"Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: An Exploration of Freedom in Creativity, Innovation, and Creation" Reading Notes

Author: Kenneth Stanley; Joel Lehman
Recommended Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Excerpt#

It is not easy to govern by doing nothing if you have sufficient resources.
If you start out with a clear goal, you won't get far. Goals narrow your scope of exploration. For great endeavors, goals are misleading. Greatness is not the result of goal guidance, because the path to greatness is never a straight line, and often times, going fast is actually going slow - without specific goals, each time you simply choose the next stepping stone, you will find treasures.
Although schools do grade students based on their progress in a subject, the goal of the school is to cultivate students who can achieve high scores. However, the school itself is also divided into different levels because of this. At the national level, each country has set various goals, such as low crime rates, low unemployment rates, or low carbon emissions, and has invested a lot of effort and resources into tracking these goals and similar ones. Behind the pursuit of these social goals, there is an assumption that is not often questioned, which is that any achievement worth pursuing is best set as a goal, and then everyone works together and perseveres towards that goal. This begs the question: are there things in this world that can be accomplished without setting goals?
All of our pursuits can be precisely defined as specific goals, and then gradually advanced in a mechanical manner. This idea is undoubtedly a great psychological comfort when we face the difficulties and confusion of life. Because if from the beginning, there are neat and uniform milestones to guide the world's progress, like the hands of a clock fixed and reliable, people will definitely feel a great sense of security.
"Having goals gives you motivation" sounds good, but it is frustrating to do - the massive calculations, evaluations, and measurements of goals will invade every aspect of life, as if turning us into slaves of goals, exhausted by the pursuit of "absolute perfection" that is impossible to achieve. Perhaps at certain times, goals can provide meaning or direction in our lives, but they also limit our freedom and become a cage that imprisons our desire for exploration.
The goal-oriented approach causes us to only focus on the rewards and scenery at the end, and neglect the uniqueness and inherent value of each exploration path.
In a sense, we are all playing the same game in various aspects of life. In our cultural concept, setting goals, striving to achieve them, and measuring progress along the way have become the main ways we pursue success.
If you are a person with no great ambitions and only want to achieve ordinary wishes, then setting goals can be very effective, which is also a major reason why people rarely question goals. For example, a manufacturing company decides to increase its production capacity by 5%, even if it succeeds, not many people will be surprised, or a software company wants to upgrade its product from version 2.0 to 3.0, it will also succeed, and there is nothing surprising about it. Such "daily small goal achievements" make us mistakenly believe that setting goals is effective for almost everything, but as "ambitions" become more and more "lofty", the hope of achieving them becomes more and more elusive - this is the most thought-provoking aspect.
It is useful to view success as a process of exploration and discovery.
If you have never seen a watercolor painting, you are unlikely to suddenly create one.
Things that serve as stepping stones are gateways to higher possibilities. We must find these stones first and step on them firmly before we can take the next step of discovery.
In fact, if you want to achieve more so-called great achievements, goals often become stumbling blocks, such as goals related to exploration, discovery, creativity, invention, or finding true happiness.
When the greatest achievements are set as goals, the possibility of achieving them becomes almost negligible.
If your goal is to invent the microwave oven, you will definitely not think of studying radar; if you want to invent an airplane (like countless inventors have been trying for years), you will not think of spending decades inventing an engine; if you want to study like Charles Babbage in the 1920s and try to build a computer, you will not think of spending the rest of your life studying vacuum tube technology.
These "high and mighty" goals are often deceptive. If we are only focused on the final goal, we will end up with an empty promise. We often have to give up goals, but in the end, we may have the opportunity to achieve them again.
If you want to figure out a new direction or a truly new way of doing something, you just need to play your own music and let your creativity flow freely. True inventors simply "go with the flow".
Sometimes, the best way to achieve "grand ambitions" is to "not deliberately pursue a specific aspiration" (because the more you pursue it, the more it eludes you).
Our world is filled with various goals and standards set for the sake of success, which mechanizes our lives and suppresses our passion for life. However, there are other paths to happiness and success. When your intuition tells you that something important is happening, you not only can believe it, but you should believe it wholeheartedly. Even if you can't explain it, you don't need to rack your brains to come up with a reason to justify every little whim.
