Instead of forcing yourself to come up with ideas, start by writing a press release from the future
Our habit of planning something is almost always to move forward from “now”: making a to-do list and thinking about the first, second and third steps. The list gets longer and longer, and the person becomes more anxious as the list goes on. In the end, the thing just sits silently on the list, never to be opened again.
Amazon does the other way around. They had a counterintuitive rule: before starting to develop a product, write the press release for the day the product was successfully launched. Bezos asked the team to answer the hardest and most important question from the customer’s perspective: So what? What does it mean to me?
This method is called “Working Backwards”. First write down the end point clearly, what success looks like, who will benefit from it, how they will describe it to their friends, and then look back at what to do today. Amazon’s Kindle, logistics, and even cloud services are all preceded by a press release that has not yet come true, and then later products.
I think this idea is particularly useful for a creator who is hesitant to start, an office worker who wants to do a side project, or a one-person company preparing to launch its first product. So I made it into a free little tool and put it in my AI lab.
How it works
Open the Future Press Release Generator and you’ll be taken through a few steps: Pick a day in the future, give it a name, figure out who it’s for, what they’re stuck with now, and what it’s getting them out of. When writing, I will remind you to use the “Oprah tone”: it is not a terminology written for peers, but words that are spoken to an ordinary person and make his eyes light up.
After filling it out, the tool will help you put it together into a formatted press release, as if the day has arrived and everything has come true.
On top of Amazon’s original method, I added three of my own ingenuities:
First, future dates are instantly converted into countdown days. Amazon insists that press releases must be dated because it forces you to face “when is it going to be fulfilled?” I turned this date into “how many days are left until this day” and turned the abstract future into pressure you can see.
Second, PR-FAQ, let go of your doubts first. When Amazon writes a press release, it pairs it with a Q&A that answers the toughest questions first. I ask you to honestly write down your biggest doubts now, such as “I’m afraid I’ll give up after writing for a while”, and then give it to AI together.
Third, after output, an AI prompt for “reverse work” will be attached. Paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, and it will take you through the entire press release, from the successful end point, back to today’s key milestones, and the first step that can be taken this week, and honestly tell you which sentence is most likely to be your wishful thinking and should be verified first. You decide the direction, AI is only responsible for helping you find the way.
After writing, post it
This time I specially added a sharing function. Your future press releases can be output into three forms with one click: save as Markdown and collect notes, print as PDF, or make a beautiful picture card with FB and IG in the square form, and IG restrictions and Threads in the straight form.
I would suggest you, actually post it. A vision that only you can see is easy to give up silently; but when you say “I want to do something on a certain day” in public and a group of people are watching, you have the added constraint of not wanting to break your promise to others. Posting future press releases is a minimum-cost public commitment.
This is actually the most important thing to practice in the AI era
When AI drives execution costs close to zero, what is truly scarce is no longer the ability to get things done, but the judgment to know where to go. This is exactly what you practice in reverse working: think about the end point first, and then the AI will know where to take you. You are responsible for setting the direction, and it is responsible for finding the way.
So this tool not only helps you write a good-looking manuscript, but also forces you to think clearly about “what success looks like” before doing it.
Go write one now
This tool is completely free and can be used immediately after opening without logging in: Future Press Release Generator.
If you also want to use every AI tool I develop later, please subscribe to Vista AI Inspiration Supply Station.
And if you don’t just want to write a good copy, you want to upgrade AI from a question-and-answer tool to a content production system that will help you research, write, and distribute. That is exactly what I will lead you to build in the AI Content Production System Workshop.
Stop starting with an anxious to-do list. First write a press release from the future, see the end point clearly, and then work backwards to today.
