There’s not much of a choice with regards to living forwards , the arrow of time goes only one way unless you’re a 4 dimensional creature who can perceive space time.
But what do I mean by think backwards?
- Life is full of constraints.
- Constraints inspire creativity
- Focusing on the wrong constraints & you will be extremely creative in solving the wrong problems.
- Humans tend to think short term and view their existing life as the unchangeable hard constraint
- If you look long term and make your desired life as the hard constraint, the chains of my constraints come loose.
- It comes down to what you choose to make hard non-negotiable constraint vs what you make the soft ignorable constraint
Hard constraints vs Soft constraints
You treat your day job, your lack of money, your ugliness as the hard constraints - as the unchangeables in your life, and then you work out how to squeeze in the life you desire.
What if you turned things around? What if your (desired) future self was the hard constraint?
When you think forward, your current situation is the hard constraint.
When you think backward, your (desired) future situation is the hard constraint.
What is a hard constraint and what is soft constraint is a matter of opinion, by thinking backwards you change your own opinion.
Thinking backward is thinking hard about what matters. By thinking carefully and choosing what matters to us the most, we can negotiate away many of todays hard constraints for the future we want to create.
This concept can be applied everywhere from your personal life to business strategy. Lets see some examples.
Thinking backwards about surviving motherhood
Sheryl Sandberg a hotshot technology executive and Radhika Nagpal, a professor at Harvard are two women who faced a similar dilemma. They gave birth to kids at crucial junctures in their and had to juggle hectic work schedules with the demands of raising kids.
Both tried juggling multiple things till they decided to draw a hard line for many hours they worked in the day. They both decided leave work at 530 come what may; this would allow them to go home and tend to their kids after work
. Instead of working crazy hours at work - the original hard constraint - they decided to make taking caring of their babies the new hard constraint
. Working crazy hours was turned into a soft constraint. Did they suffer because they worked fewer hours than they used to (or fewer hours than their colleagues?) Funnily NO!
Once they decided that leaving work at 530 was non-negotiable, they used their creativity to drop unwanted meetings, ruthless prioritise what they worked on and learned to become judicious with their time. Both women have gone on to achieve great things in the respective careers.
Thinking backwards about customer experience
Apple and Amazon are two companies known for being the best in the business at customer experience. Unlike, todays hyper-growth internet startups both of these handle web experiences, physical stores, logistics and multiple complicated things yet deliver an experience that leaves their customers asking for more.
There’s one thread in common with the excellence of these companies - they both work backward from customer experience.
In the the famous “Steve Jobs insult response” video where Steve Jobs defends his product choices, he bluntly states “you gotta start with the customer experience and work backward towards the technology instead of the other way around”
Amazon does this too. As part of their product development process, Product Managers at Amazon start by writing a press release which clearly outlines the customers benefits of an upcoming product/project
. If no one gets excited by those benefits, they don’t build the product.
Both companies view a memorable customer experience as the hard constraint and other aspects like technology, processes, etc. as the soft constraints to be manipulated.
Hence, ladies and gents, to achieve our crazy goals, we must Live forwards but Think Backwards.