Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

the “search” for greatness is often misguided, perhaps because what we imagine to be great, is in fact not that great at all. Instead of speculating what may make you great, get out there and start doing. Do not look for perfection or even greatness, but instead signs of “good” and start making tangible progress.

The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can't discover natural selection that way.

I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each... See more

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 myth of radical change and overnight success is pervasive in our culture. Experts say things like, “The biggest mistake most people make in life is not setting goals high enough.” Or they tell us, “If you want massive results, then you have to take massive action.”

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