What a high school junior can teach us about working backwards towards success.

A junior at my old my high school, Loyola Academy, just got a perfect score on his ACT test.

A piece of advice from the article:

He also discovered on the ACT test that in the reading section, if he read the questions first, he had a better idea of what to focus on when he went back to do the reading.

I’ve constantly found this same technique to not just be invaluable for taking tests, but helpful in all sorts of things life presents you.

It’s how I passed through my entire Spanish language requirement in college even though my skill at Spanish was weak.

Before college started we were required to take a set of placement exams. As I was going through the Spanish placement test, I would read the questions first. Then as I was reading the Spanish passages for reading comprehension, even though I didn’t understand ¾ of what I was reading, I could locate the blocks of text the questions were referring to by pattern matching the question’s words with the passage’s words. Then I’d take my best guess at answering. Often I’d find an answer that had more similar words with the paragraph I just located than the other answers did.

Even though I clearly hacked my way through that particular test without enough proficiency at Spanish, I managed to pass out of my entire language requirement.

The reason it worked so well, as opposed to reading the passage first, was that working backwards helped focus my attention on the actual “important” task. In this case it was correctly answering questions.

If I had read the passage first, my memory would have been inundated with tons of text. It would have made it much harder and slower for me to read the questions later and match them up with blocks of text I had read previously.

Working backwards is an insanely powerful technique that isn’t immediately intuitive to most people.

I don’t know a lot of people who take tests this way. Most folks follow the order of things in which they are presented to them.

Look at starting a business. Most folks go from idea, to worrying about creating the idea. Finally after tons of time doing all sorts of things to create the idea, they start trying to sell their crafted idea to customers. But if you are a fan of Lean Startup work, you know how powerful starting with selling to customers first can be. Those conversations can focus you on the important things you need to know before creating a product.

Or look at happiness. Most people think they need to achieve this or change that to be happy. But as Charles Darwin noticed:

Even the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it in our minds.

You can force yourself to be happier by working backwards. What’s the usual final step to happiness? A laugh? A smile? The facial feedback hypothesis has been proven to show that forcing yourself to smile can significantly improve your mood.

Or look at acting. Most people who want to be an actor think: “I need some acting training. I’ll take some classes. Meanwhile I’ll audition for small neighborhood plays and such and maybe eventually I can move up to tv and film”. You know what Ben Affleck and Matt Damon did? Despite a few early movies Matt got some work in, Ben and Matt still had very little success in getting a film career going.

We were totally frustrated as actors. We couldn’t find work. We couldn’t get arrested. That frustration built and built, until we decided to write.

-Matt Damon

They decided to work backwards. They wrote Good Will Hunting.

Matt and Ben created their own movie they could have roles in, instead of waiting for someone to cast them in theirs.

You probably already know what happened next. The movie catapulted their careers.

No, of course, I’m not over simplifying anything in this article. You can’t just work backwards and become an A-list actor in Hollywood.

But if moving forward isn’t working for you, if you’re stuck, or you feel a ton of resistance and need a fresh perspective on whatever problem is in front of you…

Starting with the last step and working backwards is a pretty helpful path to take.

Here’s another article I wrote about taking the non-intuitive approach to creating a product by first coming up with a price, and then working backwards to create something that justifies the price.

And stay tuned, I have a post coming soon about taking your job search backwards.

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