Connecting the Dots

Followup to: Maxim: Turmoil

I’m not a Steve Jobs fanboy, but this speech is pretty good. Watch the first part, about connecting the dots:

I received an email from a friend that made me think I was a little ambiguous here. To clarify: I agree with Marcus, and I’ll tell a story to illustrate why. Using hindsight and this “connect the dots” exercise might help enforce the point.

Looking back, it’s pretty easy to get angry, depressed, or laugh at any of these facts about my life:

• I’ve worked in the restaurant industry, in the kitchen or waiting tables, for almost a decade.
• I auditioned as a popper for a hip hop music video in St. Louis (and failed).
• I attended massage therapy school (and passed).

To name a few. All of them spin off in different directions, and the events associated with each have impacted my life in incalculable ways. But let’s look at one of the ways they intersect, connecting them into a single story arc to the present day:

I was in Chicago for a training seminar–this one had to do with posture and kinesiology–to bolster my massage therapy credentials. In my mind, I was distinctly separate from my new-agey, spa-centered classmates. I was a scientist who would revolutionize the field.

But being a scientist-revolutionary is hard work, and I wasn’t devoted enough to the field to make that a reality. So I spent most of my time and money in Chicago drinking and partying instead. Sound-Bar was one such destination. If you know the club I’m talking about, you’re probably wincing, and I am too, but they had a top-shelf open bar one night for $10. I arrived about 15 minutes before the special was over, and I acted accordingly.

I walked around from bar to bar (since you couldn’t order more than one or two at a time) and stockpiled drinks. My ability to carry four or five at once is not at all difficult, but definitely something I learned as a server. One of the girls there was hot, latina, and intrigued by what I was doing (all three characteristics being a plus in my book). She smiled at me. I smiled back, but was still focused on acquiring alcohol.

Later on, she saw me dancing while balancing my remaining drinks. I guess some combination of my poppin’ skillz and baffling, methodical alcoholism caused her to smile and/or pity me, and I took that opportunity to approach and flirt.

No, I’m not proud of this. It’s pretty easy to add, “street dancing to thumping dance music with 4 Grey Goose Redbulls in hand” to the list above. But here were the results:

1. We hit it off and began a relationship.
2. I moved to Chicago.
3. This.

It would have been pretty difficult to “connect the dots forward” from any of this. In fact, it’s kind of remarkable when you deconstruct things fully; for example, consider all those years of restaurant experience, funneled into one incredibly mundane detail that probably changed my course entirely.

Now let’s look at that quote again:

That every event is the right one. Look closely and you’ll see. Not just the right one overall, but right. As if someone had weighed it out with scales.

I can say, in line with Marcus’ wisdom and without hyperbole: I’m where I am now, I am happy and have things to say and to do, because of everything that went wrong, not everything that went right. But the point is that both are fundamentally the same thing. That is, all of the events were right, and that’s the only thing they can be. If you disagree, you simply aren’t looking closely enough.

Whenever I hit another dot–one of turmoil, stress or sadness–I remember that.