Reverse Engineering Success

Tip Of The Day — Day 7

This is part of a series of daily tips for writers which is published to share ideas and suggestions on our craft. Everyone will have different advice on how to write, so the tip below is just a personal selection which I hope you will find useful, and do share any of your own in the comments. I hope you find it useful.

Reverse engineering is the concept of taking a successful product and working out all the steps that went into making it a success.

It doesn’t matter what the product is. It could be a genius design such as the iPhone, a Tesla, the performance of a top sportsperson, a great speaker, any high achiever, and of course of particular interest to us on Medium, a successful writer.

One of the reasons that so many of us follow those who are successful, is that we may wish to learn what got them to that position, to copy and emulate them.

I always find it fascinating to read biographies or autobiographies of those I admire, to see the environment which shaped them, to understand what makes them tick, and what motivates them, and gives them the drive to complete a task.

For example the celebrity survivalist Bear Grylls has a motto:

“courage, kindness and never give up”.

Refusing to give up or admit defeat is a consistent feature of success.

It is widely quoted thatThomas Edison made hundreds of failed attempts before he got a lightbulb to work. Similarly Elon Musk came close to bankruptcy numerous times, taking risks with levels of debut most of us (perhaps sensibly) would have shied away from.

For more about reverse engineering, this article may be of interest.

Applying reverse engineering to writing

Consider in advance why you are writing, what you want the article to achieve, and who it is for, then you can “reverse engineer”, and structure your writing accordingly to meet these goals. Then you can break the process down into the stepping stones needed to get to your goal — a successful, viral article. Breaking a task down into small steps makes a challenging task manageable.

There are numerous writers on Medium offering advice on how to make a financial success of the platform, including Asad Educate, The Professor of Medium (Jason Provencio), and Robin Wilding to name but a few.

Some of the most frequent advice will be covered in this series, including building blocks such as using gripping headlines, writing consistently high quality articles, collaborating with other writers, and learning from the best writers.

So reverse engineering is a valuable concept for us all as writers in putting these blocks together in the most effective way.

I hope you found this article useful, and do share any tips of your own in the comments.

Previous tips:

Day 1- The Notebook

Day 2 — Mind your language — learning new words

Day 3 –Quotations

Day 4 — Dictionary and thesaurus —

Day 5 — Location —

Day 6 — Planning —