The past few weeks I’ve been learning a new piano piece: The 3rd movement to Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata. It’s a fairly long piece at 7 minutes and is 10 pages of sheet music; 2 of which are played twice. That’s about 30 seconds of music per page played.
Now normally when you learn a piece of music, you start at the beginning. You learn the notes of the first few measures and get those down. Then you move to the next few measures, learn those, then continue.
Then somewhere about 2-3 pages in you’re at the point where it takes a while to play the stuff you’ve learned. Then you hit the stuff you haven’t learned yet and it’s like crashing your car into a brick wall. It’s also discouraging.
Some time waaaaay back (like 1989) I read about how when you’re memorizing something that it’s often easier to start at the end and work backwards. So I figured I’d try it here. I jumped to the end of the movement and learned the last few measures. Once I got those down, I learned a few measures before that.
The weirdest part as I progressed was that I’d start with a struggle on the measures I was learning, but then what followed that was sheer joy as I could play the rest to the end. While it was a strange feeling, it boosted my confidence and my interest. I ended up learning to play 8 pages of music in right around 10 days at an hour a day of practice.
If you think about this though, it makes sense. We tend to do best when we struggle a little bit at first and then it gets easy after that. Our brains get almost immediately rewarded for the struggle.
Ok. So how does this relate to anything in real life?
Well, if you’re learning your lines for a play, it’s a huge booster. If you have to memorize the Gettysburg Address for your high school civics class, you’ll do it that much faster and easier. If you play a musical instrument, well, I’ve already demonstrated how it helps there.
Beyond that though, is there any practical application?
It might be a stretch, but I think goal setting and project planning also benefit from working backwards. It’s the classic “begin with the end in mind”. This is so important that it’s Habit 2 in Stephen Covey’s book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.
When preparing to do anything, you have to know where you want to end up. From there, you can work backwards to eventually get to what you need to do to start. And in doing so, you’ll now have an entire roadmap put together.
Let’s take another passion of mine: hiking.
If I’m planning a hike I have to decide among the following:
- How long do I want to hike?
- Where do I want to get to?
- How challenging a hike do I want?
Those are usually what I decide between. Sometimes they play out well together. But usually one leads the other. If I’m training, then I determine how long I want to hike, and then that dictates the available route. Even then, I may add that I want a difficult route that’s uphill on the way back (yes, I do that deliberately). But if I don’t decide that up front, then how can I pick the right route?
When you’re building a product for your business, you also have to start with the end in mind. Let’s say that you’ve done your research and decided that the world needs a new whizbangamabob. Great! Now what? Well, you imagine what that looks like all finished. Then you figure out what step is needed right before it’s done. Then the one before that. Pretty soon you have a map of everything needed to get your whizbangamabob built and up for sale.
As humans, we live forwards, but plan backwards. Those who claim not to have control of their lives aren’t doing the planning part. They expect to plan forward or “play it by ear”. While spontaneity can be fun at times, it’s difficult to live your whole life that way. If nothing is predictable then your brain sees everything as a stressful situation. And having stress all the time, as we know, is bad thing for our health.
So begin with the end in mind. Have a plan. But be prepared for when things don’t go according to plan. It’s not the end of the world. It just means you overlooked something in your original plan. Unlike Beethoven’s music, your plans aren’t written down once and forever unchangeable.
Look forward. Plan backward. It’ll do you good.