connecting dots

Connect the dots, “follow your heart”, “live life to the fullest”, these concepts have been engrained into the minds of many since childhood. Steve Jobs, in his commencement address, applies these concepts, not to children, but to the lives of Stanford graduates as they take the big step into adulthood. Steve Jobs breaks his speech into three sections and does an excellent job in discussing each of these; how to connect the dots, love and loss and death.

As kids, everyone has done a connect the dots page at least once. They are everywhere from coloring books to the children’s menu at a restaurant. In the first section of his speech, Jobs talks about connecting the dots, but he is not talking about coloring book dots, he is talking about the dots of life. In his opening lines, Jobs states immediately that he dropped out of college. He then went on to say that dropping out was one of the best decisions he had ever made. Jobs stopped taking classes that we of no interest to him and took others that did interest him. One of the classes that interested him was his calligraphy class. Little did he know that dropping out and studying classes that intrigued him would lead to him, a college drop out, being the founder of a major company. At the time, dropping out of college seemed like a bad idea, but looking back he can now “connect the dots.” He states, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.” Though everything looked chaotic and crazy at the time, if someone does what is right for them, things will work out in the end. No one can be sure of what the future holds and things could look bad in the moment, but He then says a little later on, “you have to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference.” Meaning if someone follows their heart, instinct and interests, everything will eventually fall into place.

In the beginning of Jobs’ address, his listener’s minds