Connecting the Dots
You can only connect the dots looking backward, so a broad, slightly wasteful education is the safest bet when you can't see which pieces will matter.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” Steve Jobs said this at Stanford in 2005, describing a calligraphy class he sat in on after dropping out — useless at the time, and the reason the first Macintosh shipped with proportionally spaced fonts a decade later.
Why It Works
You cannot design a body of knowledge from the top down, because you don’t yet know which pieces will matter. What you can do is keep collecting pieces that are interesting on their own terms, and trust that a broad enough base eventually connects. This is the same reason Munger reads across disciplines with no immediate use in mind, and why he calls the result a latticework rather than a list: the return on a stray idea tends to show up years later, in a domain you didn’t expect, and then compounds from there.
The trap is demanding that every hour of learning justify itself with a near-term payoff. That filter screens out exactly the odd, cross-disciplinary inputs that later turn out to be the valuable ones — the calligraphy class never survives a cost-benefit test in the moment.
Applying It
Take the class, read the book, learn the skill that has no obvious use, as long as the curiosity is real. Judge the decision by the quality of the interest, not by a forecast of where it leads — the forecast is the part you genuinely can’t do. Then look backward often enough to notice which dots actually connected, and do more of whatever produced them.
The Broader Lesson
Jobs and Munger reach the same conclusion from opposite temperaments: when the future is unreadable, a wide and slightly inefficient education is the conservative choice, because you are buying cheap options on futures you can’t yet see.
Sources
- ”You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards” — Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement Address, 2005 (transcript: news.stanford.edu/2005/06/12/youve-got-to-find-what-you-love-jobs-says)