Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Kenneth O. Stanley & Joel Lehman
The Myth of the Objective
The Book in Three Sentences
Objectives are well and good when they are sufficiently modest, but things get more complicated when they’re more ambitious. In fact, objectives actually become obstacles towards more exciting achievements, like those involving discovery, creativity, invention or innovation. Therefore, the best way to achieve greatness, the truest path to “blue sky” discovery or to fulfill boundless ambition is to have no objective at all.
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned Summary
This is my book summary of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Kenneth O. Stanley & Joel Lehman. My notes contain best quotes from the book and the key lessons in my view.
Table of Contents
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Questioning Objectives
It’s interesting that we rarely talk about the dominance of objectives in our culture even though they impact us from the very beginning of life. It starts when we’re barely more than a toddler.
We assume that any worthy social accomplishment is best achieved by first setting it as an objective and then pursuing it together with conviction. It makes you wonder, is there such a thing as accomplishment without objectives?
Though often unspoken, a common assumption is that the very act of setting an objective creates possibility. The very fact that you put your mind to it is what makes it possible. And once you create the possibility, it’s only a matter of time before you succeed.
This can-do philosophy sounds good on the face of it, but what it leads isn’t always so comforting - legions of measurements, assessments, metrics - woven into every aspect of our lives.
It’s like we’ve become slaves to our objectives, toiling away towards impossible perfection.
Objectives might sometimes provide meaning or direction, but they also limit our freedom and become straightjackets around our desire to explore. So, objectives do come with a cost.
We believe that human achievement has no limits. It’s just that we’re going to highlight a different path to achievement, without the need for objectives.
There’s a lot our culture has sacrificed in the name of objectives, and we’re going to take it back. They’ve stolen our freedom to explore creatively and blocked us from serendipitous discovery. They ignore the value of following a path for its own uniqueness, rather than for where it may lead.
Sometimes, the best way to change the world is to stop trying to change it—perhaps you’ve noticed that your best ideas are often those you were not seeking.
We’re mainly focused on ambitious objectives—those whose achievement is anything but certain. One of the reasons that objectives aren’t often questioned is that they work perfectly well for more modest pursuits.
Finding Stepping Stones
It’s useful to think of achievement as a process of discovery and creativity as a kind of search.
The nice thing about thinking of discovery in terms of this big room is that we can think of the process of creation as a process of searching through the space of the room.
The only clue to the future is found in the past.
The big question when setting ambitious objectives is always whether we can find a path through this search space from where we currently are to where we want to be in the future—the path to the objective.
You’ll have to search for the right stepping stones, and if you’re lucky enough, you might discover the ones that lead to the objective.
In other words (and here is the paradox), the greatest achievements become less likely when they are made objectives.
The best way to achieve greatness, the truest path to “blue sky” discovery or to fulfill boundless ambition, is to have no objective at all.
The key problem is that the stepping stones that lead to ambitious objectives tend to be pretty strange. That is, they probably aren’t what you would predict if you were thinking only of your objective.
Chances are that if we plan a path based on our objective, then it will miss the stepping stones. This insight raises some troubling questions that relate to the tricky nature of stepping stones:
Do increasing test scores really lead to subject mastery?
Is the key to artificial intelligence really intelligence?
Does taking a job with a higher salary really bring you closer to being a millionaire?
Is cancer going to be cured by an insight from someone who is not a cancer researcher?
Are improvements in television technology bringing us any closer to holographic television?
It often turns out that the measure of success—which tells us whether we are moving in the right direction—is deceptive because it’s blind to the true stepping stones that must be crossed.
It’s not hard to find great ideas that were never objectives for anyone, at least not until almost the moment they were discovered.
Rock and roll music took inspiration from jazz, blues, gospel, and country music. In a way, those genres acted as stepping stones to rock and roll. But no one was trying to discover rock and roll because no one knew it even existed as a possibility.
Ambitious objectives block discovery, and having no objective can lead to the greatest discovery of all.
