Do you ever just work on whatever you find interesting?
Limits of objectives
Objectives give us clarity and delineate our path to desired outcomes, which, in turn, allow us to track our progress.
So what’s wrong with this process?
Ambitious objectives require us to cross multiple stepping stones before achieving them. The problem is that the stepping stones leading to our eventual goals are often misleading. Our measure of progress becomes deceptive because it’s blind to these stepping stones.
Consider the following historic examples.
The first computer was assembled using vacuum tubes. Interestingly, when vacuum tubes were initially conceptualized, they had no connection to computers. It was only years later that scientists acknowledged the role vacuum tubes could play in fabricating computers. Similarly, the first engine wasn't invented with the idea of airplanes, yet it later became fundamental in their construction. Microwave technology wasn't initially designed for ovens; it evolved from magnetron power tubes used in radars.
Often, the building blocks of major breakthroughs were developed without the foresight of the eventual accomplishments they would facilitate. If your goal was to invent a computer, an airplane, or a microwave before their necessary stepping stones were in place, you might not have invested your time in creating vacuum tubes, engines, or radar technology. Consequently, you would probably have struggled to meet your goal.
The conventional approach when encountering a fork in the path is to choose the route that seems to lead towards your destination. However, this path often leads to a dead end. In such situations, despite our faith in it, our goal can’t guide us correctly. It becomes a misleading guidepost.
Time for exploration
So what’s the alternative approach?
Instead of worrying about where we want to be all the time, we should seek adventures, and find ourselves somewhere genuinely novel. Our novel discoveries become stepping stones to new frontiers. Cultivating novelty implies learning new things, thereby expanding our comprehension of the world consistently. We discover something new this way; we just don’t know what that something is yet. By exploring the unknown, our reward becomes an endless chain of stepping stones branching out into the future.
While objectives permit us to concentrate on a path, we often require periods of unfettered exploration to ignite our creativity. This expands our viewpoints and safeguards us from falling into the trap of local maxima.
Inspired from these books:
- Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Kenneth O. O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
- Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller
