Do you know the best way to solve a maze? You probably do. But what is its relation to our goals in life? Let us find out.

When I was young, I solved maze puzzles beginning from the START. If I was fortunate, I get to solve the maze in one shot. But more often than not, I do not. I have to try several times to be able to find the correct and only way out of the maze, to get to the END.

And then I got the idea of starting the maze from the END (I assume most of us did…). And of course, I was able to solve the maze quicker! Though sometimes I do not solve it once due to the complexity of the maze, the probability of me solving the puzzle is much much higher than starting from the START! I felt like was a maze expert.

So now how do you relate this to your goals in life? I’m going to tell you a short story. When I was in college, I took up computer science. This course had a lot of subjects that dealt with mathematics and topics that would pop your brains out. Nonetheless, I had to study them to pass the course. Since I had to study them, I might as well study it good and hard. Make proper use of the time spent studying.

Now, I had a classmate who studies just as hard. This classmate of mine was good. However, I was really surprised when she said that she had no idea what and how to use the things we learned in computer science in real life. She knew how to solve the test, exams and problems in paper but she had no idea how to relate them to the things in life. My point is (this is just a side point…), we have to learn to relate the things we learn in one aspect to another aspect of life.

So back to my main point, what is the relationship between a maze and goals? It is how we solve and achieve them. Just as it is much better and mathematically correct to start from the END to solve a maze, the best way to achieve our goals is starting from the goal itself and work our way backwards.

Let us take an example. Let us say you want to make money online. You want to earn passive income thru the power of the internet. You heard that there is a growing number of people doing this and they are doing so by Adsense and affiliate marketing. So you say to yourself, “Ah! All I have to do is put up a site, splash some Adsense and affiliate code and that’s it! I’ll be living the DOT COM lifestyle”.

Days, weeks and months go by and all you are earning is just measly cents and you give up. You ‘discern’ that the DOT COM lifestyle is just a dream. But what if you started from your goal and worked backwards? What if you started with a goal of say earning $10/month (let’s fix 1 month to be equal 28 days). That is small, but for the sake of an example, let us take that. Say you know that the average CTR(Click Thru Rate) in Adsense is 3%, meaning for every 100 visitors, you get 3 clicks. Say again that each click is worth $0.50 (I am using fixed values here for the sake of simplicity…).

Let us break this down to small simple steps. To earn $10/month means earning around $0.37/day. To get $0.50, you need at least 33 visitors (given the 3% CTR – Click Through Rate). If you do some math, we would come up with 24 visitors. Yes, we need 24 visitors to our site per day to be able to earn $10/month. And all you have to do is bring in 24 visitors to your site. The quality of your visitors coming to your site is another story and another goal to achieve.

This mini lesson does not just relate to making money, it can and should be used in every way possible especially when setting goals. Learn from it and stop shooting arrows blindly at your target.

Don’t start from the START but start from the END to get to the END.

Make sure to check out the site for more related information about Mazes and Your Goals in Life .

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