“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
A while ago, in On Writing, I said that writing things down in order helped me “see the chain of cause and consequence that brought me to where I am now.” I didn’t know how true that was until recently.
I was preparing for a speech competition on the topic “What if I’m wrong?” The plan was to list my past decisions and question each one. Was I wrong to give up on the Gaokao? Wrong to rely on AI in my first debate? Wrong about how I led my club? Wrong to spend so many hours on websites hardly anyone visits?
Then I started writing down what each decision had actually led to, and I stopped halfway through.
The answers weren’t separate. Each one was the reason the next one existed.
That’s when the dots connected.
A Python course → AI → servers → this page
I didn’t start coding out of passion. In high school I wanted to earn money and build a life somewhere else. It was the money branch, not the interest branch. So I asked my parents for a Python course, learned the basics, and then mostly gave it up.
Then GPT-3 came out. Suddenly I had something that could answer every question and fix every bug. I brought my laptop to the dorm and coded late at night and before sunrise.
That led to my first server, my first WordPress site, and my first Linux system. It also led to my server getting hacked, my Windows getting wiped, and a long period where my PC only ran on a USB stick. (The full story is here.)
The boy who wanted to make money never became a professional programmer. But he ended up building a website for a debate club, and a personal site where he writes posts like this one.
Half an hour with Daisy → English → BPDU
When I was a kid, my English tutor Daisy would sit with me for at least half an hour going through my homework, one question at a time. That’s when English stopped being a subject and became part of me.
Years later, that dot met another one. Charlie invited me to BP Debate Union. At my first debate I didn’t know the rules, so I leaned on AI, the same AI from the other chain. I was “operating an argument machine with my voice,” and the presidents called it insidious.
But one of them told me later: “We just thought you would stay.”
I did. I became president, met Jasmine, brought back the Bowen Cup, and met people I’d never have met otherwise. (Two years of that, here.)
Martial arts → running → a way out
As a kid I learned martial arts, and the classes included a lot of physical training. I didn’t think much of it back then. I just remember the hard days, like the time I came back four minutes late with water for everyone and had to do 400 squats, until a girl in the class did 200 of them for me.
But all that training stayed in my body. In middle school I found I was good at long-distance running. Later I moved on to boxing. And in my last year of high school, when everything was falling apart, running three times a day was what kept me going.
Then I stopped. Years later, burnt out as president, I came back to running, and it was the first link I broke in a loop that was choking me. (More on that.)
A dot I placed as a child came back more than ten years later to catch me.
The lines cross
Looking at these chains, I noticed they aren’t parallel. They cross. AI sits in both my tech story and my debate story. Coding helps debate, debate sharpens English, English makes me a better coder.
But a dot only connects if it’s strong enough to hold the line. Jobs didn’t just sit in on a calligraphy class. He learned it closely enough that, ten years later, it shaped the typography of the Mac. A weak dot would have connected to nothing.
I can’t say I handled every dot the way he did. But they were decent, good enough to hold. The problem wasn’t how many there were. Each one wanted all of my attention at the same time, and I was bad at allocating it. So they didn’t break one by one. They pulled on each other, and then everything collapsed together.
Trusting the dots isn’t about placing fewer of them. It’s about making each one strong, and that means giving each one the attention it needs, when it needs it, instead of giving everything to everything at once.
Trusting the dots
None of these dots looked important when I placed them. Some looked like mistakes, and some really were. But a wrong decision didn’t always lead to a wrong future.
I still can’t see how today’s dots will connect. Nobody can.
But I’ve stopped needing to.
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