The Death of Goals

I’ve suspected for years that the traditional concept of “goal-setting” was on its last legs. 

Every time I bring up “SMART goals,” I can see the light go out in my students’ eyes. An unmistakable feeling of dread and aversion fills the room, and the decline in energy and enthusiasm is palpable. They know they should set goals that way, but they don’t want to.

The SMART framework was developed 44 years ago by a director of corporate planning at an electric and natural gas utility – not exactly a paragon of modern business in the information age.

I knew traditional goals were an outdated relic of a bygone era, but I hadn’t figured out what to replace them with. After all, they seem like such a load-bearing pillar of modern society: you set an objective, you make a plan, and then you follow the steps to get there. 

What other approach could there even be?

I recently came across a book that proposes an intriguing answer, one that I’m confident is much better suited to our more unpredictable, dynamic world. It is based on extensive research in the field of Artificial Intelligence but its lessons apply broadly to any domain. 

It’s called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, by Kenneth O. O. Stanley and Joel Lehman. In this piece, I’ll summarize the book’s most interesting and useful points.

The fatal flaw in goal-setting

The concept of “goal-setting” has dominated our thinking about ambition, achievement, and progress for decades. 

It’s akin to a secular article of faith: the unquestionable “right way” to build, invent, discover, innovate, or create anything, from the smallest personal project to the grandest feats of civilization.

There are undoubtedly some advantages to traditional goal-setting, which explain why it’s stuck around for so long: it’s easy to understand, predictable, appeals to common sense, and offers comfort against the harsh uncertainty of reality.

But Stanley and Lehman ask a profound question in their book: What if that traditional approach to goal-setting is hindering progress on many fronts? What if it degrades our creativity, blocks us from serendipitous discovery, and dampens what makes us most interesting and unique?

They note that goal-setting works perfectly fine for modest pursuits. If you’re trying to improve efficiency on a production line by 5%, or finish a kitchen remodel, by all means, set a goal and follow the obvious steps to reach it.

The problem arises when we try to scale up this modest strategy to greater achievements – those that involve true ambition, novel invention, innovative breakthroughs, or pushing the frontier.

These are the kinds of pursuits in which goals lose their power, and can actually become counterproductive and lead you in the opposite direction of progress.

To understand why, it’s helpful to think of achievement not as creating something completely new from scratch, but as searching a space of possibilities.

Imagine yourself walking through a vast hall containing all possible inventions, each one floating in midair like a shimmering possibility. 

As you explore the hall, you start to notice that there is a structure to the space – inventions that are similar to each other are found in the same area, while inventions that are distinct are located far apart from each other. Some parts of the hall are dead-ends, leading nowhere, while others are full of potential, with pathways leading in multiple directions.

Now imagine you’re trying to invent a new kind of computer. The question is, why can’t you just go straight to the “best” computer design in the whole room? Presumably, it would entail a level of performance millions of times beyond our current designs, using technology that is unimaginable to modern science.

Well, when you put it that way, the answer is obvious: you have to proceed through each of the intermediate stages of technology to get to that level. Each invention builds on a previous generation, and you don’t get to skip steps.

Now we can identify what makes our task so challenging: those intermediate steps are not at all predictable. In fact, they often seem bizarre, nonsensical, or completely counter-intuitive until after you’ve taken them.

This isn’t a theoretical example: one of the crucial stepping stones to modern computers in the 1940s was vacuum tubes, which are devices that channel electric current through a vacuum. Yet the potential uses of vacuum tubes were so unexpected that it took over 100 years from their invention until someone realized they could be used in computing.

This might seem like an exceptional example, but it’s closer to the rule:

• The Wright Brothers invented the first airplanes by reusing bicycle technology, a seemingly unrelated stepping stone.
• Microwave technology was first invented for magnetron power tubes that drove military radar, until Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon, noticed it melted a chocolate bar in his pocket.
• In 1879, Constantin Fahlberg, working on coal tar derivatives, accidentally tasted a sweet residue on his hand—leading to the discovery of saccharin, the first artificial sweetener.
• Wilhelm Röntgen was experimenting with cathode rays when he noticed an unknown form of radiation that passed through solid objects, thereby leading to x-rays.
• In 1956, engineer Wilson Greatbatch installed the wrong type of resistor into a heart rhythm recorder circuit, accidentally inventing the modern pacemaker.

