A collection of Dots.

“Originality is not the rejection of norm or what you are used to. It is in the play with the norm that originality arises.
The question should be, how can you use what already exist to make something new?”

***

If experiences are dots, then reflection is the line that connects them.

When it comes to connecting dots, you must have heard that you can only connect them by looking backward and not forward — Steve Jobs. This is only partly true. If the wealth of experience you’ve gathered in the past represents the dots, therefore, the more dots you have the more dots you can connect and the more dots you can connect the more lines you can get. It is that simple. But these experiences can be physical or mental, creating imaginations or strings of thoughts, then connecting them.

In this article, I have put together 42 dots for you to add to your collection of dots and connect them as the need arises.

Ask more questions.

We are often rewarded for giving the right answers but hardly for asking the right questions and I think that needs to change.
For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

On Patience and compounding.

Love and Kindness multiply, be a multi-multiplier of both.
If you hang around the barbershop long enough, sooner or later you’re going to get a haircut.
Patience has its own reward. It is the virtue of the extraordinary kind. — Jim Rohn.
To talk is cheap but practice is what breeds competence and competence builds confidence.
Any fool can know. The point is to understand. — Albert Einstein
Stop talking yourself out of something before you even get started.
Don’t compare your life to others. There is no comparison between the sun and the moon. They shine when it is their time – Cassey Ho

Emotions

Your feelings are valid, do not let anyone tell you otherwise.
As valid as your feelings are, truth does not care about your feelings. Also, that you’re angry does not make you right.
In most difficult conversations, facts and/or truths are not as important as feelings.
Pain is temporary but permanent in the moment.
To be known is to first know yourself.
Intimacy, both emotional and physical, requires a deeper and better understanding of the self before it can be shared with somebody else. — From the series: Seal team
I think that at the core of intimacy with another, is also the ability to listen – learn to listen.
When you overvalue compliments, people that want to tear you down have leverage. — Gary Vee.
It is amazing how far you can go with logic. Learn it, most importantly use it.
You can’t win a debate with an emotional argument, of course, but conversation is not a debate and human beings are inherently illogical. We are emotional creatures. To remove, or attempt to remove, emotion from your conversation is to extract a great deal of meaning and import. — Celeste Headlee.
Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous. — Brené Brown

Ideas and creativity

One of the things that is a spark of creativity is taking ideas from one place and applying them to another place, maybe in an utterly different context. —Nathan Myhrvold, Inventor.
Creativity doesn’t mean inventing something out of nothing, instead, it’s about refashioning what already exists. Understanding that our brain endlessly remixes existing inputs…overturns a commonly held myth about creativity. Being original is not just about generating something out of nothing. —David Eagleman
It’s often in the combination of seemingly mutually exclusive ideas that if you find a way to combine them, you actually get a third entity that combines aspects of both into something that doesn’t seem composite, but actually, it’s the synergy of the two. —Bjarke Ingels
…say you bump up 25 of the greatest novels ever written, right? The strategy at that point ought not to be how am I going to differentiate what I’m doing from what Tolstoy did or what Thomas Mayne did? The thing to do at that point is to say “How can I use what they did”
I’m going to allow the knowledge of my predecessors and their work to inform and help shape what I’m doing. Not because I’m trying to copy them, but because I know that my unique experience in life is going to inevitably intervene to help me produce a work that is not like it’s intervening in some way. —Michael Chabon, Novelist.

Miscellaneous

Learn to say no.
You are Human and for that, there is no cure.
Since Lions cannot write, the hunter always takes the glory – we all have our stories. All of us. – Samuel Ikani.
The wise ask questions, a fool is always sure.
Fools ignore complexity. Geniuses remove it. – Alan Perils.
Ask questions, and when you don’t know something, say “I don’t know”
When you work, work. When you play, play. Don’t play at work, don’t work during playtime.
Enjoy! Enjoy the little things. The train ride, to road trip, the walk through the sidewalk. Enjoy your time off.
Don’t major in minor things.
On humility: The more conscious you are of it the more likely you are to display a lack of it.
What kills you is not what causes your heart to stop beating but what prevents you from living.
A room without a book is like a body without a soul.
It is the only way we can connect the future with the past. Without that there’s no way we can know about the future, particularly the past, the present. – Mike Tyson
What you do speaks so loudly they cannot hear what you say – Unknown
Having the courage to change your mind is a strength that not a lot of people exercise.
The man who does not know himself cannot understand this world. The man who knows himself best is the one who has the best relationship with the one who made him.
“When you view the world as a series of outputs, you form opinions. But when you view the world as a series of systems, you form strategies.” — Channing Allen.
Specific knowledge is the knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you. – Naval
There’s a certain delusional quality that all successful people have to have. You have to believe that something different than what has happened for the last 50 million years of history – you have to believe that something different can happen. – Will Smith

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Cover Art by Priya Sabu