These ideas can’t both be right, can they?

Okay, follow me here…

When you do (rarely) find time to work on your vision for your company or law firm, you probably ask yourself soul-searching questions like:

·??????? What kind of operation am I trying to build?

·??????? Where was this all going?

·??????? What does “done” look like?

·??????? Who would ever want to buy this business/firm/etc?

Obviously, the more concrete your vision, the easier it is to complete.

Maxwell Maltz dug into the underlying neuroscience here: Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than ‘you’ ever could by conscious thought. ‘You’ supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.

Sounds true enough. Steven Covey—author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People—would agree.

But are we who worship at the altar of “Begin with the End in Mind” overlooking something?

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham thinks so. Here’s his Deep Thought on the matter:

“Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things... Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it’s going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong. I think the way to use… big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You’ll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don’t try to construct the future like a building because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.”

Hmmmmmmmmm……..

“Head in a General Westerly Direction” is the opposite of “Begin With the End in Mind”? So which is right? And for what?

Let’s run through an example. Say your law school’s alumni magazine asks you to write an article. There are two ways to tackle it:

“Begin with the End in Mind” – You create a very detailed outline before putting pen to paper.

Pros: You increase the likelihood of a solid end product.

Cons: You might waste time with prep and neglect insights that you have along the way that don’t fit into the rigid plan.

“Head in a General Westerly Direction” – You create a loose outline and just dive in.

Pros: You speed up the process and get to use ideas you discover along the way – the writing teaches you how to write.

Cons: You run the risk of meandering and finding yourself tasked with a big rewrite.

“Head in a General Westerly Direction” obviously isn’t the right approach every time, but it’s a really interesting tool for the toolbox. One ignored by the clear-vision-first folks.

Which tool works best for you?

Learn more about Adam Kosloff and Virtuoso Content here: https://lp.virtuosocontent.com/