Steve Jobs Returns: Part 1 - Connecting the Dots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kHDJKdJXM&t=11s

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.

~ Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005

I have been researching Steve Jobs and his life for my upcoming keynote, one man talk and training: "Steve Jobs Returns - How to Build a Visionary Company." In the performance I play Jobs looking back on his life from early childhood on, but especially focused on 1997 - 2007, when he returned to Apple and culminated in releasing its greatest product, the iPhone.

In this process I have learned to see the world through his eyes, think through his mind* and connect the dots from his past into a future that ran out for him.

The central part of the presentation is telling his 1997-2007 story and then following that by explaining ten iterative, lego like steps that he followed to make Apple "insanely great" and that anyone can follow to do the same for their company, organization or anything they are wanting to accomplish in their life.

He wasn't able to connect them in his life which made his genius process unscalable and has made it challenging for Apple to proceed innovatively and disruptively since he died. The ten steps following the Steve Jobs role play makes his genius scalable so anyone can use it to achieve and accomplish whatever they choose.

As I proceed with my "tour" which is like a Minimal Viable Product with each presentation I will be learning much more about him and sharing insights I have gathered that I have found fascinating and hope you will find useful.

In this installment, I have discovered what I think Jobs meant by the "connecting the dots going backwards" quote.

Among the many things that made Jobs special was that he had a joy of wonder and a joy of discovery that was possibly even more than what he was discovering. Rather than fearing the unknown, he sought it out. By "can't connect the dots going forward," I think he meant that going forward you should just stack up one experience after another and not inhibit that process with premature thinking or analyzing.

Connecting the dots going forward is using your thinking too soon and it will hamper and lessen your experience and you will miss out on much of it. It's being convergent too quickly and before you have the full benefit of being divergent.

The majority of people are uncomfortable with the unknown and can only take small doses of it, before they resort to trying to analyze it in order to stay in control. This premature convergence puts a serious crimp in their creativity.

His view was that if you just keep collecting experiences and let them accumulate in your past without analyzing them, that there will be some natural way (through "your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever") of them coming together and you may only realize that when it happens in your future.

I had a personal experience to illustrate dots from my past that connected in my future when I was learning geometry in middle school. I had no idea where studying triangles would fit in my future, but when I working as a couples therapist (I even wrote a book about relationships entitled: The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationship: How to Fall in Love... and StayThere) I remember feeling that they and I were part of either an acute, obtuse, isosceles, right, or scalene triangle and when the session was working well, the three of us energetically became an equilateral triangle.

What also made Jobs successful was that he not only had a joy of discovery or what we might refer to as "divergent" thinking, he had an equal joy in "convergent" thinking where the dots would come together right in the middle of his customer's user experience. In fact when he connected the dots of producing products that were: simple (to prevent people from feeling stupid), reliable (to prevent them from becoming frustrated), fun (to put a smile on their faces) and elegant (to take their breath away), he knew he could capture the B2C world in a way that computer technology had never been able to do.

One of the best examples of his loving the feeling of how divergent and convergent could dance together (which you'll understand if you love motorcycles) was his passion for earlier model BMW motorcycles.

Again, I know that personally, because I had a similar passion for riding those same motorcycles the same exact years as he was driving them. In those years in the late 1960's, BMW motorcycles were the picture of power, elegance and "convergence" whenever you would downshift one of them.

Like Jobs, I have been an outlier most of my life and I can tell you that driving one of those older model BMW's not only made me not care about being different and not typical, it made me breathe in the freedom of it. See if you get a taste of that experience of power, elegance, control and being apart from the world and loving it from this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k35sUhAMcA&t=1s

And your takeaway?

Go where you are looking more and fully experience it, instead of missing out on the experience by looking where you are going and thinking and analyzing too soon. Begin to enjoy it, instead of fearing it, lean into it instead of away from it and trust that those experiences will come together and make sense in your future.

* My background is as a UCLA clinical professor of psychiatry, crisis psychiatrist, FBI and police hostage negotiation trainer where I learned to listen into people from their inside out which meant seeing the world through their eyes, causing them to feel less alone. This enabled me to help suicidal patients sometimes give up their suicidality in a session. It also helped me to train FBI and police hostage negotiators to cause people to surrender by negotiators learning to connect with them from their inside out.