In Order to Connect the Dots, You Have to Create Them in the First Place
In his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address, Steve Jobs said:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
He was talking about how we can only understand the meaning of our past experiences (and how they’ve led us to where we are) in retrospect, not in anticipation. It’s a much-quoted message to trust the journey, even when the path ahead seems uncertain.
But there’s an implication here that is often overlooked: in order to connect the dots, you have to create them in the first place.
As designers, we’re always encouraged to stay relevant - read the popular UX blogs, follow the right people on LinkedIn, keep up with popular tools and trends. All of that has its place. But if we only consume “career relevant” content, it limits us to pulling from the same pool of dots that everyone else has.
Curiosity as a Career Strategy
We all have our own weird, unique personal interests: Retro video games. Jazz music. Hiking. Cosy-crime novels. We often think of these as “outside” of work - something separate that shouldn’t mix with the serious career stuff.
But when you follow your curiosities and interests, you’re not wasting time. It’s not a distraction. You’re creating more dots. You’re building a unique personal collection of knowledge, references and ideas, that someday might become the key to solving a tough brief in a way no one else could. Or it might help you reframe a business problem from a fresh perspective, or invent something that feels genuinely new.
The best ideas rarely come from inside the echo chamber. They come from the unexpected collision of seemingly irrelevant nuggets of knowledge. That niche photography technique you picked up might influence the visual hierarchy of your next design project. A piece of music theory might inspire how you structure a user flow. That dystopian novel you just finished could reshape how you think about ethical AI in product design.
If you don’t have a unique information diet, you won’t have unique ideas. That’s the trick: to trust that curiosity will pay off - even if you can’t see how just yet. In order to connect the dots, you have to create them in the first place.
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So read that weird Japanese novel. Build something just for fun. Go deep on a subject that has absolutely nothing to do with work. Because someday, you’ll face a challenge that no framework, no best practice, no design system can solve - and it’ll be those dots, the ones only you have, that will help you see a solution that no one else can.