How to Know Where You Are Going (Steve Jobs Looks Back to Connect the Dots)

This is from one of my favorite commencement addresses – by Steve Jobs at Stanford University. His dissections of his life lend a lot towards all of those – from any generation – struggling to find their next steps.

I mention this now because I’m in a conundrum. Fresh out of college I began studying with a woman brilliant at teaching a way of working with disabled children. I’ve flourished in the four years I’ve been studying and practicing the techniques I’ve learned – both in my own physical endeavors and with the adults and children with whom I’ve worked. And now I’m done. After 4 years and 75,000 hours.

When I left school I didn’t know how my passions for circus and cognition could possibly fit together. Looking at the eclectic combination of teaching, performing, and movement therapy I practice – they have come together after all. Today I don’t know how my current private practice will fit with my the book I’m writing on autism, with my dance performance company, with my interests in marketing, sales, and teaching. How do these pieces fit together?

Watching Job’s discuss his life – a life so celebrated upon his death last year – I’m reminded that I don’t have to know how I’ll connect the dots to know that they will come together. Though I don’t know where my trajectory is heading and am periodically upset and frustrated by that unknown it is fun to look at a similar problem from one else’s perspective to gain a bit of wisdom and insight as I go forward from here.

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