A Letter from Chris Suarez
START WITH THE END IN MIND
Last week I spent a day at our beach house with the family. I am a creature of habit and routine. I start my morning with a run. I come back and take the dog out to the beach. I blend the same vegetables every morning that I am there for my smoothie. I have a shelf of books there that I read in the afternoon. And there is always a puzzle on the coffee table that the family gravitates to in the evening. Now, I don’t specifically love puzzles. I may not have the patience for them. But I love what they represent. The four of us around the table, searching for the right piece, laughing about nothing, complaining about how ridiculous the puzzle might be, or perhaps having a deeper discussion that comes up purely because we are all together.
This particular evening no one was super excited about the puzzle. It was just over the top difficult. It was a 3000 piece puzzle of the streets of New York. All black and white with a few splashes of taxi-cab yellow. It’s been on the table for the last few trips and I realized we weren’t making much progress. I picked up the box top and studied it. With a bit of impatience I looked down at the few thousand pieces - an almost comical sea of seemingly identical shapes. I decided there must be a life lesson in there somewhere.
We often hear the expression “start with the end in mind.” Every puzzle is built off of this philosophy. We look at the picture on the top of the box, and start picking up pieces with that end picture in mind. There isn’t a doubt as to what we want the end result to be. We are creating this clear picture literally piece by piece.
Once the group opens the box and dumps out the pieces, we find ourselves constantly going back to the top of the box to be reminded of what the picture looks like. It is constantly there so we can build off. “Pass me the box” or “Let me see the box” is heard countless times throughout the night. Why? Because it is constant assurance that we are moving in the right direction. It reminds us what the end result will look like. It informs us of what puzzle piece we need to find next.
“Starting with the end in mind” in our business or life is no different. It allows us to paint the picture of what each area of our business and life looks like before we begin piecing it together. This is wildly valuable advice as it pushes us to be very clear as to what we want to accomplish, what we want to build, what we want our world to look like. We start with that picture or vision. The clearer it is in our mind, the easier it is to work towards.
A word of caution. It’s impossible to put the entire puzzle together at once. You may have to work on one part of it at a time. Focus on the edges. Find a particular color to focus on. Piece together a very distinct or clear section that stands out from the big picture. At times you just need to find one piece at a time. Connect one piece to another piece to another piece.
Many of us want to know every step we are going to take in advance of taking it. In puzzles and in business and in life, that just isn’t possible. Just start with the end in mind. Hold that picture up in your head along the way as a reminder of where we are going and as a comparison to where we are. It’s the picture on the box of that puzzle. It’s there to remind us of what we want our business to look like. What we want our life to look like. After all, both of those are just puzzles to be built - piece by piece.
Chris