Make a choice, reverse-engineer your life
These days, I write about tools on Medium. Tools and frameworks I find helpful. I shared my insights into Edgar Schein’s model of organizational culture, talked about role analysis, explained the Founder Institute’s customer development methodology.
The grandest tool of them all: reverse-engineering your life.
Most of the time, when my MasterMind peers and I discuss our annual plan, this is the metric we focus on: our year.
But I am talking about not one year of your life, but your LIFE. As in the totality of all days you spend on this earth. I am aware and so are you that we cannot forecast by when these will be numbered.
There are statistical averages however. I am a female based in Western Europe and currently 45 years old. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s ‘better life index’, a woman in Germany can expect to life until age 84. I have 39 years left.
Reverse-engineering is typically used in project management. Hence the notion of my MasterMind peers and I using it to better map our annual goals. But what is so wrong about the idea of reverse-engineering not only a year, but a life?
My favorite coach Marie Forleo correctly states in her online course Time Genius that “sometimes we are in the trenches”. Life happens. External circumstances force us to adjust and some of our plans do not pan out. And yet, even in times when we are forced to duck down and simply survive, remembering a bigger framework helps us. It provides us with a guideline and a sense of orientation. It helps us shift gears and not automatically assume roles and responsibilities that may simply not be voluntary.
Former palliative nurse Bronnie Ware in her book “The top five regrets of dying” summarizes the countless conversations with those about to depart.
One of the recurring messages was: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me”.
By taking the unusual approach to reverse-engineer your life, you at least attempt to prevent this scenario to happen. You take your fate into your own hands. You make choices — active choices that are based on an active reflection on the essentials.
How does this work?
I suggest working with an excel spreadsheet. You can plug in different dimensions. My friend Nour and I use the following for our annual review and I have found it beneficial:
- Family / friends
- Money / career
- Spirituality
- Personal development
- Health.
You can plug in goals for every year that remains, but start with the last year (year 84 for a woman in Western Europe — take a look at the OECD better life index for more information). And plan from there.
Adopting the perspective of your 84-year-old self helps you better respond to the question: “what do I want to look back at?” and “wWhich memories do I want to have created and fondly remember”?
It most likely also helps you better differentiate between the “nice to have” successes and milestones and the essential ones.
Once you have retroactively planned your life on an annual basis, you can also allocate these goals & experiences to a quarterly or monthly basis. Or simply include them in your annual planning tool so you won’t forget about them.
Some of the goals that come to my mind are: hiking on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, building and exiting a fashiontech startup, living in Vietnam or Hong Kong for three years. For others, they might include activities such as adopting a pet, retiring in Bali at age 55, or becoming a parent by age 37 latest.
You may find it morbid of me to even consider reverse-engineering a life and make a life plan. While I was already interested in this topic as early as 2014 (I found an excel spreadsheet evidencing this on my Google drive), age and witnessing an aging parent’s decline has certainly made me reflect much more on this topic.
We don’t life eternally. We die eventually.
Why not use a project management tool to *really* make the best of our experience while we are alive?
Sources:
Marie Forleo: Time genius. Online program. Link.
James Lopez for Forbes: “Technical Insight: How To Reverse Engineer A Big Project”. Published on 14 May 2019. Link.
Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development: Better life index. Link.
Bronnie Ware: “The top five regrets of the dying: a life transformed by the dearly departed”. Revised edition 2019. Link.
