Bill Gallagher argues that entrepreneurs should start by picturing their end goal, then work backward to break it into stages. He calls this "beginning with the end in mind," treating even your final vision as a stepping stone toward something larger.
When you're planning on growing a business, that's never been done before, when you're scaling something, when you're creating something completely new or dramatically different in your business, when you're going to 10x it, even if it's been done by somebody else before, you haven't done it. You've got to do what Stephen Covey taught us, and that's begin with the end in mind. We start planning from the future state. Looking back at how we got there, start thinking about, okay, if that's the mountaintop, how did I get there? What's the next stop after that, and the next stop after that, and the next stop after that? We start with the end in mind and we imagine how did we get there. And if you have something that you're particularly attached to, like an end game, try to go beyond that so that your, your end game is something you're actually playing through, or what had been your end game is now merely another step on the way to something enduring and perhaps even never finished.
