I’ve had a series of 7-hours-of-meetings days lately. It got me thinking about the idea of “wherever you go, there you are.” I used to have similar days of 8+ hours of meetings at Atlassian, and I was looking forward to working for myself and having more control of my calendar.
Here I am, working for myself, and I find myself heading towards a similar outcome. Yet I also see other leaders and business owners who don’t have a calendar like mine. I don’t think a full calendar and business success are necessarily correlated.
How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t like? What could I do to create a calendar that better serves me and my goals?
I don’t have an answer, unfortunately. I think this one will take a little analysis and a little reflection. There’s definitely a blind spot for me in here, or generally something for me to learn.
Remember that financial modeling work I was worried about? We’re still in the middle of it, and the work has reinforced two things:
1) Demand aggregators are great. 2) I can expand services within a client by adding value in many areas.
The financial modeling work is for several different companies, but they all come to me through one company. By getting one client who needs Group 18’s services for their clients, I do one sales cycle and effectively close 10-20 deals. To get this work otherwise would require finding, pitching, and closing those 10-20 companies 1-1. That would take years! Thank goodness for demand aggregators.
(The downside of course is that these are not my clients, but rather my client’s clients. I like demand aggregators in the beginning, but would want to grow my direct client base over time.)
The work we closed was for financial models. In theory, you produce an Excel file, send it over, and you’re done. While there are many ways to improve quality and surprise and delight customers, this is more or less commodity work.
One of the things I did as part of this work was follow my natural curiosity. We were working on a model and I followed my curiosity to the company’s operating plan. Having produced a lot of operating plans, 6-pagers, and other business storytelling, I could see areas of opportunity in the operating plan and how it connected to the model.
Long story short, I ended up providing strategic guidance to the CEO, and produced slides for the board deck he was preparing for.
My client asked if I had the capacity to do that work for more of their clients.
What started as one-and-done commodity work is slowly blossoming into an ongoing relationship for many different projects doing higher value work. Sweet.
Thanks to everyone who submitted feedback on the latest survey. It was really helpful!
In general you all were understanding about me reducing the frequency of this newsletter to every other week instead of weekly. We’ve been on that cadence for the last three issues or so and I plan to continue that going forward.
The majority of people read the whole newsletter start to finish, so right now I don’t plan to adjust the content structure.
Have a great holiday season, and I’ll see you again in 2026! 🍾
Kevin
A Quote
“
Making death an ally requires you to constantly align your life decisions as if death were near. Doing so, you can take advantage of the inevitable end as a purifying, clarifying, and energizing force. Think about how your thoughts and mood would change if you knew you were going to die tomorrow. How much attention, love, and commitment would you bring to what would surely be your last acts on earth? How present, grateful, and awe-inspired would you be? Consider how you’d kiss your lover, put your child to bed, prepare your last meal, or take your final walk in the woods.
This guy must not waste a lot of time doom-scrolling on his phone - he’s too busy in his garage tweaking his inventions. He created pawn pieces that transform into others; knight, bishop, rook, and queen. I’m impressed and inspired.
I liked this relatively quick-read leadership book. I don’t know what Admiral McRaven is like in real life, but I have a lot of respect for leaders who have strong virtues and lead in ways that are consistent with them. The more I read about the military, the more I realize my early-career understanding of how it works is inaccurate - there's a lot more agency than I realized.
This exceptional ice cream came into our lives a few years ago. It’s got great ingredients; only five in their vanilla flavor, and uses real eggs and cream.
(enjoy this 5️⃣ minute read)
Deep Dive on Working Backwards from Magic
You’re leading your team into the future. Deep down you want to create a great outcome. Something magical for your boss or customers.
But what happens in reality? You plan forward from the current state.
It feels responsible. You build upon what you have today. Slow and steady wins the race.
Incremental thinking seems practical. But what you get is well-executed mediocrity.
If you start from where you are today, you can only build slightly better versions of today.
The antidote? Work backwards from magic.
What I Mean by “Work Backwards from Magic”
Magic is the unconstrained future state.
Instead of building forward from where you are now, design a future state and work backwards from there to today.
This is not a strategy, or a roadmap, or OKRs. It’s a vivid, almost unreasonable picture of the future.
