Reverse Goal Planning
Planning Backwards to Create a Roadmap for Success
Think of the biggest goal you have for your life. It probably feels out of reach and intimidating, something abstract and totally unattainable. When you begin to think of how to accomplish your goal, you might feel lost, like you’ve been asked to find your way to a remote location without a map. This feeling of disorientation — the lack of an idea, any idea, to get from where you are to where you want to be — can cause you to feel hopeless and paralyze you in the face of real, profound change in your life. But it doesn’t need to be this way.
The anxiety surrounding our largest goals — whether they be career-, family-, or spiritually-focused — centers around the fact that given any starting point in life, there are an infinite number of paths forward. The more difficult, concrete, and far off into the future the goal is, the fewer of these branching paths will reach the destination you desire. Identifying the correct path, or even seeing that one exists, can feel nearly impossible.
This is because most people try to plan forward to their goals, instead of backward from them.
Imagine an event in your life, something big that you have accomplished. Think back to while you were in the process of completing that goal — the uncertainty you may have felt. Now look backward from today, and feel how certain the path forwards looks in hindsight. When looking backward at the path, the route seems obvious and safe. When looking forward, the path seems obscure and treacherous. The objective, then, is to imagine yourself having already completed the goal and then imagine the steps it took you to get there.
In this way, we can work iteratively backward from your goal to the present day, littering the path forward with checkpoints and benchmarks that provide clear guideposts along your path.
For example, let’s say your goal is to learn Spanish to fluency. This is an extremely large, abstract goal that involves multiple years of effort. Looking forward from today to your goal, reaching the point of fluency can feel impossible with no clear way to achieve it. Let’s take the opposite approach, and imagine that you already speak Spanish. What would someone learned Spanish to fluency have already done? They’ve probably read something like Don Quijote.
We now have our first checkpoint along the path to fluency — reading Don Quijote. This checkpoint now becomes our new endpoint in the journey in this iterative process. So now we must ask ourselves, what would someone who has read Don Quijote have already accomplished? That’s a hard book, so they probably started somewhere easier. Maybe they read through the Harry Potter series to grow their vocabulary and grammar knowledge. There are eight Harry Potter, giving us a further eight checkpoints along the journey.
Now, imagine you’re someone who has already read the first Harry Potter book in Spanish. What would you have already accomplished? You probably need to know a few thousand words and some grammar to read that book, so you would have likely memorized the 3000 most common words in Spanish and worked through a grammar book.
This becomes our new objective, and we’ve now reached one that can be acted upon today as a small, daily task. We can start by buying a grammar workbook and finding a list of vocabulary to memorize, and. set a goal to work through a small portion of them every day. Once we finish the vocabulary list and grammar book, we can continue by working towards the other objectives we’ve outlined during this exercise, following the journey we laid out.
In this iterative process, working backward from our true goal, we can develop a plan of checkpoints that carve out the path forward for us. By looking backward into an imagined past, we can determine our very real future, making the vague and abstract, clear and concrete.
Could I suggest that perhaps the best way to achieve goals is to build mental models?
For example in language learning we can use the understanding of our native language to build a model of the necessary structure that we can then use as a map onto the new language. For example Vocabulary, Parts of Speech, Syntax and Morphology.
These are 4 universal characteristics (the invariant parts of language). Vocabulary graphs meaning onto pneumonics (words), POS describes the function of words within sentences, morphology describes Gender/Tense/Conjugation/Pluralization rules and syntax describes the structure, relationships, and necessary agreement between morphological entities.
It’s often more important to learn these rules first rather than focusing specifically on vocabulary since doing so makes discovering and understanding these rules explicit rather than inferential. This is something that having a model would make obvious and thus creating a learning map more methodical.