Sometimes we don’t have a future goal in mind. We may not have plans and what we are doing now may not be considered a part of our grand scheme. We may feel confused and try to understand what we are doing with our life. Am I wasting my life with what I’m doing now? This is one of the things we could ask ourselves in those moments of doubt. We don’t know where we are going and we ask ourselves whether the things we are doing in our present are really meaningful. Sometimes since life is ever-changing, we may do something completely different from our plans. That’s why doubts may rise.

In his speech at Stanford commencement in 2005, Steve Jobs tells us more about what happened to him in a similar situation.

He talks about dropping out of Reed College even if his parents had promised his birth mother that someday he would have gone to college. There was a period in the life of Steve Jobs when he didn’t know what to do and didn’t have a plan. So what did he do? He decided to join a calligraphy class.

It was something interesting for him to do and something that fascinated him, since he was attracted by the beautiful fonts on the labels, posters and writings at the university. He followed what he wanted to do without having a plan that linked the calligraphy class to a possible future goal. But then he discovered years later that what he did in college, in that calligraphy class, was something useful for him. He used his knowledge of fonts to create beautiful typography for the Macintosh, followed then by Windows. So now we have beautiful fonts on the computer only because Steve Jobs decided one day to do something that didn’t absolutely connect to his future plan.

Now I would like to share about my own calligraphy class, that event in life that was not planned, not connected to a goal in the future but it helped me at the very end.

When I was in my twenties I was in university. Even if I was attending classes and doing well, I thought I missed something so I decided to go to the UK and live there. I didn’t decide to study English in a class there so my staying in the UK was only because I wanted to work and at the same time improve my English skills. It was a big change in my life. Going to another country completely alone, working for the first time in a place where I didn’t speak well the language was something I hadn’t planned in my life. I worked as a waitress so it didn’t help me with any future university goals. But then years later I found that experience really changed my perspective of the world, thanks to that I was able to work and live in Japan because I was already independent. Thanks to that I really learned English from every day life interactions and today I’m coaching in English to other people.

Without my “calligraphy class,” I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

I couldn’t see that at the time and I considered it a waste of my time, especially since I was studying at university, but now I can connect the dots and understand that my experience then was connected to what I did later and what I’m doing today.

So don’t expect to have all your plans and goals connected but connect the dots later when looking back at your life and you will find that even something less meaningful for you, was actually truly important.