For each of these landmark accomplishments, fixating too intently on their original goal would paradoxically have blinded their inventors to the world-changing discoveries lying just outside their expectations.

For the most interesting, exciting, impactful achievements, goals are a false compass, distracting you from the highest potential directions. They induce a narrow tunnel vision, eliminating the serendipitous discovery, unorthodox creativity, and breakthrough innovation that are most valuable.

In other words, the best path through the vast hall of possibilities is not a straight one; it’s a twisty turny wild ride of daring leaps and hairpin pivots that would seem positively crazy to any outside observer.

Professor Amar Bhide presents evidence for this in his book Origin and Evolution of New Businesses: 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.

Other examples from recent history also confirm the pitfalls of goals:

• If you focus too much on raising student test scores, you may end up worsening the quality of their education by encouraging rote memorization.
• If you optimize too much for making as much money as possible and therefore decide to take the highest-paying job, it may lead you away from becoming a millionaire in the long run.
• Fixating too much on reducing alcohol and drug abuse among young people at all costs might inadvertently lead to the abuse of even more dangerous drugs.
• Paying citizens to turn in venomous snakes may lead to them breeding snakes as a money-making endeavor (which happened in British-ruled India).
• Paying executives higher bonuses for higher earnings might lead to short-term profits but a long-term disaster when the firm collapses due to excessive risk-taking.

In all these examples, optimizing a certain measure of success in the short term, which makes it look like you’re moving in the right direction, is in fact leading you away from the long-term objective!

The same principle even applies at the level of individuals and their careers, for example:

• John Grisham first trained and practiced as a criminal defense attorney for ten years. The trigger for his career change was a particular testimony that he overheard one day from a young rape victim. Somehow that testimony made him realize that he should and could write, and he began waking early in the morning before work to gradually complete his first novel, A Time to Kill.
• Harland David “Colonel” Sanders (the founder of KFC) cooked for his family as a six-year-old after his father’s death, but would not make a living out of it until he was 40. In between, he tried his luck at piloting a steamboat, selling insurance, and even farming. But the opportunity for success didn’t arrive until he owned a gas station, where he began cooking chicken for his customers.

Building a great career or business might not qualify as a civilizational-scale achievement, but even at this relatively modest scale, objectives can trick us into settling for the known and the predictable instead of the far grander space of possibilities available to us.

An alternative to aimless wandering

The most common objection to this attack on objectives is that, if we don’t have goals, then we’ll be left to “wander around aimlessly.” 

But this book points out that there is another option – there is a way to intelligently explore a search space without the benefit (or drawbacks) of objectives.

The key, the authors tell us, is to “Loosen your requirements for what exactly you’re going to achieve; in other words, you can achieve something great, as long as you are willing to stop demanding what that greatness should be.”

This is such a radical assertion because it flies in the face of the first (and arguably most important) criterion of SMART goal-setting: to be as specific as possible. The demand for specificity is based on the assumption that you can and should control the outcome and that your control is facilitated by zeroing in on the precise details you envision.

Stanley and Lehman would describe this approach as “trying to drag a preconceived vision of the future into the present,” and as “doomed to fail.” 

Their philosophy is better understood as “treasure-hunting.”

Imagine you are part of a treasure-hunting team searching a remote island for lost pirate treasure. You have no treasure maps, but you do know for certain that the island is littered with lots of buried caches.

Your goal is not to arrive at any specific destination on the island, because again, there is no map and no X marking the spot! So any point you arbitrarily choose is likely to contain nothing. Instead, the better search strategy is to pursue novelty, i.e. to try and find places on the island that you haven’t been to before, or even better, that no one has been to before.

There’s far more likely to be a treasure in that hidden underwater cave that no one has even noticed than in the middle of the largest clearing in the middle of the island. That obvious fact points the way to the authors’ recommendation for what we should be optimizing for instead of goals.

How to succeed in a goal-less world

The elimination of objectives might seem like an intriguing idea at this point, but we need some principle to guide our efforts, don’t we?

The authors make six recommendations for what to do instead of setting goals:

1. Optimize for novelty and interestingness
2. Follow your gut instinct about which direction is most promising
3. Hold your plans lightly and be open to changing direction
4. Pay attention to the past
5. Double down on what makes you unique
6. Collect stepping stones

#1 – Optimize for novelty and interestingness

Stanley and Lehman argue that instead of targeting a specific destination, we should optimize for novelty and interestingness. 

