Nirvana Exercise

(I learned the Nirvana Exercise from Rob Mee.)

In the Nirvana Exercise, you imagine the perfect outcome. If costs, time, and constraints didn’t exist, what would be ideal?

Practical risks and current pressures can produce myopia, letting present tides dictate your actions. The Nirvana Exercise is conscious permission to ignore those limitations and focus on the essential and the strategic.

Sometimes the exercise is hard to do. That’s valuable information. If you can’t picture the ideal state, it often indicates strategic uncertainty - maybe even the absence of clear intentions and goals. That’s worth knowing, because it means current efforts might be wasteful or ill-directed. (Unless those efforts are exploratory, pursued because a previous Nirvana exercise revealed “we don’t know what we’re doing or why.”)

Armed with the picture from the exercise, you work backwards to build a plan that either (a) approximates Nirvana or (b) reaches a milestone on the path to it.

The scenario described by a Nirvana exercise frequently helps establish North Stars.

This isn’t a first-principles exercise - that’s a how activity (reverse engineering or solution development). But if viewing it as a first-principles exercise helps, focus on what, not how.