Being overly fixated on goals is also unhealthy. The criteria for judging "where all our time has gone" based on goals are fundamentally flawed.
"While you are making plans, life is quietly moving forward." - John Lennon.
There is no magical formula for changing the world, or rather, great achievements do not have a predetermined script and often come about without careful planning.
Choosing a realistic life goal is not unfamiliar to all of us. Just think of the old saying "be realistic, don't daydream" and you will understand. Although the pressure of choosing realistic life goals obviously has a greater impact on musicians, their stories actually reflect a broader cultural tradition: following one's heart in choosing life goals seems more foolish than pursuing practicality.
Those who achieve great accomplishments are willing to give up their original goals and seize new opportunities when they arise.
Those who are desperately searching for love only reveal their own lack of love, and those who lack love will never find it. Only those who have love can find love, and they never need to search for it." Many people will realize this sooner or later.
Without the hobbies he cultivated for his own amusement, the amateur archaeologist would probably never have discovered the importance and value of ancient cave paintings. So, these hobbies unexpectedly became stepping stones to great discoveries.
Everyone has the right to pursue the passion of their life, even if it deviates from the original plan or conflicts with the initial goals. Because the courage to change direction sometimes brings unexpected rewards.
Life is full of risks, and some choices will indeed not succeed; but those who ignore unexpected joys rarely achieve their dreams.
I will not follow the path, but go to uncharted territory and leave my own footprints. - Muriel Strode, "A Soul's Faring"
If we set a certain image as a goal, it is absolutely impossible to cultivate it. The images on the website were discovered because they were not the breeding and iteration goals themselves. The website users who discovered these images were all people who did not initially set them as their goals.
If we focus too much on the goals we hope to achieve, we may ultimately overlook the most crucial steps to achieving those goals.
No matter how tempting and persuasive it may seem, lofty and grand goals cannot guide you to their side. Grand goals themselves are the most unreliable compass.
Among all the biases we have listed, there may be one most deeply rooted a priori fallacy or natural bias; it not only occupies the supreme position in the ancient world, but also still has almost undisputed dominance over many of the most cultivated minds... that is, the conditions of a phenomenon must, or at least may, resemble the phenomenon itself. - John Stuart Mill, "A System of Logic".
Almost all major discoveries were made without considering the invention itself.
The discovery of electricity did not consider computers, or even vacuum tubes. And the invention of vacuum tubes was not to promote the manufacture of computers. Humans simply lacked enough foresight to understand what new inventions would be driven by a discovery.
The prerequisite for creating great inventions is that all the prerequisites already exist.
True passion is the fundamental reason that drives you to succeed.
The disconnect between the ideal way our world should work and the way it actually works is the problem we should truly pay attention to and worry about. When we strive to pursue our dreams, we should at least know what those dreams are and pursue them with passion and perseverance. But if we accept this idea without thinking, it will lead to absurd behavior and results. Just as you cannot evolve human intelligence by measuring intelligence in a petri dish on Earth, determination and intelligence alone cannot create a computer - we need stepping stones! Just as you cannot become rich simply by finding a high-paying job, because a raise today does not guarantee a continuous raise in the future. The reality we need to accept is that many things cannot be achieved simply through effort.
Many people have indeed achieved their goal of becoming rich, but not because they dreamed of becoming rich, but because they pursued their passion, and this relentless pursuit happened to bring abundant material rewards.
The problem is that "high and mighty" goals are different from ordinary goals, and the best way to achieve these lofty goals is to ignore them. This idea seems to contradict conventional intuition and traditional wisdom.
Grasp the uniqueness and novelty of every moment and enjoy unexpected happiness. - Andre Gide
It doesn't take much effort to say what kind of person you want to be, where you want to go, or what you want to accomplish. The real challenge is how to achieve these desires. More precisely, the real problem is that it is difficult for us to determine the stepping stones between here and the ultimate goal.
Because great discoveries are never accidental.
These great discoverers are not fanatical, uneducated people, nor are they purely lucky to encounter great discoveries.
In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.
