THE THING THAT MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE FOR STEVE JOBS

A never ending, incessant, curiosity has lived with me as long as I can remember. It’s best described as the love of novelty or randomness. An intuitive feeling that has always suggested that pursuing new paths, actions, thoughts, or ideas, is the right way to go. Whenever I recapitulate, I find that the most meaningful moments in my life were built by happenstance.

Simple reasoning doesn’t easily deal with this way of living. Our general Western view of life cherishes well thought out plans, actions, and behaviors. Things thought out and planned seem somehow smarter...and they probably can be. It is hard to think about what could’ve been if we diverged from our current path in life, nay it’s impossible (no counter-factual).

It’s still difficult however, to ignore the pull of randomness, serendipity, and the beauty of the unexpected or unplanned. Not only the pull, but the value. I mean, think of your personal history. I can guarantee that the top few moments in your life were unplanned. The real life changing catalysts usually are.

Steve Jobs for instance, after dropping out of college, and trying to figure out what to do recalls in a commencement speech for Stanford in 2005:

“I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on...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. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Now this isn’t some aside, or half baked assessment, it is the ‘thing’ that “has made all the difference in my life.”

While individual silos of thought exist positing understanding of such a thing as serendipity, synchronicity, and the like; there does not exist a sobering look at the commonplace value of these manifestations. What we hear or read is too often cloaked in mysticism on one end, and scientific jargon on the other. Mysticism will tend to enchant the esoteric, while science sees things in terms of random mutations, or dissipative structures.

Serendipity deserves a modern investigation, without starry eyes or bombastic scientism.