Part 1 ~ Connecting the Dots

Recently, a friend forwarded me an email on a simple but yet meaningful speech given by Steve Jobs (to the uninitiated, Apple Computer CEO) at Stanford University on June 12th 2005. I thought to share it with you as the speech “spoke” to me on so many levels.

The following is a transcription of that speech, which I will break up into 3 blog postings i.e. one story for each posting.

From the mouth of Steve Jobs:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college.

Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal.

Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.

So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5' deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

~~~~~ To be continued ~~~~~

I remembered my first major interview with the folks from Effem Foods (the company that produce Mars and Snickers, M&M’s, Pedigree, Whiskas, etc.) I had graduated recently and had only one year of working experience behind me. I was among eight final candidates vying for a position in Effem Foods.

In those days, interviews to get into corporations like these were long, drawn-out one-and-a-half to two-day affairs. We had to go through various written tests (which encompassed multiple choice questions, written essays, calculations and questions on general knowledge), performed five-minute impromptu individual presentations to the panel of interviewers, put through various group dynamic tests and of course, a final sit down dinner at the end of the interview to test our social etiquette.

After going through the battery of tests, I figured I’d most likely get the job; except for one person standing in my way i.e. this other Chinese chap. He oozed self confidence in every sense of the word but he had one major flaw ~ he never listened to anyone and was opinionated on everything to the verge of annoyance. (Note: I could be biased since I was vying for the same position.)

In any case, “gwei los” (who happened to form part of the interview panel) have a tendency to admire self-confidence in a person. Not that I lack any; just that I do not come across so strongly ~ if you know what I mean. Anyway, we had to go through a final group dynamic test where all the eight candidates were secluded in a room and were given a task to come up with a solution for a case study within a stipulated time. There were “examiners” observing our behaviour while we discussed the case study and arrived at a solution.

I was pretty sure that I had bagged the job the moment this test was presented to us. Why? Because as usual, Mr Oozing-with-Self-Confidence had his say and pretty much shut everyone up because he thought he knew what the best solution was. I watched his antics with glee as I knew the purpose of the test was not the solution in itself but how a leader manage his team and provide a platform for everyone to say his/her piece before arriving at a solution. And I believe I passed this test with flying colours and ousted my strongest contender for the position. As they say, the rest was history.

One may ask, what did this have anything to do with connecting the dots?

Well, during my varsity years, I was deeply involved with this student organisation called AIESEC. I spent a lot of time and effort with the organisation that in some ways, I neglected my family and my studies. Often, my parents questioned me on my time spent in this organisation and what I hoped to achieve out of it. Well, other than the fun, the games and the networking, I learned about handling group dynamics. We organised and attended lots of sessions on the above. One of which was the same test that I went through in my interview in Effem Foods.

And that was how and why I knew I had the edge over the rest to win the job at the end of the day. It was nothing as ground breaking as what Steve Jobs did with the Mac but if you had asked me at that point in time what I hoped to achieve from joining AIESEC, my reply would have been fun, games and networking. Little did I know that it would have helped me succeed in getting the highly sought after job with Effem Foods later on.

As Steve Jobs said,
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I shall leave the above for you to ponder over.

P.S. Look out for Part 2 – Don’t Settle