Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Welcome to a provocative challenge of conventional wisdom. We often believe that setting a clear destination is the surest way to succeed. Yet there is growing evidence that this approach may actually limit us, preventing the discovery of hidden opportunities.

When we define rigid endpoints, we can easily get stuck. Like a compass that fails in unfamiliar territory, our laser focus can blind us to better routes. Sometimes, we need to wander just enough to stumble upon real breakthroughs.

This book begins by exploring just why we cling so tightly to objectives. It asks whether the accomplishments we admire most were truly planned from the start—and points to surprising examples suggesting otherwise.

Most of us grow up hearing that we should name our goals, measure our progress, and try harder when we fall short. This mindset is embedded in our schools, jobs, and personal development plans.

Yet behind every bold target lies a tricky assumption: that simply moving closer to the goal is always good. If higher test scores or bigger profits become our only measure of success, we risk ignoring unusual but vital breakthroughs.

In reality, the path to a major innovation can twist and turn through many unexpected detours. When locked onto a single 'best' route, we often skip or discard creative leaps that don’t look immediately relevant.

By acknowledging this pitfall, we open ourselves to the idea that small successes, measured in purely objective terms, may not always lead to bigger, long-term triumphs. Sometimes, short-term metrics can even deceive us.

Imagine programming a robot to find its way through a maze. The obvious strategy is to reward it for every step closer to the exit. Yet in experiments, researchers discovered that focusing on the end-goal often trapped robots in dead ends.

A different strategy—encouraging the robot to try new moves that are simply 'different'—turned out to be more effective. The system would stumble blindly around, but eventually, it became more likely to find a winning path than when it was pushed toward the finish line.

This showcases the danger of forcing a direct route toward a complex objective. If an earlier turn seemed 'worse' by the conventional measure, a goal-obsessed approach would drop it, losing a potential route to victory.

The lesson: sometimes, aiming anywhere but the target can lead us to the ultimate solution. This goes against our intuition but highlights how rigid objectives can cause us to overlook valuable detours.

When chasing a lofty dream, it is natural to assume that the best plan is a straight shot from start to finish. But complex terrain rarely cooperates with tidy maps.

History is filled with major inventions that arrived by accident, from microwaves to penicillin. These discoveries didn’t emerge because everyone relentlessly aimed at them. Often, they were offshoots of entirely different investigations.

The supposed 'myth of the objective' is that staying targeted on a single end point drives creative success. Yet again and again, we see that exploration, spurred by curiosity, luck, or side projects, brings about big leaps.

If you believe greatness comes purely from planning, these stories can feel unsettling. They reveal a consistent pattern: to stumble on the best ideas, we must allow ourselves to roam off the beaten trail.

In one fascinating project, people around the world collaborated to 'breed' digital images by picking the ones they liked best. At first, they were only strange blobs on a screen.

Over time, users discovered unpredictable shapes resembling butterflies or faces. The catch was that no one set out with a specific end-image in mind. Instead, they simply kept turning to whatever sparked the most interest.

Remarkably, trying deliberately to evolve a particular picture usually failed. This is the same dynamic seen with the maze robots: forcing a goal closed off the fruitful sidesteps that catalyze real creativity.

This digital art experiment confirmed that, even for seemingly simple images, letting curiosity guide the search can produce results far beyond predetermined expectations.

Biological evolution is often framed as selecting who best survives and reproduces. But it did not set out to 'create' human intelligence, bird flight, or a cactus’s spines.

Nature simply collects stepping stones along the way: organisms adapt, explore new niches, and develop traits without a grand target in mind. Bacteria did not evolve to become fish, nor did fish have the explicit aim of turning into land animals.

Every trait emerges as a new branch from a previous one. None of it was engineered to happen by looking countless steps ahead. That’s why evolution, while messy, has created an absurdly varied tapestry of life.

In the same sense, letting your creative process meander may feel random in the moment, yet it can open far more possibilities than a narrow push for one perfect outcome.