I have long thought that mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions are the fab­ric of a qual­ity life, whether between peo­ple, ideas or things. I found this lovely quote attrib­uted to Steve Jobs regard­ing con­nec­tions we make in the ‘cre­ative’ realm.

Creativity is just con­nect­ing things.

When you ask cre­ative peo­ple how they did some­thing, they feel a lit­tle guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw some­thing. It seemed obvi­ous to them after a while. That’s because they were able to con­nect expe­ri­ences they’ve had and syn­the­size new things. And the rea­son they were able to do that was that they’ve had more expe­ri­ences or they have thought more about their expe­ri­ences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s a rare com­mod­ity. A lot of peo­ple in our indus­try haven’t had very diverse expe­ri­ences. So they don’t have enough dots to con­nect, and they end up with very lin­ear solu­tions with­out a broad per­spec­tive on the problem.

The broader one’s under­stand­ing of the human expe­ri­ence, the bet­ter the design we will have.

— steve jobs