What if You Have It Backwards?

“ I wanted to pass on another nugget I’ve learned about how to approach and define problems: working backwards. I’ve found this to be useful in both technical and business situations and I use it all the time.

Basically, start with the end result you want, and figure out how to get there from here. If you can’t define the desired outcome, then ste

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The point is to try and step outside of your existing framework for thinking about how you approach (some set of) things, and to perceive how your past experience and existing worldview influences your expectations of how things will go, and how those expectations would then influence the outcome. It can be helpful to do thought experiments where y

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When the path we’re on isn’t working, the solution isn’t necessarily to find some new slab of concrete to jump to. But rather look at where we want to go and start walking. Someone else’s system or routine might work for getting them where they want to go, but it’s unlikely you’re headed in the exact same direction.

If you are fortunate or unfortunate enough to wonder:

“What should I spend my time working on?”

Then perhaps a better question is:

“Where am I most afraid to fail?”

When we’re avoiding some path because failure would destroy us, that’s often the path we need to go down.

Because if we aren’t afraid of failing, do we really care at all?

I wish when I was at my previous startups I had focused more on building and less on winning. Sure, I may not have done exactly what I had thought I wanted, but finding ways to love the process would’ve allowed for better outcomes anyway. What we want is such an abstract idea, built on a foundation of shifting sand, that it is pointless to try to p... See more

Don’t worry if this feels familiar. The tendency to focus on processes over outcomes is actually a natural psychological operation: because we spend the majority of our cognitive resources on what is happening right now—which makes sense, since we do actually have to act in order to create change—we’re biased toward focusing on those immediate acti

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