A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connec... — Steve Jobs

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 design we will have.

Author: Steve Jobs

Insight: Most of us understand this intuitively but don't act on it. When you've only ever lived one kind of life, solved one category of problem, or moved through the world in one way, your brain gets lazy. It starts seeing all new problems through that same narrow lens. The tech industry gets called out here because it's so easy to spot—a group of similar people building tools that only make sense to people like them. But this happens everywhere. A manager who's never struggled financially makes tone-deaf policy decisions. A product team that's all the same age misses what matters to different generations. An artist who only reads one genre produces derivative work. The real insight is subtler than "get diverse experiences for the sake of diversity." It's that your creative range is literally constrained by what you've lived through. You can't connect dots you've never collected. Travel helps, but so does reading widely, learning a craft outside your field, listening to people whose lives don't match yours, or even just trying jobs that terrify you. The goal isn't diversity as a checkbox—it's understanding that the problems worth solving are human problems, and humans are far more varied than any single perspective can capture. Your next good idea is probably waiting in someone else's story.

Source: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 568, 2011