Ideas that are novel and interesting have the tendency to lead to even more novel, even more interesting ideas, in a divergent, branching space of increasing possibilities.

This is deeper than simply trying random things because a novelty-driven search tends to produce behaviors in a certain order: from simple to more complex. This is because as soon as the simple options have been tried, and you keep pursuing novelty, then the only ones left to try are complex!

Eventually, doing something genuinely novel always requires learning about the world, which is why novelty search is inherently about accumulating information (whereas the pursuit of fixed objectives often requires you to ignore new information in service of reaching the goal more efficiently).

As the philosopher Alfred Whitehead put it, “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than it be true.”

#2 – Follow your gut instinct about which direction is most promising

If the structure of the space of possibilities is unpredictable and irrational, that means we have to rely on non-rational means of detecting it: inspiration, elegance, potential to stimulate further creativity, thought-provoking construction, challenge to the status quo, analogy to nature, beauty, simplicity, and imagination, for example.

Our gut – otherwise known as our intuition, instinct, subconscious, or emotions – has access to vastly more information than our conscious minds can consider, which means it can sometimes sense the shape of the network of possibilities in pre-conscious ways.

#3 – Hold your plans lightly and be open to changing direction

A third strategy is to hold your plans lightly and be open to changing directions since we never know when the prerequisites to a breakthrough will fall into place and suddenly make it possible.

Stanley and Lehman write, “To arrive somewhere remarkable we must be willing to hold many paths open without knowing where they might lead.” 

It takes a high degree of open-mindedness to “hold many paths open” in one’s mind without getting overwhelmed or discouraged. It means we have to find a way to explore paths in parallel, or opportunistically, rather than focusing all our resources on one all-important goal, as traditional thinking suggests.

#4 – Pay attention to the past

Fourth, the authors recommend special attention and sensitivity to the past, because the past is what defines what is novel. 

It’s much easier to know what happened in the past, and then escape it, rather than trying to arrive at a specific and unknown future. This might require studying the past, documenting the past, finding out what others have tried and how and why it failed, which goes against modern society’s bias toward the future.

#5 – Double down on what makes you unique

Fifth, a goal-less world frees us to double down on what makes us unique. There is no longer a singular destination that we’re all trying to arrive at, which also means there is no right path or wrong path. 

There are only more or less interesting paths, and one of the best ways of finding a new and interesting path is to look at what qualities, quirks, interests, biases, obsessions, or beliefs most set you apart from others.

Count Basie, who was a respected name in jazz during the birth of rock and roll, described how new musical styles really come about: “If you’re going to come up with a new direction or a really new way to do something, you’ll do it by just playing your stuff and letting it ride. The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.”

#6 – Collect stepping stones

Interestingness can be thought of as a network of stepping stones, each connecting to the next in surprising and unconventional ways. As you move through this network, you will come across stepping stones that seem promising, but it’s not clear how, why, or even when – it might be a stepping stone that you can only use years from now when the circumstances are right.

The answer is to keep a collection of those stepping stones in the meantime. We’re talking about information here – ideas, stories, metaphors, anecdotes, facts, theories, frameworks, hypotheses, experiments – which means this can be as simple as taking good notes for the long term.

This is, by the way, a wonderful and accurate way of describing what we’re doing when we build a “Second Brain.” Although I often emphasize the importance of keeping a list of currently active projects – the “P” in PARA – many of the notes you save won’t be directly related to a project, at least not immediately.

That doesn’t matter. As long as you keep an ever-growing collection of inherently intriguing stepping stones, over time the possibility space in which you reside can only expand. You’ll start to see more and more connections from the stepping stones in your collection to new projects, inventions, breakthroughs, people, places, conversations, and on and on.

This also explains why it doesn’t matter all that much whether your notes are comprehensive, or perfectly organized. It doesn’t matter if a given note completely captures the message of a given article, book, podcast, or course. All that matters is that it exists, so you can stumble across it in the future and be provoked to wonder if this is a stepping stone worth following at that moment.

Your main problem will start to become how to choose where to spend your limited time and attention in the face of such a staggering number of exciting possibilities branching out in all directions. But at least that’s the best possible problem to have.

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