Connecting the Dots Backward
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Have you ever wondered why you're doing something today - only to look back five or ten years later - and realize that it all made sense? This is a phenomenon that Steve Jobs called connecting the dots backward. And as he eloquently shared in a story during a commencement speech to Stanford university a few years ago, it is how we make sense of our experiences.

Jobs' birth mother was a young, unmarried graduate student who upon learning the couple who planned to adopt him had not graduated from college, refused to sign the adoption papers unless they promised he would get a higher education. At 17 he went off to Reed College. "I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford," recalled Jobs, "and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it."

Jobs dropped out but stayed on campus. "Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed." Jobs enrolled in a course.

As a result he became fascinated and developed a deep appreciation for the beauty, artistry and subtly in this art form, which as he put it, "science can't capture." Years later, this artistic sense found its way into the typography of the first Mac computer. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them," Jobs observed.

Going on, he reflected "Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later."

As you think about your own life, I encourage you to consider the detours, challenges, successes and failures in a new way. Like the late Steve Jobs, who taught us so much about leadership, you can learn alot about who you really are.

As I was writing Discover Your CEO Brand I realized that connecting the dots backward is the most important step. Taking the time to recall the stories of our lives and careers allows us to clarify lessons, and out of those lessons emerge the values that have made us the leaders we are today. Your brand is your reputation; the core of your reputation is a unique way of looking at the world, that defines you. It's in the rear view mirror that these values are crystallized.

To leaders who are searching to understand their brands, I have always recommended incorporating storytelling into their executive coaching programs, not only so they can speak effectively, but at a more basic level, how coaching can help them understand and interpret their own authentic brand of leadership. In next year's new Discover Your Brand Retreat, one of our primary focusees will be to give you the time and tools to examine the events of your life in story form, interpret the lessons, and then learn to tell those stories in a meaningful way.

Your brand is yours alone, and when you understand the values, you have a powerful tool that can shape and define the organization you lead. As Steve Jobs said, "This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."