[nurple]

Thanks for writing this. It reminds me of Steve Job's commencement speech at Stanford.

> Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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.

[redlock]

Until it killed him (ignoring doctors advice on cancer)

[giantrobot]

He had an inoperable cancer and wanted to spend his remaining time doing what he wanted rather than sitting in a hospital getting ultimately fruitless treatments. Pancreatic cancer doesn't fuck around. It's not like he died of pneumonia because he loved sleeping outdoors in the rain.

[shepherdjerred]

What? That's not at all the case. The type of cancer that Jobs has could be surgically removed. He spent time receiving alternative treatments and delayed his surgery.

> Jobs had a rare form of the cancer, known as neuroendocrine cancer, which grows more slowly and is easier to treat

> GEP-NETs are slow growing tumors that have the potential to be cured surgically if the tumor is removed prior to metastasis.

> Many journalists mentioned and even focused on Jobs’ initial decision to forego conventional treatments and instead use complementary and alternative medical (CAM) therapies, including acupuncture, botanicals, and dietary changes.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pancreatic-cancer...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4924574/

[lenocinor]

Agreed, but it’s remarkable how well this approach worked for him till then. No approach can solve every problem. I wonder if this one, on balance, was the right one for him, or for others.

[jamieplex]

Lol, yeah, there is that...

[Lionga]

You can connect the dots easy when winning the lottery or being Steve Jobs. But for the majority will not magically connect.

In short this is called survivorship bias.