Connecting the dots

I may have written this in a pretentious way, but these are the words Steve Jobs spoke to students at his Stanford University commencement speech.

It is obvious that various experiences will connect and be useful in the future. However, it is difficult to look into the future and learn or experience something with the knowledge of how it will be useful.

I interpreted the message of 'connecting the dots' as follows: when you look back on your life later, various things end up connecting and becoming your foundation, so there is no point in worrying excessively about the future. Therefore, be absorbed in what you are doing now, do it with all your might, and live the present moment desperately.

I experienced the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March of my third year of undergraduate studies. At the time, I was provisionally assigned to a seismology laboratory and was scheduled to begin my graduation research on a seismology-related topic in April.

I intended to go on to graduate school, but I had not thought very seriously about what kind of job I would get. I vaguely thought it would be nice to work somewhere where I could make use of what I had learned, but I did not have anything specific I wanted to do.

After researching earthquakes during my third and fourth years of undergraduate studies and my first and second years of graduate school, I ended up getting a job at a geotechnical survey company. For someone who experienced an unprecedented massive earthquake in a seismology lab during their student days, I feel now that it was only natural that I decided to get involved in earthquake disaster prevention.

While I was researching my original research topic at the lab, I would go home and write my own tsunami simulation programs as a hobby. The unprecedented massive earthquake brought about an unprecedented massive tsunami. Tsunami research was also being actively conducted, and with the evolution of computers, it was a time when large-scale calculations could be performed on personal PCs to some extent.

Being able to build a somewhat complex and potentially useful program from scratch by myself helped me overcome my aversion to programming. It led to a confidence backed by experience that if I understood the calculation formulas, I could create a program, and if I did not understand the formulas, I could just read papers and study them. I also learned that if the machine's memory was insufficient, I could execute calculations by devising program algorithms, skipping some data, and making various other adjustments.

I am currently in a department that analyzes ground and seismic motion, and my experience at that time is definitely useful for tasks such as large-scale seismic motion analysis, as well as creating visualizations and animations. Furthermore, the experience of being able to devise algorithms to speed up time-consuming calculations is also useful.

Of course, I did not work hard on the tsunami simulation program because I thought it would be useful for my future job. It just turned out that way.

For any experience, if you engage in it desperately and greedily, there should be many things that will become your foundation for the future. But conversely, even if you try your hand at something you are not interested in because you think it might be useful in the future, if you do it half-heartedly, it may not be of much use later on.

In that sense, adults often say, 'You should experience many things; it will be good for your future.' Personally, I think that is limited to cases where you engage in them desperately; if you experience many things half-heartedly, they may not remain in your memory much, and they may not be useful.

Experiences that involved hardship remain in my memory strangely well. This is probably because the joy of solving them is great. That might also be playing a role in this.