🌿The Grove Journals #25

The Day I Stopped Handing My Magic Away

On the reverse engineering lesson I used to teach everyone else — and the Sunday morning I finally turned it on myself.

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I have a teaching I used to give to other authors. I called it reverse engineering.

The idea is simple: instead of staring at the gap between where you are and where you want to be — which is paralyzing, always — you start at the end.

You close your eyes and picture yourself already living the dream. Not the polished, Instagram-caption version. The real, specific, unglamorous, ordinary version. The random-Tuesday version.

Then you trace backward. What had to happen right before that moment? And before that? And before that? You keep going until you arrive at something you can do today. This week. This hour.

I taught that framework to dozens of writers. I watched people light up with it. I helped authors use it to map their way from “someday” to “here’s my plan for Tuesday.”

I gave it away freely and completely forgot to use it myself recently.

A dream without a concrete plan is just that. A dream.

That was the lesson I wrote down this week. Not from a book or a podcast or a mentor. From my own life. From watching what happens when you have vision, and passion, and genuine talent, — and absolutely no roadmap — and from finally getting tired of that particular flavor of stuck.

🔒From the Den is below — for paid subscribers. This is where I get bear-bones honest about what the roadmap actually looks like, what the real numbers are, and what it feels like to finally turn the teaching toward yourself.