Begin With The End In Mind

A few months ago I was watching a You Tube video of Gordon Ramsay being interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel in the US. Kimmel started the interview with this…

“What’s the first thing you teach your chef’s?”

“We teach them how to taste”.

Bang. Just like that. He didn’t even pause.

In other words, Ramsay and his team begin with the end in mind. Knowing how to taste enables his chef’s to work backwards and find the right starting point or re-calibrate a recipe if it’s all going pear shaped.

Welcome to deep dive number one.

Beginning with the end in mind would hardly seem like the sort of revelation you would expect to find when diving into the abyss. But that’s exactly my point.

It’s such a simple point that all of us over look it at times, that is, until we’re in it up to our eyeballs and we wonder why it’s so hard to navigate our way out if it.

A Simple Mistake
If beginning with the end in mind is so simple, then why do we sometimes overlook it? I think there’s two reasons why and to illustrate my point, let me share a simple example most of us are familiar with, writing.

When I first started writing this Moowsletter way back when, some posts were very easy to write while others were almost impossible. Worst of all, the simplest ideas turned into the hardest and I couldn’t understand why, and it drove me nuts!

Thankfully, I eventually I worked it out. I didn’t begin with the end in mind.

Sometimes an idea can be so simple that complacency creeps in and you just start. You don’t even define the end point and step it backwards to your starting point because it seems so easy. But then when you hit the ‘messy middle’ you wonder why it’s so hard to get traction – you’ve lost your focus.

Then doubt creeps in and because it’s such a simple idea you figure you’re a dud writer and around and down you go. But in a perverse sort of way I think that’s healthy. It gives you an appreciation of the basics again and eventually you begin to prioritise everything and bring it all back into sharp focus. You go back to the beginning for first time.

Planning our finances is exactly the same. Lets use a simple example like savings. The only reason people don’t save is because they don’t have an end goal. It’s not that they can’t, they just don’t know what they want.

A Complicated Mistake
The second reason I think we don’t begin with the end in mind is because some situations are so complicated we can’t see the forest for the trees. Standing back seems like an impossible task, almost overwhelming.

Writing is the same. Trying to articulate a difficult message becomes so hard it’s almost impossible to know where to ‘start’, and that’s usually because we don’t know where we want to ‘end’. Not surprisingly, we get lost in the ‘thick of thin things’ before we even begin.

Planning for retirement is a very good example of this. Most people want a comfortable retirement but they rarely define or quantify what that goal should really be because it seems too hard. And then the wrong goal often leads to the wrong strategy.

Beginning with the end in mind is powerful stuff. If you don’t have an end goal, make it your goal for the next thirty days to define one.

The end.

Have a great weekend!

Adam

p.s. if you think I have this writing thing nailed, I haven’t. Not even close.