Greatness Without Goals

Yet what the book is about is that we have a tendency in our culture, a strong tendency, to basically design everything that we do around exactly that archetype, which is that let's set a goal, stay on our objective, and then let's set some metric so we can decide how close we're going to that goal, and then let's put all our effort into just movin... See more

The thing that makes innovation work is that the people who could run with something are exposed to the thing that they could run with, and that is what's missing I think from a lot of these organizations is that we have these filters, which are extremely narrow, which decide what comes through, and they end up pruning out things.

It's like self-driving cars. We heard as far back as, I don't know, 2016 or so, right around the corner next year, that is the false visionary type of situation where it's like somebody's being really ambitious, but the stepping stones haven't been laid. You have a false understanding of where we are and you think that the stepping stones are there... See more

Why is that a revelation? Well, the problem is that if you think about it, what that means is that the only way to discover any of these things was to not be trying to discover them.

"Almost no prerequisite to any major invention was invented with that invention in mind." You used that term stepping stones, the things that we combine. You gave the example of vacuum tubes and computers. People working on vacuum tubes weren't thinking about computers, and there's a million examples like this. So I just want to plant that idea out... See more

So it's both scary and exciting that the greatest things that any of us might accomplish are not something that we can imagine or something that we could accomplish through just a linear progression. So I'd love to describe what you think this means for how people should behave, especially ambitious people that want to achieve great things or affec... See more

This is not generally how we run collaborative systems because we run them by consensus, which is the exact opposite. That's about pruning out stepping stones. People start generating things and then we start saying, "No, no, no. Committee doesn't like this. Committee doesn't like that." We then converge to the thing, which is basically the consens... See more

Complexity basically means that everything is circuitous and hard to understand. Hard to understand means that the things that lead to the things you want aren't the things you want. They're very complex. So you need to do things like work on vacuum tubes to get to computers because vacuum tubes are in the first computers, even though vacuum tubes ... See more

The shocking revelation was that in almost every single case, more than 99% of cases, if you looked at something interesting, like a car, for example, or a butterfly or a bird or whatever it might be, if you go back in its history and you look at what were the steps that led to that thing, the steps look nothing like it at some point back. Right be... See more

So there's basically two pieces of advice I would give. One is collect stepping stones and honor interestingness... The second piece of advice is the more visionary angle, which is to recognize stepping stones when they snap into view for the first time.