In 2005, Steve Jobs delivered what would become an iconic commencement address to Stanford graduates. One of the messages that resonated most with me was that when you eventually end up where you’re meant to go in life, the path you took to get there will make sense in retrospect, but it might not make sense while it’s happening in real time. As he put it,
“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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.”
Jason Fried of Basecamp writes a similar story that looks back to connect the dots from where he is today—the founder and CEO of a multi-million-dollar software company who has been asked to pen an opinion piece for the New York Times—to when he was a teenager who decided to make a simple computer program to keep track of his music CD collection.
Students and parents, as you read this story, ask yourself, “Would Fried be where he is today if someone back in high school had told him that colleges wouldn’t care about his hobby?” (They would have been wrong, by the way, even without the future dot-connecting to prove it).
College planning has its place. But don’t make every high school decision based on its predicted impact on your college admissions chances. Instead of always looking forward, trust that your hard work and character will eventually leave you with connected dots to look back on.