However, the problem is that it’s hard to simply abandon objectives because they are a powerful security blanket. They give us a sense of purpose and the promise of success if only we try hard enough.
We don’t face a false choice between slavishly following objectives and aimless wandering. Just because you don’t have an objective doesn’t mean you have to be wandering. We can align ourselves towards discovery and away from the trap of preconceived results.
Greatness is possible if you are willing to stop demanding what that greatness should be.
We’ll show you why not only can you trust your gut instinct when it tells you something important is around the corner, but you should trust it, even if you can’t explain what that something is. You don’t need to make up a tortured reason to justify every little impulse you feel:
Do you ever tell yourself that you can’t do something because it’s not justified by a clear purpose?
Do you ever blame yourself when you can’t achieve your highest goals despite your best efforts?
Why do so many of us feel our creativity stifled by the machine-like integration of modern society?
Objectives are a pillar of our culture, but they’re also a prison around our potential. It’s time to break out and discover what’s outside.
Is There Alternative to Objectives?
The great successes, the ones that come crashing out of nowhere and shake up the system, they don’t usually follow a script.
Some people set objectives and completely miss them—all for the better.
Being open and flexible to opportunity is sometimes more important than knowing what you’re trying to do. After all, any path might lead to happiness, even the most unexpected.
The deeper lesson is that focusing too much on your goal can actually prevent you from making useful unexpected discoveries.
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
The common thread in all successful tales is that they successful wander from their original paths, whether those paths were chosen by themselves or others.
Actions such as volunteering, joining clubs and generally making contact with other people and groups are likely to increase your chances of an unplanned experience.
Thus, the search for your dream career suggests that you should embark on a search for possible stepping stones without any particular destination.
One characteristic of great achievers is that they are willing to abandon their original objectives and spring for opportunity when it arises. All it takes is sensing potential in a path.
We often choose hobbies not because of some long-term grandiose plan, but just because we like them. So having no objective leads to at least some personal satisfaction.
If you take one thing from this chapter, perhaps it should be that you have the right to follow your passions
Another important implication is that not everything in life requires an objective justification.
The Problem of the False Compass
If you want to achieve or create something, start working on stepping stones that lead you there. But how can you be sure that the stepping stones actually look anything like your ultimate objective?
In other words, no matter how tempting it is to believe in it, the distant objective cannot guide you to itself—it is the ultimate false compass.
The fundamental problem of search and discovery is that we usually don’t know the stepping stones that lead to the objective at the outset.
It’s perfectly possible that moving closer to the goal actually does not increase the value of the objective function, even if the move brings us closer to the objective.
Collecting stepping stones isn’t like pursuing an objective because most stepping stones don’t lead to somewhere in particular. Rather they are the road to everywhere.
To arrive somewhere remarkable we must be willing to hold many paths open without knowing where they might lead.
Almost no prerequisite to any major invention was invented with that invention in mind.
Great invention is defined by the realization that the prerequisites are in place, laid before us by predecessors with entirely unrelated ambitions, just waiting to be combined and enhanced.
Maybe you want to become rich. Most people who become rich are not pursuing money per se, but they get there probably because they pursued their passion. Passion is what drove them to a point, and then one day they realized that they are only one stepping stone away from being rich.
On the contrary, a single-minded preoccupation with money is likely exactly the wrong road to abundant wealth.
We should be concerned by the disconnect between how the world is supposed to work and the way it really does work.
Purse the Interesting and the Novel
Our preoccupation with objectives is really a preoccupation with the future. Every moment ends up measured against where we want to be in the future.
Are we creeping closer to our goal? Does the assessment confirm that we’re moving forward? The future becomes a distant beacon by which all endeavors are lit. But this beacon is too often deceptive, playing tricks with the light that leads us astray.
What good then is it to compare the present with the idealized future? Let’s try something different and more principled.
We can instead compare to the past, which is a lot easier than the future because we know it - the past already happened.
