Engineers of Change
Start with an Outcome and Work Backwards
An engineer’s purpose is to change outcomes. Whether she is changing the outcome her personal life, of a business, or the world.
I always start with the outcome and reverse engineer, slowly the plan starts to emerge. Not all of it, but some of it. As I solves one piece the other pieces will reveal itself.
When I use the word ‘engineer’ I don’t mean just people who are software engineers. I mean practitioners, people who actually walk the walk. I classify anyone who can produce solutions for any problem as an engineer, whether they can make music, films, design a web-site, build rockets, electric cars, or even provide some kind of service people want to pay for. Here is the definition of an engineer on Google.
noun. A skillful contriver or originator of something.
One may think of engineer in the traditional sense but the fact is, engineering skills apply to almost every aspect of life. If you apply the concepts to life, you have the ability to change things beyond your imagination.
Engineers are natural problem solvers. Its what we do everyday. When we’re given problem. We break the problem into smaller problems and then we solve them. One after another. We apply what we know, and if we don’t know something, we learn, then we solve.
Once I understood this it became clear to me that I was only limited by my vision. If I can imagine an outcome and not be afraid of what was in my head, I can solve everything between me and the net result I want. Provided I applied the same concept. Others have done it.
Nolan Bushnell wanted to build games that were ‘easy to learn and difficult to master’ that you could play on your TV so he built ATARI.
Bill Gates wanted to put a personal computer on every desk. So he built Microsoft.
Steve Jobs wanted to challenge the status quo. In his life time, he changed the personal computer industry, mobile phone industry and the music industry.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to make the world’s information accessible so they built the largest search engine in the world.
Linus Torvald wanted an open-source OS so he built Linux, and along the way he wanted a better way to manage code so he built Git.
David Heinemeier Hansson didn’t like the existing web frameworks at the time he was building his product so he built one. Today it’s the most sought after technology in the industry. Other languages and frameworks are ‘learning’ from his framework.
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim wanted people to be able to film themselves and share it with the world so they made YouTube.
Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett believe in a better way to collaborate on code so they built github.
Gary Vaynerchuk wants to buy the New York Jets, so he made videos on youtube to change the outcome of his businesses.
Elon Musk wants to put people on mars and build the best cars in the world so he started Space X and Tesla.
And the list goes on. What these people have in common is they turned what was in their head into physical tangible things, that had a net positive effect on people’s lives. I call them ‘Engineers of Change’ also known as ‘Entrepreneurs’.
Make no mistake these people didn’t change outcomes overnight. They persevered. Along the way people called them names, said they were going to fail, but it didn’t matter. They knew what was in their head was too complex for most people to understand. They dedicated their lives to their outcome and the net result they wanted. Every action they took, revolved around their plan to make what was in their head into something real.
I am lucky to be born in this era. The era of the self-made. I now have tools that amplify my body, mind and soul. They’ve made what was practically impossible a decade ago, now inevitable. I have no excuse not to build my vision of the future.
