Reverse Engineering Your Future

There’s so much talk online about reverse engineering success.  I love this concept, and in fact I have done a fair bit of this both with PodcastMotor and with other projects that I’m implementing successfully.  The key here is identifying an end goal you want to reach and working backwards from there.

In The 4 Hour Work Week Tim Ferriss called this Dreamlining.  I agree with the concept although instead of Dreaming about it, I want to create a framework to actually make it happen.  And I want to do this in as short of a timeframe as possible.

In order to achieve both of those things at the same time I have to put concise, actionable, and measurable goals in place.   So let’s start from the beginning and work backwards towards how you might set a longer term goal and build the framework for achieving it.  The nice thing about Beginning With the End in Mind is that every step along the way will make sense and will have purpose behind it.  No more will you have ambiguous goals and actions along the way.

1. Define what Success will mean:  Example:  $15,000 recurring revenue.
2. Map out a realistic timeline to achieve Success:  10 months
3. Set monthly goals.  Anything less will just be a guess, especially if you’re working part time at building your business up:  Two new customers per month at $500 each
4. Define actions that will lead you to the monthly goal.  This will include things like content creation (inbound marketing), marketing, social media, outreach (outbound sales), and conversion optimization.
5. Put weekly frame work in place to focus just on the activities that will allow you to reach these monthly goals.  Do these things every week as the scaffolding to your success.  This will be things like:
   1. Monday 9:00-10:00 am:  Send 15 cold emails to prospects.
   2. Tuesday 1:00-2:00 pm:  Write guest blog post on relevant site
   3. Thursday 11:00-12:00 pm:  Send 3 networking emails to associated players in my space to set up Skype calls

One of the big keys here is to have milestones along the way, not just goal marks.  Celebrate them too.  You want this to be fun, right?  Otherwise you’d have a day job.

Something really key to keep in mind is that having a clearly defined vision of your future will allow you better clarity when making business decisions.  Every thought will be:  Does this align with my plan of the future.  This will allow a quick yes or no answer and will eliminate any ambiguity about these decisions.

Wraup

Everyone wants a quick and easy way to guarantee success in their business (and in their personal lives).  This is not easy to do, but it’s almost impossible without a road map of how to get there.  Begin with the end in mind, work backwards with actionable and specific steps along the way and you’ll be on your way to reaching your end goal.