I’ve been wanting to write this paper for decades now. This blog centers on probably the most asked question I get in my life: “How did you solve that problem?” Or, “how did you accomplish what seems impossible?” Or, “how did you get to where you are in life?” These questions most likely come because the path doesn’t seem so clear. I’m writing today about a goal accomplishment method I created, called the “Butterfly Principle”. I refer to this process a lot, and I will continue to in many other writing and interviews, because it is really a concept on how I solve problems, accomplish goals, and create opportunities. Let’s dive in.
Most of my adult life, I’ve been using the Butterfly Principle in order to accomplish objectives at work, goals at home and in my personal life, and things for others. Oftentimes, these accomplishments have seemed impossible — almost outlandish – but nevertheless, I’ve been able to accomplish them. After I accomplish these goals, I often get the question: “How?”
The Butterfly Principle is named after the Butterfly Effect, a theory you have most likely heard of. The Butterfly Effect basically states that if a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, the effects of that ultimately can be a hurricane in another part of the world. It is a model for cause and effect, using a dramatic example. The butterfly flaps its wings – it creates some motion – that motion continues to create change – and the changing energy evolves until it reaches the other side of the world, where that initial flap has now turned into a hurricane.
The Butterfly Principle is about examining the Butterfly Effect – but backwards. Instead of starting at the beginning where a butterfly flaps its wings, you start at the end, at the result – the hurricane. The Principle asks: How did we get to the hurricane? How do we find the first step in that process, all the way back to the beginning when the butterfly flapped its wings? The Butterfly Principle creates a backwards step-by-step process that illustrates how an end goal is linked to a starting point.
I’m going to be taking you through this with a real world example where I used my Butterfly Principle to accomplish a huge life goal. My hope in sharing this with you, is to give you a process to achieve your goals.
This is an example of a goal I had when I was a teenager in the military. My goal was to work in the sport of NASCAR. In fact, I didn’t just want to work in the sport – I wanted to be the Head Mechanic on a top auto racing team. And, I wanted to be one of the people on the Pit Crew who goes over the wall to perform the pit stop. I had zero NASCAR experience. I knew nothing about being a mechanic. I knew no one in the sport. So the question was, where do I start?
For more background: I was in the Navy at the time. In fact, I remember I was somewhere in the Persian Gulf during the Desert Storm, and I distinctly remember seeing a NASCAR race for the first time on Armed Forces Network (basically a TV network run by the military). I saw what these racing teams were doing – and I was mesmerized by what seemed to be like a choreographed ballet of people going over the wall, changing tires, and doing it in just seconds. It seemed impossible. And that day, I set my goal: one day I would be on a top NASCAR team.
It felt like an impossibly long way to go, from being 18 or 19 years old at the time, being half a world away, fighting in a war, having never even worked on a car before. But it was what I wanted to accomplish. I had set my end goal.
So then, using what I’ve now coined the Butterfly Principle, I worked backwards from my end goal. I determined what the step right before the end goal was, and the step before that, and the step before that, etc. I knew I needed to get to the very first step, to be able to take action. Because isn’t that one of the hardest problems we as humans have? If we have a goal we want to achieve, the question usually is, “How do we start? When do we start? If we have a misstart, do we give up? How do we start again?”
I’ve found the Butterfly Principle solves these questions and sets us up for success.
If my end goal was joining a top NASCAR team and being the Head Mechanic, and a Pit Crew member, the goal before that would be to get an interview with a team.
So how would I get that interview? I started thinking about what all the skills would be that I’d have to know, to even get an interview for a job on a NASCAR team. And then I had to break those steps down. I might have to know how to build an engine (spoiler alert – I did not have to know how to build an engine). I still learned how to build an engine – and that’s OK. Sometimes in the Butterfly Principle, we map out steps backwards that we take, but those steps don’t end up being critical to the goal. In retrospect, we don’t end up “using” them. It is tempting to say, “that was a waste of time”… but that’s not true. First of all, learning a skill is never a waste of time. And second of all, it is impossible to know the trajectory of your life, and when exactly a skill might help at a moment in time to grab an opportunity. There is no wasted time in any learning or personal development. Remember and live that!
Getting back to our Butterfly Principle example…
As I broke down the goals working backwards, I mapped out each goal. Maybe I needed to know how to weld. Maybe I needed to know metal fabrication. I certainly needed to learn skills to be a Pit Crew member. How do you use an air gun to change a tire? How do you jack up the car? How do you run around a car so fast? How do you become so coordinated? How do you perform all of these tasks under pressure?
As I continued to work backwards, documenting each step, I finally landed on where I needed to start; my goal for today. The first step was that I needed to help someone at the most introductory level, in local racing, who had to work on their car directly, to get baseline experience.
