How You Can Reverse Engineer Your Career

You probably already know this, but there is no one way to succeed in Hollywood.

Everybody has their own story, their own steps, their own specifics that got them to where they are. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything from them. Dreams tend to feel out of reach until there are tangible steps to take, so we need something to grasp to help us move forward.

While everyone’s stories are different, there are steps that most people take for every dream. I call this the Foundational Ladder. It’s a way to reverse engineer what you want, so you at least have somewhere to start. This foundational ladder will not be the only steps you take, but your intuition, your relationships, and your skills can show you those steps in between.

What Would Have To Happen?

Jack Canfield has a great exercise that I lovingly call WWHH, which stands for What Would Have to Happen? It’s a question you can ask to build your dream ladder. We start by working backward to figure out the steps you need to take.

Start by drawing a rectangle on the top of a piece of paper (see example below). Inside that rectangle, write the dream you’re working towards right now. For an example, I’ll go with “Win An Oscar.”

Next, we will work backward by asking, “What would have to happen [to win an Oscar]?” We’re looking for the very last thing that would happen right before your dream. So, in this example, the very last thing that would have to happen before winning an Oscar would be to be nominated for the Oscar. (We could say there are steps between being nominated and winning, such as marketing and getting the word out so the Academy will vote for you, but we’re looking for the broader strokes here.) So I’d write “Be nominated” in the second rectangle below the Oscar. Then we’d ask the question again: “What would have to happen [to be nominated]?” What’s the very last thing that would have to happen in order to get to this step? For this example, I’d say: Work on an Oscar-worthy film.

We keep asking this question and working our way down the ladder. As you’ll see in the example, you may have more than one item for each step, and in that case, you can split the ladder level into two or three boxes. What you’ll notice is that we are reverse engineering your dream. We’re working backward to figure out what needs to happen. Every success can be reverse engineered when you take luck out of the equation. I want you to remember that. Every success can be reverse engineered.

If you’re having trouble filling in your ladder and are unsure what your steps are, ask someone. Google it. Research. Remember: you are solution-oriented. It’s easy to say, “I don’t know” and then give up. Solutions are all around you, and it’s as simple as a Google search. Once you have your ladder, I want you to take a look at it and repeat a 3-year-old from one of my favorite tweets (by @jendziura): “That’s just 4 things.” Okay, maybe my example is about 6 things, but the point is, you are only a few steps away from that dream you thought was so out of reach! That’s worth doing a little dance.

There is no one way to achieve your dreams

So now you’ve got this foundational strategy. These are the main steps that you can work towards. But remember when I said there is no one way to achieve your dream? That’s because it’s going to take magic in between these steps. And your magic may look very different from someone else’s. With my example, how you get the agent, or how you make the connections, or how you get noticed… have a million different ways they could play out. Oh, and the fun part: you could even skip steps!

My cousin directed a movie that received four Oscar nominations, and one of them was for Best Actress for the leading girl who was only 9 years old at the time of nomination. She was pulled from obscurity in Louisiana, had never acted professionally before, booked the film, and was nominated for an Oscar. Like, holy magic! Now, you could go, “Ohh okay, great. I’ll move to Louisiana and just live my life, hoping that a film comes to town looking for me.” But that’s just crazy pants. That was Quvenzhané Wallis’ story. Not yours.

When we try to replicate other people’s magic, it takes us out of the running for our own. So while we can reverse engineer the basic steps, the magic has to be unique to us.

Try this out for your Hollywood dream. Your foundational ladder will help your mind believe that your dream is reachable. And once your mind gets on board, there is nothing you can’t achieve.

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