Steve Jobs gave a brief but powerful speech at The Academy of Achievement in 1982.
Here is a transcription of a portion of that speech – edited for space and emphasis. It’s about the creativity and making connections…
Have you ever thought about what it means to be intelligent?
It seems to me that a lot of intelligence is memory, but a lot of it is also the ability to zoom out.
It’s like being in a city. Most people are on the ground trying to get from point A to point B, staring at these little maps. But if you’re on the 80th floor, you can look down and see the whole thing at once.
You see the whole system, and you can make connections that feel obvious because the bigger picture is right in front of you.
That’s why bright people sometimes feel guilty. They come up with something, say “Hey, look at this,” people give them awards, and they feel a little uncomfortable about it.
But here’s the key: if you want to make innovative connections—if you want to link two experiences in a new way—you can’t have the same set of experiences as everyone else.
Otherwise, you’ll make the same connections and you won’t be innovative. And no one will give you any awards.
So you’ve got to gather experiences outside the normal path.
One of the funny things about being “bright” is that everyone tries to put you on a track: high school, college, Stanford—I heard about a kid who was fourteen on his way to Stanford.
And that’s fine. That’s unusual. But you might also want to go to Paris and be a poet for a few years.
Or you might want to go to a third-world country. Go see people suffering from real diseases, see lepers whose hands are falling off.
Fall in love with two people at once.
You can hear stories about all these people, and what you’ll notice is this: they all had a wide variety of experiences to draw from. And those experiences helped them solve problems or approach dilemmas in unique, innovative ways.