One of my favorite quotes comes from Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford commencement address.
“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. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path; and that will make all the difference.”
In the years since he gave that speech, I’ve seen just how true that quote really is.
In 2004, Collegewise was a scrappy little college counseling company with just me and two other counselors in Irvine, California. Then my old friend Paul from the Princeton Review called to tell me that he’d just attended an event at a high school where he was blown away by just how good the presenter from Caltech was. Paul gave me the presenter’s card and said, “You should meet with him and see if he’ll come work with you.”
Two meals with plenty of shared vision and values later, we both agreed that he should leave Caltech and open a Collegewise office.
That presenter was Arun Ponnusamy.
Later in 2004, our Irvine office had grown enough that we needed another counselor. One of the applicants was a recent Colgate University graduate who’d worked for the dean of admission. She sent her application to us along with a letter of rec from the dean who told us in the nicest way possible that we would have to be certifiably insane not to hire her.
I’m glad we listened, because that applicant was Katie Konrad Moore.
Today, Collegewise is a part of The Princeton Review. My old friend Paul and I run it together. And we’re opening offices across the country.
As part of that expansion, Arun will be hiring 12-14 new counselors this year to spread the Collegewise ways across Los Angeles.
Katie Konrad Moore owns and runs our office in Bellevue, Washington. She's helped nearly 400 students find and get accepted to the right colleges. And in 2012, I married her best friend (thanks for the introduction, Katie!)
I never could have connected those dots looking forward ten years ago, but I couldn’t be happier about how they connect looking back today.
Most high school students don’t know yet where you’re going to college. You don’t know what will happen to you once you get there. You may not even know what you want to study or what you’ll do when you graduate. That’s OK. The path to your future doesn’t have to be perfectly clear today.
In the meantime, work hard. Learn as much as you can. Make a dent in your tiny corner of the universe. Try to be a good person and treat people right. Be excited about your future even if you aren’t sure what it’s going to look like.
As you keep at it, your dots are going to connect someday, whether or not your dream college says yes.