Connect the dots looking back…

I was listening to a Venture Voice with  Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com this morning, and I had a thought about connecting the dots.  When asked how or why he started meetup.com, he talked about being in NYC in 9/11 and the need for in person interactions inspired him, but the thing that I found interesting was when he went back 10 years to when he first arrived in NYC in 1994.  He said  when he came from Iowa, he looked all over the place for ways to find and meet people in the city who had similar interests.  I think this is how everyone feels when they first move to a new city, but it is clear that this was a problem Heiferman cared about way back then.  He could have never known (or maybe he did) that 7-8 years later (I think) his interest in solving that problem for himself, would lead to  building a platform that would solve it for so many people.  It reminded me of this quote from Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech:

Again, 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. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Something about this all makes me excited.  I think it’s something about how the problems you care enough about to seek solutions today, could be the start of something very big.