Steve Jobs was pretty creative. A couple of things he said about connecting the dots:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity.
You don’t have to have all kinds of incredible experiences; just thinking more about the experiences you do have can make a difference.
A lot of people . . . haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.
The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
Do you have any experiences, or hopes and dreams, that have always seemed random and out of place? Are they?
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Day 10 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Subscribe on the right or below and each day will be delivered every morning to your inbox.
