Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

The Myth of The Objective might very well be worth writing an entire post about and dedicating a lot of time to. I have read a whole bunch of books so far this year but the only one that I keep coming back to is this tiny volume.

The book is short enough that you can read it in an afternoon, and it is of a philosophical nature and not a technical nature despite being part of the Springer imprint. The reason I even picked it up was because of how odd the title looked on a Springer book.

It really got me thinking about the way I structure my own life and the types of goals that I have. The central thesis of the book is roughly that adaption and evolutionary processes often have a very roundabout way of operating that doesn’t work with a specific end goal in mind.

This might be pretty straightforward to say, but the way it is said by this book is very elegant in a way that I’ve never thought about before.

The greatest achievements are not really done via a straight common sense linear progression towards some goal. Often progress toward some goal in particular does not look like progress toward that goal, but appears to the outside observer totally unrelated.

The authors have this concept of “interestingness” and the idea that we should simply look toward things that are interesting rather than what seems to be working toward a specific goalset.

They use a ton of parallels to real life historical and technological progression. The end point they come to is the title that you can’t have this goal oriented behavior in meaningful or novel breakthroughs. It just isn’t ever the case for these kinds of longer-term goals.