Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned - a great idea, a repetitive book

I wanted to give this 5 stars, because the core idea is so good and I think the authors have a genuinely great point.

The title alone was enough to make me pick it up. I’d honestly never considered the philosophy that having no goal can beat having a specific goal you don’t know how to achieve. Written down that sounds crazy, so it needs a few qualifiers. No goal doesn’t mean you do nothing. You still try your best, you just don’t aim at any specific target, the way a treasure hunter isn’t hunting one specific treasure. That treasure hunter image is the one that really made it click for me. Instead you aim for the most interesting next stepping stone you can actually reach, and that might be what leads to a breakthrough.

The nuance is what sold me. Goals work fine when you know exactly how to achieve them. They fall apart when you don’t know which steps to take, and I think that qualifier is dead right. For something far off like “I want to visit Mars”, there’s basically nothing you can do directly to guarantee you get there in your lifetime, and charging straight at it can blind you to other amazing goals you might have reached instead. As the authors keep repeating, nobody would have guessed we needed vacuum tubes to invent computers.

Our society is obsessed with goal setting, and it’s genuinely hard to even imagine not having specific goals. So I appreciated how well the philosophy was articulated, with plenty of examples to cement it. It has actually changed how I operate a little: I’m less fixated on the destination now and more on the journey.

The reason it’s a 4 and not a 5 is the writing. It gets overly repetitive in parts, and it mentions their project Picbreeder in what feels like every other paragraph. That got frustrating, because it felt like being babied, and we can make those connections ourselves. It only ever bugged me as a reading experience though, it never dented the argument itself.

Still, it’s a great read and it surprised me. I didn’t think a book could talk me out of direct goal setting, and this one nearly did. If you’re already very familiar with the idea, just read a summary. Everyone else should read the whole thing.