Novelty search does provide a more interesting sorting: from simple to complex.
Ultimately, we must acquire some knowledge in order to continue creating novelty, which means that novelty search is an information collector for accumulating knowledge about the world. The longer the search, the more information about the world it will eventually accumulate. Of course, the amount of information and complexity go hand in hand, and more complex behavior inevitably requires more information.
The more "lofty" the goal, the more deceptive it is.
Overly ambitious goals can never be achieved through diligent pursuit - unless these goals are within reach.
To prove that America is progressing, you can present various pieces of evidence: school test scores, crime statistics, arrest reports, or anything that can help politicians get elected and ordinary employees get promoted. After setting such statistical standards, many people in the organization will rack their brains to make it look like there is progress, even if there is actually none. - David Simon
Evaluating teachers based on students' test scores directly forces teachers to engage in test-oriented teaching, and the end result is not the cultivation of students with rich knowledge and practical skills, but the production of test-oriented students who are good at memorization and exams.
In fact, economists have realized that relying too much on GDP is meaningless, even though it is a widely used economic indicator in various countries. This paradox is also known as "GDP fetishism".
Only in the case of relatively ordinary goals are standards useful.
When we are guided by a policy that has fundamental errors, no matter how accurate it is, it is useless to us, because its result is only a better evaluation of the interfering factors on the path to the correct path, rather than a true stepping stone.
With the popularity of "test-oriented education" and the increasing pressure of goals such as "striving for high scores", the reliance on this "intuition" has obviously been suppressed, and the result is that most teachers' autonomy, intuition, and creativity have been deprived, and their enthusiasm and original intentions for teaching have gradually been exhausted.
Sometimes, emphasizing goals too much is a very dangerous approach.
In the long run, great endeavors are achieved not because of goals, but precisely because there are no predetermined goals. This is a disappointing conclusion for those who hope to promote progress through mandatory standards, but for others, it may be an enlightenment.
I tell you: you must accept the restlessness and confusion in your heart, because it will make you a shining star. - Friedrich Nietzsche
The general process of applying for research funding is as follows: scientists submit proposals to funding agencies and provide proposals that explain their research ideas; the proposals are then sent to a review panel composed of expert peer reviewers, who are usually senior scientists in the field of the proposal, such as biology or computer science; the reviewers then give ratings, including different levels from poor to excellent. Generally, the proposals with the highest average ratings are most likely to be funded.
If you follow the trend and do popular research, and parrot the mainstream, you may gain widespread recognition and support; on the other hand, a truly interesting idea may provoke controversy. In the boundaries of what we currently know and don't know, there are still some questions with uncertain answers. That is why in the unknown territory of science, experts' opinions should remain divergent and divergent. It is precisely in this "wilderness" borderland between the known and the unknown that we should let the greatest minds of humanity explore, rather than "indulge in pleasure" in the comfort zone of maximum consensus.
The fear of risk is one of the main reasons why people cling tightly to goals. Although a certain degree of risk is the price that must be paid for exploration and progress, those responsible for funding usually do not want to take on excessive risks, so as not to waste resources on unrealistic and fanciful projects.
When it comes to personal interests and gains, few people are willing to bet on overly ambitious goals, because most people have the intuition that simply setting a "lofty" goal does not guarantee its achievement. For this company, the deception of goals is too great, and the risk is not worth taking.
To be successful, do not aim for success as a goal; just do what you love and believe in, and success will naturally come. - David Frost
Houses should still be built according to the design drawings; software should still be designed according to established specifications; when you are preparing dinner for tomorrow, you can continue to follow the recipe. If you set a goal for exercise and stick to it, you can improve your physical endurance. All of these are moderate goals, which are not the subject of this book's argument and refutation, so there is no need to give up on them.
It is often wiser to determine where to go based on the current position rather than based on where you want to go. Everyone has the ability to turn the present into the future, but no one can turn the future into the present.
Protecting differences and accommodating divergent views is a virtue.
When everything has been said and done, when dreamers are tired of old visions, when the ashes of expectations without return settle on the insurmountable future, there is only one rational light that can penetrate the darkness: in order to achieve our highest goals, we must first be willing to abandon them.