It’s easier to put a puzzle together when you know what it’s supposed to look like. This applies to everything that requires skill or deliberate effort. Communicating, designing, cooking, leading, chainsaw carving, etc. If you can see the desired outcome, or at least a blurry outline of it, it becomes more attainable.
This is critical because directionless effort can feel productive, can make you feel busy when nothing’s getting done. An inability (or unwillingness) to start with the end in mind can make you aimless, corrupting your agency. It means you can’t shift perspective, can’t avoid traps, even when you’ve watched others be eaten by them.
Starting with the end in mind helps you break decisions into more realistic, lower-risk chunks. With the end in mind, you can check your work as you go. You don’t have to see the entire path so long as you can roughly point to the destination.
Start small. With an “end” that’s not far away. What do you want to accomplish this hour? Whatever it is, opening TikTok probably isn’t step one.
Now think medium-term. For example, “I want to run a 5k” does not carry the weight of, “Several people in my family have suffered and died because of heart disease, and training to run a 5k would be a constructive first step toward improving my cardio.” The real goal isn’t running a 5k (a checkbox), it’s a healthier life (lasting change).
Starting “with the end in mind” is the second habit in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The objective of starting with the end in mind is not just to direct our tasks, but also our lives.
A core, oft-repeated piece of homework from The 7 Habits is to draft your ideal obituary. Or perhaps imagine yourself as a ghost at your funeral. Who showed up? What did you accomplish? What mattered when you were on your deathbed? Whatever the answers, you need to start working toward those things today.
Starting with the end in mind strengthens discipline. It turns ideas into intent, and intent into reality.
There are many practical versions of starting with the end in mind:
- Reverse engineering: Break apart the end product, just like you would rebuild an engine. Learn how it works, how it all fits together.
- Working backwards: Define success, then outline steps back from that. What domino fell last? And before that? Think of how you roll out the underlayment then work from the bottom up to shingle a roof.
- Standing in their shoes: Understand the desires and perspective that are shaping their words and actions. What end are they trying to reach?
- Following the golden rule: Treat others (and your future self) based on treatment you’d want to receive.
- Inverting the problem: Rather than figuring out how to achieve success, figure out what could lead to failure, then prevent those things from happening. Like checking tire tread and air pressure before a long drive.
- Drilling to first principles: Abandon assumptions, then strip it bare. Seek fundamental truths required for end states, then build from there. What actually needs to happen?
“It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”
~Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Book)
“It’s as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That’s how it was. In society’s opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me.”
~Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych (Book)
