I think I have mentioned this before that one of my inspirations in life has been the late cofounder of Apple, Steve Jobs. Although some of you would disagree with me as to the appropriateness of a person like him to be someone’s inspiration, owing to the fact that he is known to have been a bully sometimes, it is what it is!

I have watched countless videos of him on stage introducing one product after the other and his interviews for different agencies and I have always learned something new from him every time.

Perhaps the biggest influence he had on me was when he gave the commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. Seriously, if you haven’t yet watched it, you need to check it out.

He laid some great words of wisdom in his speech and I have even written about some of them before. But perhaps one of the most important things he talked about was the importance of connecting dots.

You Can Only Connect The Dots Looking Backwards

You know what most motivational articles on the internet say? They advice you to forget about the past and just concentrate on the future. But I think differently. Why ignore the past when all of your greatest lessons happened in the past!!

Also, sometimes, to have clear view of the future, you need to look into the past and connect the dots. As Steve said in the speech, you can only connect the dots looking backwards, and he was absolutely correct.

When you are taking an important decision in life, one that could be a defining moment for you, it is of vital importance that you view your life up until that point as a bigger picture consisting of a series of related or unrelated events and somehow, if you are able to find connections between these events, you could have that aha moment and gain the clarity you had been seeking for so long!

Even creative people will tell you that some of their masterpieces have been the result of this dot connecting which was made possible only because they found connections between two or more things and just combined them and brought it into the world.

Tales From The Past

In the speech, Steve Jobs shared a story from his past that made a huge impact in his life and computers in general. He had dropped out of college but remained on campus to take classes that he was interested in Calligraphy was one of these classes.

A decade down the road, the same calligraphy class that he had taken, prompted him to include different typefaces in the first Macintosh computers that they were developing at Apple and it was a huge step in personal computers at the time.

Even in my own life, I had always been interested in writing, right from my childhood, but never really pursued it as a career but last year when I was seriously thinking about my future path, it all came to me and I started my own blog and just weeks later I found Steemit!

So, I was in a perfect position to start on Steemit since I had gained some experience of running a blog in the weeks prior to it! So, somehow you have to trust that even insignificant things in your past could lead to a big change in your life, if you just manage to connect the dots.