Begin with Your End

I have fairly decent math skills.  I can even do algebra...and I actually use it every day at work. (Crazy!  Who knew it was applicable in real life?) But I really didn't like geometry in high school. Proofs were most definitely the worst thing ever when it comes to high school math.  I just couldn't get it.  I couldn't figure out how to work backwards from the end.  At that point in my life, to work backwards from the answer didn't seem to be any sort of logical.  I would get a cloudiness in my mind that I wasn't accustomed to and it sucked.  Fast forward 23 years...to begin at the end is how I accomplish and complete almost every task that I undertake.

I'm writing a book.  It's a big undertaking.  I've had this story rolling around in my mind for years, and it's time for it to come out.  I don't have all the pieces, but I have nuggets and snippets of the story that I know for certain need to be in the book, but I was getting lost.  As I work through it, I've learned a couple things; first, one does not write a story in the order that it happens from beginning to end.  That was a weird epiphany for me.  I've been reading for a long time now, and I always read from the beginning to the end.  It never occurred to me that the stories aren't written that way.

The second lesson I've learned from writing a book is that it is really helpful to start with the ending. It doesn't have to be the very first thing you write, but, like so many other things in my life, it's extremely helpful to know where I'm going.  Otherwise, I'll wander.  It's really funny to me that I can start to write, whether it be a blog post or a short story or a novel, I don't know exactly what I'm going to write until I write it.  But if I have the end in mind, then I have guidance and a compass to work back to, no matter what twists and turns happen along the way.

What ending do you need to set for yourself before you get there?  Career goals?  Retirement planning?  Loving marriage?  Set the end goal, then take steps to get there.

Make it a beautiful day, friends.

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