How to find what you're not looking for

1.5 years ago, a garment steamer changed my life.

A friend who was moving out of Singapore was selling all his stuff. He sent me a list of things to check if I wanted to claim anything on there.

A coffee table so massive it could double as a ping-pong table, a smart speaker I didn't share values with, a blender I already had—because who doesn’t need a backup for all those smoothies they never make?

A handheld garment steamer.

That's a thing?

I've seen the hotel garment steamers so I understand the concept. Give your outfit a quick face lift while it is still standing instead of the usual thing where you have to get it to lie down first.

But there’s a handheld version?

How long has this been available? How was I supposed to find out? Does everyone else already know?

Post undergrad, I was immediately focused on the big things. Achieving greatness, getting rich, changing the world. Okay, maybe just getting rich. I was going to get this down and then figure out the other stuff.

10 years in, I'm beginning to understand that's not how anything works. Big things take time. Compounding over decades.

Everyday life is inevitably about the little things.

Coming across this steam iron made me wonder what else was out there that I didn't know about. Where would I look for it?

So I started looking. Everywhere. For little things. Trying a Taiwanese restaurant instead of getting my usual dosa fix, attempting to surf in Bali with an instructor instead of assuming it is only for the pros, experimenting with acupuncture because there must be a reason people puncture themselves with tiny needles, signing up for a cohort based writing course after hearing about it on Twitter.

None of these things have "transformed" my life yet, no. They might never, and that’s okay.

But life is just the slightest bit more interesting because of each new small thing.

Steve Jobs famously took a calligraphy class at Reed College out of curiosity after dropping out. This would later prove invaluable when he was designing the first Macintosh computer.

He might not have known how the dots would connect looking forward, but he was actively putting more dots on the page.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, is a trained hypnotist. He credits his understanding of hypnotic language patterns with making Dilbert more relatable to audiences. Dots.

Putting more dots on the page is how they found what they weren't looking for.