1. Questioning Objectives

Imagine waking up without thinking about what you need to do today. Have you ever done that? Suppose then you go to work, but instead of holding the usual meetings and poring over benchmarks and milestones, your boss instead tells you to do whatever you feel is most interesting. What would you do? When you later check the news online, there is no talk of national testing standards or missed objectives for the economy. Strangely enough, teachers somehow still teach and money somehow still changes hands anyway. Maybe you post a profile on a dating website, but you leave blank all the answers on what you look for in a partner. Today you aren’t looking for anything in particular, but that still doesn’t stop you from looking. While you probably won’t experience a day like this one anytime soon—a day without objectives—what would life be like if you could? Would it be confusing, difficult to navigate, too open-ended—or, quite the opposite, a lot better?

If you want evidence for that, all you need to do is stop in at your local bookstore and take a look at the magazine rack. There you will be reminded that you might want to change jobs, lose 15 pounds, start a company, find a date, get promoted, change your look, make a million dollars, buy a house, sell a house, or even complete a video game. In fact, almost anything worth doing is expressed as an objective. Now, we’re not suggesting by any means that all of these objectives are a waste of time. Of course, many are admirable. Others may be more frivolous, but whatever you may think of one objective or another, we rarely question the value of framing all our pursuits with objectives. Can you imagine life with fewer objectives, or with no objectives at all? Would it lead to any good? Regardless of how you’d answer these questions, at the least they highlight how deeply our culture has come to revere objectives.

And it’s not only about individual pursuits. While it’s true that children are graded for their progress towards mastering a subject, the schools themselves are also graded. But in the case of the schools, their objective is to produce high student test scores. Even nations set objectives, like low crime, low unemployment, and low carbon emissions. A lot of effort and resources are spent measuring progress towards these objectives and others like them. There’s an assumption behind these pursuits that isn’t often stated but that few would think to question: We assume that any worthy social accomplishment is best achieved by first setting it as an objective and then pursuing it together with conviction. It makes you wonder, is there such a thing as accomplishment without objectives?

If you take a look at most professions, the answer would appear to be no. Take engineers for example. They typically set objectives through rigorous specifications. Then they continually measure how their prototypes compare to these specifications. Inventors are similar, conceiving an invention and then pursuing it as an objective. In the same spirit, scientists must come up with clear objectives to secure funding for their projects, which are then judged by how likely they are to achieve their objective. The list goes on. Investors set earnings objectives and corporations set profit objectives. Even artists and designers often mentally conceive a design and set its realization as their objective.

The weight of objectives on our thinking even impacts the way we talk about topics like animals in nature. After all, whenever evolution is discussed, we view animals through the lens of survival and reproduction, evolution’s assumed objective. Even many algorithms, or programs that run inside computers, are designed to work towards some specific objective, such as finding the best search result or playing a better game of chess. In fact, these kinds of algorithms are quite common in artificial intelligence and machine learning. So it may come as no surprise that the term objective function is now practically a household name in such fields.

Maybe all this objective mania makes sense. At some level, we must believe it does to have allowed it to dominate our lives so completely. Or maybe it’s something else—maybe we’ve become so used to objectives defining everything we do that we’ve forgotten that their value can even be questioned. Either way, there’s a certain appeal to this kind of routine. The idea that all our pursuits can be distilled into neatly-defined objectives and then almost mechanically pursued offers a kind of comfort against the harsh unpredictability of life. There’s something reassuring about the clockwork dependability of a world driven by tidy milestones laid out reliably from the starting line.

Even so, perhaps you’ve felt qualms about this kind of thinking from time to time. It might sound good on the face of it, but what it leads to isn’t always so comforting—legions of measurements, assessments, metrics—woven into every aspect of our lives. It’s like we’ve become slaves to our objectives, toiling away towards impossible perfection. Objectives might sometimes provide meaning or direction, but they also limit our freedom and become straitjackets around our desire to explore. After all, when everything we do is measured against its contribution to achieving one objective or another, it robs us of the chance for playful discovery. So objectives do come with a cost. Considering that this cost is rarely discussed in any detail, maybe it’s a good idea to look a little harder at what we’re really giving up in exchange for such objective optimism.

But before we do, it’s important that you know that we aren’t pessimists. It may sound like this book is going in a cynical direction, but that isn’t really true. In fact, we believe that human achievement has no limits. It’s just that we’re going to highlight a different path to achievement, without the need for objectives. There’s a lot our culture has sacrificed in the name of objectives, and we’re going to take it back. They’ve stolen our freedom to explore creatively and blocked us from serendipitous discovery. They ignore the value of following a path for its own uniqueness, rather than for where it may lead. The chapters ahead will show that great discoveries are lurking just beyond our fingertips, if only we can let go of the security blanket of the objective. Sometimes, the best way to change the world is to stop trying to change it—perhaps you’ve noticed that your best ideas are often those you were not seeking. We’ll come back to this paradox later, but first let’s think a little more about the way most people approach achievement today.

