connecting the dots

While driving through Silicon Valley today, we were reminded of what Steve Jobs said in his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, about trusting that the dots will eventually connect. It was then that I realized that I’ve been doing a lousy job wrt trusting that the dots will connect. Admittedly, I’ve been over-planning ever since the start of business school and thinking in terms of elaborate decision-trees, which if you think about it, is futile since there’s no way to reliably estimate the probabilities of certain events occurring in our lives. Instead, it may make more sense to first ask myself what’s important to me, in terms of what I want in my profession/career. I think what I value the most are, in order of importance: 1) Freedom to create new things/value, 2) that “Winning” feeling, 3) competition/strategy 4) authority to make key decisions and be fairly evaluated/recognition. 5) Flexibility in setting my schedule/hours, where I live, etc. The extrinsic stuff like pay is of course, important too, but the above intrinsic things are stuff we tend to overlook.

So the following things happened today:
1) saw SI cover of the Heat trio (w/ DWade in the middle, and LeBron sitting to his left, signifying second-fiddle status?), 2) saw that someone posted on their Facebook about how it’s better to try than to regret, and 3) conversation with a friend about taking risks while we’re still young, and “connect the dots” convo. When I began to understand the common thread, I then felt more at peace with whatever lies ahead.