Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

by Kenneth O. Stanley

If you want evidence for that, all you need to do is stop in at your local bookstore and take a look at the magazine rack. There you will be reminded that you might want to change jobs, lose 15 pounds, start a company, find a date, get promoted, change your look, make a million dollars, buy a house, sell a house, or even complete a video game. In fact, almost anything worth doing is expressed as an objective.

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?

The idea that all our pursuits can be distilled into neatly-defined objectives and then almost mechanically pursued offers a kind of comfort against the harsh unpredictability of life. There’s something reassuring about the clockwork dependability of a world driven by tidy milestones laid out reliably from the starting line.

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 straitjackets around our desire to explore.

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.

The process of setting an objective, attempting to achieve it, and measuring progress along the way has become the primary route to achievement in our culture.

Objectives are well and good when they are sufficiently modest, but things get a lot 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—or even achieving true happiness. In other words (and here is the paradox), the greatest achievements become less likely when they are made objectives.