Connect the dots
Runner-up title: Bridge the gap
Welcome back to The Ecstatic Review!
In the last issue we talked about shape, and this week I want to talk about connecting the dots. Is my enthusiasm for geometry showing? Math and voice might seem like opposites, but there’s actually a lot of common ground—which is what this week’s issue is all about.
It was originally inspired by all of the internet advice I’ve been sent lately about how to explain resume gaps, from the spiritually empowered (“I was reclaiming my own sacred energy”) to the hilariously bananas (“I signed an NDA”). As a once gap-toothed kid who got my first real paycheck from Baby Gap in high school, I’m a fan of gaps—including the ones that get a bad rap for being on resumes.
I love gaps as much as I love career changes that inspire concerned looks, experience that could easily belong to 10 different people, product offerings so full of variety that they make Amazon look niche, and all of those other indications that you’re choosing to live your life in your own way—or at least doing your best to figure it out.
Let’s see if we can figure out a bit more, together.
HERE’S AN IDEA
Two types of bridges
When people ask me where I’m from, I like to say that I grew up on bridges. This is literally true: Most days and many hours of my childhood were spent in the back seat of my dad’s Ford Escort or my mom’s Volvo station wagon, crossing one of the bridges in the Bay Area and sometimes a triangle of three in one day—the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning, the Bay Bridge in the afternoon, and the Richmond Bridge at night.
My high school, which drew from seven counties, had a bus that would take kids from my county home after school, and I didn’t ride it a lot because I’d often be staying in the city or going somewhere else. One day when I did take it home, a girl in my grade stopped me as I was getting off.
“Where do you live?” she demanded to know, as she and the other kids studied me suspiciously.
“Everywhere?” I thought to myself.
I had no idea at the time just how much this experience of continually crossing large-scale physical connectors would impact my world view and my work. In addition to having an endless interest in perspectives other than mine, much of my career has been about fine-tuning the precise art and inspired science of connecting things—especially those that seem at first glance like they have nothing in common.
Early on, that looked like creating a nonprofit educational media company that merged math and pop culture or discussing the power of sketch comedy on my business podcast (two things that required a lot of dot-connecting at the time, to keep people’s heads from exploding).
Now, it looks like identifying intuitive logic in everything from creative processes to career paths and translating that logic into change-making, identity-shaping expressions of voice.
By nature, communication is connection. At its root (by now you know I love roots), the word communication means “common” or “shared.” It’s about seeing connections, finding common ground, sharing logic. It’s the way you get others on board with who you are, what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and why—and even before that, the way you get yourself on board.
Communication can feel complicated—especially when you’re creative, dynamic, multifaceted, nonlinear, or simply doing things differently. If it’s feeling that way to you, it might help to think about it in two general steps:
Connect the dots for yourself.
Connect the dots for others.
In a way, it’s like identifying and designing two types of bridges: one that connects all of the parts of you, and one that connects you to other people and places. If the first one is missing or incomplete, you’ll likely feel lost. If that’s true for the second one, you’ll likely feel lost in translation.
Lately, my Instagram feed runneth over with shortcuts, AI hacks, and quick fixes promising an instant understanding of your point of view. One of my problems with these is that as easy as they promise to be, it’s just as easy (as I wrote about last week) for them to limit you before you’ve even had a chance to see all that you are, or to promote the adoption of someone else’s scalable logic at the abandonment of your own.
And so I want to be clear that by distilling communication down into two steps for the purposes of this conversation, I’m not suggesting a shortcut, hack, or quick fix. Just like building an actual bridge, connecting the dots in a way that soundly supports you without limiting you, that seamlessly carries you to where you’re going next, is a layered and often complex process.
It calls for thoughtful attention, relies on nuanced skill, and asks for courageous curiosity—starting with the willingness to look at your dots in the first place: the ones you’re proud of and the ones you’re not. The ones you gladly chose and the ones you’ve been figuring out how to deal with ever since they chose you. The ones you’d relive a million times over, and the ones you’d give a million bucks to do over.
It also means looking at the equally present spaces between the dots: the changes, the meanderings, the stretches of time spent doing seemingly nothing. Just like a body of water is as much a part of a landscape as the two pieces of land it divides, those are as much a part of your story, too—full of oceans of things to discover.
And once an internal bridge of discovery has been formed, it’s time to craft a bridge of translation. If done well, both bridges will be as strong as they are dynamic and as certain as they are agile, equally capable of carrying you to new adventures and carrying you home.
I can’t promise any shortcuts to connecting your dots in the way that I'm talking about, and I'd be shortchanging you if I did. Because when you go through the process of seeing and sharing your intuitive logic, not for a quick fix but for real, this really magical thing happens.
Suddenly or gradually or somewhere in between, the gaps go away. The points merge to reveal a vivid picture. The bridges are as much a part of you as the parts they connect. And you’re no longer full of dots and divides. There’s no you then and you now, or you over here and nine other yous over there—there’s you.
A whole, brilliant, expressive, and actually quite logical you. Logic that can be understood by others and is all your own.
The Golden Gate Bridge—the one I traveled across most as a kid, that carried me to new adventures and then carried me home, again and again—is considered one of the seven wonders of the modern world. It took some time to build, partly because of the art and science of it all and partly because of the fog. Its towers soar nearly 800 feet into the air, and its cables are thousands of feet long. Its color is International Orange, created to be visible across the sea and sky.
The bridge has become as much a part of the landscape as the two pieces of land it connects and the ocean it spans. 40 million people cross it every year, many of whom have made a point to seek it out, to take pictures of it, to celebrate the fact that it exists.
And the whole reason it does is because of two points in need of connection, and a gap between them.
LET’S PRACTICE — CONNECTIONS
This week’s practice isn’t the latest addition to the games section of The New York Times—though I encourage you to approach it with the same amount of imagination and play. It’s a way to start flexing your dot-connecting muscles and see where they take you.
Pick a couple of dots that you’d like to connect, for yourself and/or for others. Maybe they’re two things you love doing that don’t seem to have anything to do with each other. Or two parts of your career separated by what currently feels like a big gap. Or simply where you are now and where you want to go next.
One way to identify a couple of dots to work with is to notice what’s separated in your mind, either literally or figuratively, by the word “but.”
A few examples:
“I want to go back to work full time but I’ve taken a lot of time off.”
“Our specialty is books but we want to move into apparel.”
“I’m work as a painter but I can't stop thinking about physics.”