In forward-planning, you’re iterating on what exists. In backward-planning, you design what should exist.
Once you have an idea of the future you want to create, you can then imagine one step before that. And one step before that. Keep stepping backward until you understand how it’s connected to your current state.
Now that you know the path backwards from magic, you can build forwards toward that state.
Why the Word Magic Matters
“Magic” is a beautifully effective word.
It turns off the inner critic.
It gives you permission to dream, and to imagine something disconnected to your current reality.
In fact, this is the whole point! You need something to break you away from your current reality.
Leaders spend so much time immersed in the business. They know what’s happening today. They know the state of their systems. They know the state of their customers.
They need something like “magic” to give them permission to think of a future that doesn’t exist yet.
This Isn’t A New Idea, but It’s Rarely Practiced
In areas outside of business this concept is practiced quite a bit.
To make a movie, you don’t start filming the people and environment around you and see what happens.
To write a book, you don’t just start typing.
And to construct a building, you don’t start laying bricks and “see how it goes.”
In all cases, you design the end state and then work backwards from there to the beginning.
You architect the structure around which you’ll build the smaller elements. It’s how you get “Inception,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” and the Burj Khalifa.
Lots of things in business aren’t well-architected or designed. At their worst they’re held together by duct tape and bubble gum.
Someone built something quickly and it was put into production. Then six months later another team built something on top of that. And another on top of that. And so on and so on.
This house used to be a nice one bedroom one bath. Over time every owner put their own stamp on it.
The Tradeoffs
Working backward from magic is a useful tool in particular moments. It’s not a great mindset to stay in forever. Think of it like a hat you put on when needed, then put back on the shelf when you don’t.
That’s because magic increases complexity. It can create long time horizons that increase uncertainty.
You can’t perpetually sit there imagining a future state. If you do, it’s like those signs outside of bars that say “free beer tomorrow.” You come back tomorrow, and it’s free beer tomorrow. It’s perpetually out of reach.
In business for the magic to matter you need to actually build it. Go imagine the future state, but then get back into execution mode.
If you only think about the future you'll never get there. It'll be perpetually out of reach.
The Skills Required
Since it’s not enough to just think magically - we actually have to build toward it - let’s explore the full spectrum of skills required.
Imagination: You need creativity and imagination to create a compelling vision of the future.
Systems Thinking: You have to understand the complex system you’re trying to influence. You need to understand the sequences and dependencies that matter.
Judgment: You need to know what parts of the vision to hold firm to versus adapt.
Leadership: You need to protect the vision and propel your team toward this future state.
If you’re deficient in any of these four, you’re going to have a hard time. A vision that’s not compelling won’t matter. A lack of systems thinking will make it hard to build. With low judgment you’ll lose your way. And without leadership you won’t sustain the energy required to get there.
A Real Example
This concept was on my mind because of a recent experience. We were working on improving operational systems, and were specifically going through the architecture of ClickUp.
I was describing this as a love letter to our future selves. The us of today were going to go through the hard work to build something future us was going to love.
Shortly into the meeting the CEO started to look wistfully off screen. He was like, “Oh yeah, if we could get this to show [these metrics in this way across all of our clients] that would be amazing.” He saw how we were going to systematize operations and how he could confidently take on more clients. The leader started enriching this picture with more ideas…
…but then their head operations person jumped in and said, “I’ve already built that,” and started pulling it up on the screen.
Except, they hadn’t built it. Not quite. It was definitely related to the leader’s vision, but was just something they already had on the shelf.
The result was that the CEO was pulled out of that future headspace and asked to review something from today. We lost the vision. We lost the excitement. We lost the magic.
This happens so often! Most organizations don’t kill the magic intentionally. They interrupt it to sound smart.
Be alert to when your customer or your boss is getting into a “magic” sort of headspace, and then let them run. The worst that can happen is you spend five minutes off track. Best case you grab a magical vision that clarifies the future direction.
Call to Action
The next time you come upon a hard problem, put on your magical thinking hat.
Ban feasibility for 15 minutes. Describe the magical outcome in detail. Let your imagination run free and unconstrained.
From there work backwards until you connect it to today. Now you can execute forward.
If you try it, reply and tell me how it went. What did you notice in yourself and your team? How was the energy different? Share with me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz.