When I came back from the Gulf War, to my military base in San Diego, I found a local racer at a local track who needed help. The local track racers all need help. They don’t have the money to pay pit crews — they just are looking to have fun on a Saturday night, and they need volunteers to help with their car.
So I volunteered. I knew absolutely nothing about anything that I was getting myself into, except I knew where I wanted to go, I knew the end goal. And because I had worked it backwards, I knew everything I had to accomplish to get there along the way .
At that local level, I learned things like building an engine, working on a pit crew, and I learned the vernacular of racing.
After that, the next step up was to find a regional race team to help. When I had written down my backward steps with the Butterfly Principle, this step of working on a regional team was the halfway point to the largest goal. At this point, I’d learned applicable skills at the local team, and I’d taught myself more (things like welding, and a lot of reading auto mechanic books, as there wasn’t a lot online back then – this was the early 90s). I kept my eyes open, and ultimately found an opportunity where a regional team needed help. And I had just enough skills, I had just enough vernacular, I had done just enough, that they took me on. What once seemed impossible was starting to shape into reality. I could now start to see the end goal in sight, and there is nothing more you need for motivation than to have your goal within your grasp. But, there was still a lot to get done, a lot of training, a lot of learning, and waiting for that next opportunity to come.
The time on that regional team helped me really hone my skills. The races were longer. The cars were more complicated. I started to train on pit crews with other pit crew professionals. Being successful in a pit crew took a lot of eye-hand coordination, and I realized that could come from different types of training – not just at the race track. I spent a lot of time in the gym, improving my general athleticism. I trained, and I trained, and I trained.
The next step to the end goal was to get discovered by a bigger team – an actual NASCAR team on a lower circuit. There are multi-tiered circuits in NASCAR, ultimately with the top known as the Cup level (what you think of on national TV).
I knew I needed to get some exposure to these national NASCAR teams. And so I researched and found a pit crew school that NASCAR held for fans. The school was not to become a professional – it was held so fans could pay to experience what it is like to be an actual pit crew member. But it was to be held at Charlotte Motor Speedway, which is one of the bigger and more well-known tracks in NASCAR, and it was going to be held by real pit crew members. So what better chance to interact with real pit crew members, and begin to form relationships that might be fruitful in the future?
And without going into the story on how it all evolved, I was able to meet the Crew Chief of a very famous racecar driver, and their associated lower circuit team pit crew members in that school. We struck up a conversation, and that conversation became a relationship, and that relationship ultimately turned into an opportunity. That Crew Chief called me one day, and said they needed help changing tires in a NASCAR regional race, because their tire changer had unexpectedly fallen ill.
Now remember, I was still in the military at the time – but I was able to get permission to leave the base that weekend, and I flew up to Sonoma Raceway in Northern California. I was going to be in my first major race with a National NASCAR Touring team.
That day I got to go over the wall, change tires on the pit crew, and use all of my training from the past year. The opportunity had come and I was able to seize on it. Was it luck? I believe we put ourselves in a position to take advantage of an opportunity, thus creating our own luck.
On our last pit stop, with my adrenaline pumping, I went over the wall to change tires. During the stop my air gun broke, and my instinct was to instantly jump back over the wall, grab a spare gun, and finish the job. Even the TV announcer said “where did he go”. That fast thinking, those instincts from training, saved valuable time on the pit stop, and guess what, we won. Imagine that — my first major experience out, and with all the pressure associated with that – and we won the race!
Winning that race opened the door for the next opportunity. My time in the military was ending, and that Crew Chief soon had a place for me to join that NASCAR team. This led to additional new opportunities, and eventually my participation in the NASCAR Cup level – where I spent 7 amazing years at the top of the sport, as a head mechanic and member of the pit crew. From that day floating in the Persian Gulf to being on a top NASCAR team had come to a reality.
The realization here is that I was able to reach my “impossible” goal using the Butterfly Principle. And I continue to use the Principle for other, new goals in my life, always tackling the impossible by working the problem backwards. For the last two decades, it has led me to solve some of the biggest and most challenging problems in the world with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
To anyone who has a goal that feels impossible… but who doesn’t know where to start, and doesn’t know how to get there… I say – start at the end! Start at the finish line. And just imagine one small step right before that finish line. And then the situation right before that step, and then the thing that has to happen right before that.
Sometimes for a personal goal – like running a marathon – you’ll have 10 steps worked backwards. But for some end goals – like an industry-shifting entrepreneurial idea – you might have hundreds of steps from the end to find the start. But regardless, the process is the same.
And when you get to the end – really, the beginning… that is your first step. That is the thing you can do right now, today. Many people will still say, “but that trajectory seems impossible”. And my statement to them is that it isn’t impossible – by definition, you just wrote every single step on how to get there — so you already know how to get there. What are you waiting for? Define your goals and GET GOING.