It’s not finding your inner strength or practicing for 10,000 hours. 

It’s something much simpler.

Most people have never heard it. But when you try it for yourself, you’ll see just how easy it can be to set ambitious goals, and actually achieve them.

So what’s the secret? 

It’s learning to reverse engineer.

It’s the process of studying the best work by the best people in any given field, then working backwards to understand how they succeeded.

To reverse engineer is to look beyond what is evident on the surface and find a hidden structure—one that reveals both how an object was designed and, more important, how it can be recreated. 

My new book, Decoding Greatness, digs into the principles of reverse engineering, shows how top performers use it, and offers simple techniques that you can use to apply it to master your field.