Sometimes the best way to achieve something great is to stop trying to achieve a particular great thing. In other words, greatness is possible if you are willing to stop demanding what that greatness should be.

Being open and flexible to opportunity is sometimes more important than knowing what you’re trying to do.

DeMarco, “Software engineering: An idea whose time has come and gone?,” Software, IEEE, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 96–96, 2009.CrossRef

Great invention is defined by the realization that the prerequisites are in place, laid before us by predecessors with entirely unrelated ambitions, just waiting to be combined and enhanced.

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 pa

To arrive somewhere remarkable we must be willing to hold many paths open without knowing where they might lead.

So we’re going to have to accept something slightly humbling: Maybe the whole idea that there is some kind of “best practice” for finding your objective is misguided. There may simply be futility at the heart of search—no approach to searching can guarantee that you reach your objectives. It’s not enough to give up the idea that objectives are the

If you take one thing from this chapter, perhaps it should be that you have the right to follow your passions. Even if they deviate from your original plans or conflict with your initial objective, the courage to change course is sometimes rewarded handsomely. Another important implication is that not everything in life requires an objective justif

But here’s where novelty search takes the plot on a surprising twist. The situation may sound hopeless, but the conclusion is both more subtle and more profound than it seems: We can reliably find something amazing. We just can’t say what that something is!