Our fascination with “connecting
the dots” starts at a fairly young age. Most of us have played with connect the
dot books as a kid; each page of the book had a cluster of numbered dots on it.
All you had to do was draw a line that followed the sequential order of the
numbers. As you connected each number with your pencil or crayon, a picture
magically appeared – usually a house or a flower or a cow. Life was easy then;
all you needed to do was follow the simple rules and the result appeared.
Fast forward to more challenging
times. You have now graduated to “connecting the dots” via the Nine Dot Puzzle,
a brain teaser form of Zen koan. This puzzle consists of three rows with three
dots in each row – picture a tic-tac-toe game sheet. The goal of the Nine Dots Puzzle is to
link all of the dots using four straight lines or less, without lifting your
pen and without tracing the same line more than once. Our natural tendency – to
work within the nine dot box - results in frustration and failure.
In order solve the nine dot puzzle, one must move out of the constraints of the rational mind –
not so easy to do. Solving the puzzle requires moving beyond your perceptual boundaries of a box and
natural tendency to stay within the imagined constraints of the nine dot
structure. Literally thinking “outside of the box” in your approach will enable
you to link all of the dots within the parameters of the puzzle instructions.
Fast forward to even more challenging times –
"connecting the dots" to make sense of your life. As you move through
life, it’s human nature to approach and want to understand it through the
template of cause and effect. It’s comforting to think that if I do “A” then“B”
will be the result. In other words, it's comforting to think that we can always
control our outcomes. With experience and the resultant wisdom that comes with
life unfolding, we soon learn that control and understanding is not always
possible.
Steve Jobs, in his Stanford graduation speech, talked
about “connecting the dots”in life. The essence of his wisdom was that, try as
we might to “connect the dots” into our future, we can only do this connecting
looking backward. According to Steve's wisdom, what we need to embody is trust
– trust that our various “dots” will connect in the furture as we take action
to move forward in life.
For
me, this sense of trust that my"dots" will ultimately come together
in the future has facilitated many twists and turns – personally and professionally.
A trust mindset has also elegantly set in motion many adventures and
experiences that ultimately led to a future that was even better than what I
could have imagined. Sometimes, not being able to “connect the dots” into the
future, is an incredible gift from the Universe.
Janet
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