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Sometimes a word other than “objective” might be used, but usually it plays a similar role. For example, scientists often demand hypotheses from each other because they don’t want to fund research only because it sounds “interesting.” “What is the hypothesis?” they’ll insist. It’s similar to asking what is the objective. Without a hypothesis, an experiment is reduced to mere speculation, little more than child’s play. The hypothesis, like the objective of any project you might want to pursue, certifies that it’s worth pursuing. Even if it might not work out, it still provides a clear outcome that will allow people to judge your success or failure later.

Obviously we’re going to raise a lot of questions about the benefits of objectives, but one important point is that we’re mainly focused on ambitious objectives—those whose achievement is anything but certain. One of the reasons that objectives aren’t often questioned is that they work perfectly well for more modest pursuits. If a manufacturer decided to increase efficiency by 5 %, no one would be shocked if it succeeded. A software company upgrading its product from version 2.0 to version 3.0 is similarly likely to succeed, as happens all the time. Everyday successes like these mislead us into believing that setting objectives works well for almost everything. But as objectives become more ambitious, reaching them becomes less promising—and that’s where the argument becomes most interesting.

Some objectives are anything but certain. Medical researchers have yet to cure cancer. And it’s hardly clear that computer scientists will succeed in creating a convincingly-human artificial intelligence any time soon. It would be nice to have a limitless source of energy with no risk or environmental impact whatsoever, but who knows when that will happen. Even fully immersive holographic television, which you must admit would be fun though perhaps less noble, is nowhere in sight. Maybe there is even a beautiful new genre of music waiting to be found, so enchanting that all of humanity would succumb to its spell, if only the right artist can find it. Or, if you want to get really ambitious, how about time travel or teleportation? You might even have some big ones of your own, like making a billion dollars. Of course some ambitious objectives might turn out impossible. But some are possible, and if we could even come close to achieving them, the world would surely change for the better.

The question then is, how will we ever get there? How can we achieve not just improving our golf swing, but our dreams? These are the kinds of questions where objectives offer less assurance. After all, even if time travel is theoretically possible, the best use of national resources at this moment is surely not to reroute trillions of dollars into an all-out effort to build a time machine. But why not? Is setting the objective not the first step towards success? Or would pursuing time travel be our Moby Dick, distracting us from what really matters in life?

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Why is it so hard to achieve ambitious objectives? To get a handle on the problem, think about all the things that are possible. As an example, consider all possible images. Everything you’ve ever seen falls into this class, but so do many things you’ve never seen and will never see. Now consider this: A minuscule proportion of all possible images are great masterpieces like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. These are objectives that are hard to achieve. A larger proportion of possible images are recognizable but less inspiring than the masterpieces, like pictures of acquaintances and everyday objects. Of course, the vast majority of possible images are of no interest whatsoever—like television screens tuned to the wrong channel, just random static. One exciting aspect of this vast set of all possible images is that some of the great masterpieces do not yet exist because no one has painted or drawn them yet. Put another way, these future masterpieces are not yet discovered.

So we can think of creativity as a kind of search. But the analogy doesn’t have to stop there. If we’re searching for our objective, then we must be searching through something. We can call that something the search space—the set of all possible things. Now try to picture this space—it’s as if different possibilities appear at different locations in a big room. Imagine this giant room in which every image conceivable is hovering in the air in one location or another, trillions upon trillions of images shimmering in the darkness, spanning wall to wall and floor to ceiling. This cavernous room is the space of all possible images. Now imagine walking through this space. The images within it would have a certain organization. Near one corner are all kinds of faces, and near another are starry nights (and somewhere among them Van Gogh’s masterpiece). But because most images are just television noise, most of the room is filled with endless variations of meaningless gibberish. The good stuff is relatively few and far between.

The nice thing about thinking of discovery in terms of this big room is that we can think of the process of creation as a process of searching through the space of the room. As you can imagine, the kind of image you are most likely to paint depends on what parts of the room you’ve already visited. If you’ve never seen watercolor, you would be unlikely to suddenly invent it yourself. In a sense, civilization has been exploring this room since the dawn of time. As we explore more and more of it, together we become more aware of what is possible to create. And the more you’ve explored the room yourself, the more you understand where you might be able to go next. In this way, artists are searching the great room of all possible images for something special or something beautiful when they create art. The more they explore the room, the more possibilities open up.