The past doesn’t tell us about the objective but it does offer a clue to something equally if not more important—the past is a guide to novelty.
Instead of judging our progress towards a goal, the past allows us to judge our liberation from the outdated. Interestingly, the question then changes from what we’re approaching to what we’re escaping. And the exciting thing about the past is that it opens new possibilities.
Novelty can often act as a stepping stone detector because anything novel is a potential stepping stone to something even more novel.
Novelty is a rough shortcut for identifying interestingness: Interesting ideas are those that open up new possibilities. And while it might sound wishy-washy to go looking for “interesting” things, interestingness is a surprisingly deep and important concept.
Instead of seeking a final objective, by looking for novelty the reward is an endless chain of stepping stones branching out into the future as leads to further novelty. Rather than thinking of the future as a destination, it becomes a road, a path of undefined potential.
Objectives mean sailing to a distant destination with an unknown path while novelty requires only steering away from where we’ve been already.
Deviating from the past is simpler and richer with information because we can look at the whole history of past discoveries to inform our judgement of current novelty.
This myth of serendipity is that serendipity is an accident. The reality is we humans have a nose for the interesting. We understand that if we take the interesting path, it may yet lead somewhere important, even though we might not know where.
Behind any serendipitous discovery there’s nearly always an open-minded thinker with a strong gut feeling for what plan will yield the most interesting results.
Searching for novelty seems to lack practical constraints, which might mean wasting a lot of time meandering through a space of meaningless possibilities.
But we don’t need the constraint of the objective to avoid meaninglessness: The world provides its own constraints.
The behaviors that really become stepping stones to further behaviors are the ones that respect how the world actually works.
Objectives by their nature cause a search process to converge—towards the objective. And convergence means that many potentially interesting directions will not be explored.
However, without the burden of the objective the search is free to branch in many directions and thereby diverge while collecting new stepping stones along the way.
While divergence abandons the comfort of only probing in one predetermined direction, it is no coincidence that the term divergent thinking is associated with creativity and innovation.
It is for the very reason that divergent thinkers do not become trapped in a stale corner of the search space that they are known for fearless and surprising discoveries that other tend to miss.
Novelty search is not a solution to all our problems—even though it might sometimes work better than pursuing a particular objective.
Ambitious goals can’t reliably be achieved by trying—unless they are one stepping stone away, where they come within reach.
Become a Treasure Hunter
The alternative to objective deception is the treasure hunter. And the treasure hunter is about collecting stepping stones.
All of us have an uncanny instinct for sniffing potential wherever it might lead.
The answer is to become the treasure hunter. Out in the vast wilderness of the unknown are countless treasures buried deep in unmarked locations.
So if you want to be a treasure hunter without a specific objective, then there is a special kind of clue—when something feels interesting.
Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally. - David Frost
Contrary to popular belief, great inventors don’t peer into the distant future. A false visionary might try to look past the horizon, but a true innovator looks nearby for the next stepping stone. The successful inventor asks where we can get from here rather than how we can get there.
Letting go of objectives is also difficult because it means letting go of the idea that there’s a right path. When there’s no destination there can’t be a right path.
Judgmentalism is the natural habitat of the objective-seeker, always worried about where everyone else will end up. But we are all better off in the end if we end up at different places. That’s why we need to beware of the seduction of consensus.
Conclusion
So if you’re wondering how to escape the myth of the objective, just do things because they’re interesting.
Not everything needs to be guided by rigid objectives. If you have a strong feeling, go with it. If you don’t have a clear objective, then you can’t be wrong, because wherever you end up is okay.
Assessment only goes so far. A great achievement is one that leads to more great achievements. If you set out to program computers but you’re now making movies, you’re probably doing something right. If you wanted to create AI but you’re now evolving pictures, you’re probably doing something right.
If you imagined yourself painting but you’re now writing poetry, you’re probably doing something right. If the path you’re on does not resemble where you thought you’d be, you’re probably doing something right.
In the long run, stepping stones lead to other stepping stones and eventually to great discoveries.