![]() While college and a degree(s) are likely a stock part of your resume, and you may not be inclined to quit your job to fulfill that long-held desire to be a celebrity chef or join an ashram, how can you intentionally create more “dots”, or connect the ones you’ve laid down, to find new possibilities in your work?ġ) Engage in a creative practice. It’s the hard-core scientist who supports a confused colleague through a poem he remembered from college, or the leader/musician who powerfully clarifies his role and vision for the organization by metaphorically saying he sees himself as the “conductor of the orchestra”. I’ve seen many clients find great success, appearing very human and very authentic, and finding innovative answers, when they’re willing to connect disparate dots in their life to their work. The Mac came from someone who had laid down lots of “dots” in his life, and found ways to connect them along the way. He gave himself permission to try new things and trusted somehow that his portfolio of interesting experiences would perhaps lead somewhere new and exciting. While most of the world marches to the drumbeat of required classes, standardized tests and lock-step career paths, becoming more narrow and linear along the way, one of the biggest innovators (and job creators!) in our country made his success because he simply followed what he found fascinating. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.” ![]() … Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. ![]() “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. However, the story that stands out to me as I’ve read accounts of his life is this one he told in his graduation speech at Stanford in 2005: There’s so much that we can learn from him about leadership. By all accounts he was certainly the definition of visionary, and he seemingly found his own signature way of driving execution at Apple. The icon may be gone but Steve Jobs has certainly left his mark – on an industry, a country, the world.
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