Hoping the dots connect someday

In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs said:

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.

After dropping out of college, Jobs sat in on a calligraphy class. At the time it seemed to have no use at all. Ten years later, when he was building the first Macintosh, what he learned in that class came back as its beautiful typography.

I have a dot like that too, one I don't know where it leads. Drawing.

A dot of more than ten years

I started drawing when I was very young. I kept at it through middle school and high school, and on into university: well over ten years.

I drew for a long time, but I couldn't draw the way I wanted to. From observation I did well enough, but whenever I tried to draw what was in my head, my hand reached for familiar symbols first. The gap between the drawing I wanted and the drawing that came out never closed. The stress grew so heavy that around 2017 I put drawing down for a while. A short break turned into years.

The questions that stayed

I stopped drawing, but the questions stayed. Why do symbols come out when I draw from imagination? How did the rare good drawing come about?

Looking back, the good drawings had something in common. Among lines I didn't like at first, at some point I could see the line that needed to be drawn. A drawing wasn't something taken out of my head. It was something found on the paper.

I'm a developer. So I decided to work on those questions in the way I can. I built an exercise for finding lines over a blurred figure, and another for placing dots before drawing a line, and they became Right Drawing.

Still connecting

Only after building this site have I started drawing again, a little at a time. I no longer draw under the old pressure to draw well. I sketch rough lines over a blurred figure, find the lines in them, and when I don't like what I've got, I move on to a new figure. It takes a few minutes, and it's fine if it doesn't come out well.

I hope for two things. That by improving this site bit by bit, I will one day be able to draw what I want to draw. And that when I look back, the years of drawing and the years of building software will be joined in a single line.

I can't know yet. As Jobs said, you can't connect the dots looking forward.

Right Drawing has an exercise called Dots. Draw a line without thinking and your hand reaches for a familiar symbol, so before drawing, you picture the line with your eyes. Then you roughly place dots where it will pass. The line is drawn with their help.

You can't connect the dots looking forward, but you can picture the line you want to draw. With that line in mind, I'm placing dots: each line of code I fix, each drawing I make again. I hope that when I look back, a line will have been drawn through them.