This way of thinking doesn’t only work for paintings. We can imagine a room filled with anything. For example, it could be a giant room full of inventions. As with images, the great room of all possible inventions is mostly filled with inelegant doodads, like unreliable machines that occasionally can move a ball from one location to another and pointlessly ring a bell. But if you look hard enough, some areas of the room contain simple yet useful ideas—bags, wheels, wheelbarrows, spears. Rarer still are more sophisticated inventions—in one corner are all manner of cars and in another corner, computers. Somewhere in the room are fanciful machines unlike any we’ve seen before, still waiting to be found.

Let’s visit the pocket of space filled with computers. If you spend a lot of time in this area, an interesting thing begins to happen: You start to understand the shape of the space, how one computer leads to another, like stepping stones along a winding path. Wander here long enough, and you might even start to see where the interesting possibilities may lie.

But why do we have to wander? Why can’t we just go directly to the location of the most powerful machine of all? The reason is that the only clue to the future is found in the past. The first computer, the ENIAC, was introduced in 1946 and could execute 5,000 instructions per second [1]. While this might sound like a lot, a modern desktop computer executes over ten billion instructions per second [2]. In other words, ENIAC was a slug, more than two million times slower than today’s computers.

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Now we can finally tell you what this book is really about. It’s not just about achievement or how to succeed. The deeper message here is about a surprising paradox. We’ll have a lot more to say on it in later chapters, but you can get the gist of it just from what we’ve said so far: 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 paradox), the greatest achievements become less likely when they are made objectives. Not only that, but this paradox leads to a very strange conclusion—if the paradox is really true then the best way to achieve greatness, the truest path to “blue sky” discovery or to fulfill boundless ambition, is to have no objective at all.

Why would this be? The key problem is that the stepping stones that lead to ambitious objectives tend to be pretty strange. That is, they probably aren’t what you would predict if you were thinking only of your objective. Put another way, if you were walking through one of these great rooms of all possible things, how the items in the room are arranged would be unpredictable and confusing. History is full of examples of this vexing problem. For example, the very first computer was built with vacuum tubes, which are devices that channel electric current through a vacuum. However, here’s the strange part: The history of vacuum tubes has nothing to do with computers. People like Thomas Edison who were originally interested in vacuum tubes were investigating electricity, not computing. Later, in 1904, physicist John Ambrose Fleming refined the technology to detect radio waves, still with no inkling of building a computer. It was only decades later that scientists first realized that vacuum tubes could help build computers, when the ENIAC was finally invented [3].

So even though vacuum tubes are a key stepping stone on the road to computers, few if any could see it coming. In fact, if you were alive in 1750 with the objective of building some kind of computer, you’d never think of inventing a vacuum tube first. Even after vacuum tubes were first discovered, no one would realize their application to computation for over 100 years. The problem is that the stepping stone does not resemble the final product. Vacuum tubes on their own just don’t make people think about computers. But strangely enough, as history would have it vacuum tubes are right next to computers in the great room of all possible inventions—once you’ve got vacuum tubes you’re very close to having computers, if only you could see the connection. The problem is, who would think of that in advance? The arrangement, or structure, of this search space is completely unpredictable.

Unfortunately, this kind of unpredictability is the rule rather than the exception in almost any situation with an ambitious objective. The first engine was not invented with airplanes in mind, but of course the Wright brothers needed an engine to build a flying machine. Microwave technology was not first invented for ovens, but rather was part of magnetron power tubes that drove radars. Only when Percy Spencer first noticed the magnetron melt a chocolate bar in his pocket in 1946 did it become clear that microwaves are stepping stones to ovens [4].

These stories of delayed revelations and serendipitous discovery expose the danger of objectives: If your objective was to invent a microwave oven, you would not be working on radars. If you wanted to build a flying machine (as countless failed inventors did over the years), you wouldn’t spend the next few decades instead trying to invent an engine. If you were like Charles Babbage in the 1820s [5] and wanted to build a computer, you wouldn’t dedicate the rest of your life to refining vacuum tube technology. But in all these cases, what you would never do is exactly what you should have done. The paradox is that the key stepping stones were perfected only by people without the ultimate objective of building microwaves, airplanes, or computers. The structure of the search space—the great room of all possible things—is just plain weird. It’s so bad that the objective can actually distract you from its own stepping stones! If you think too much about computers you’ll never think of vacuum tubes. The problem is that ambitious objectives are often deceptive. They dangle a false promise of achievement if we pursue them purposefully. But strangely in the end we often must give them up ever to have the chance of reaching them.

This paradox isn’t just about historical events. It applies just as much today as ever—to everything from society’s greatest challenges to your own personal ambitions. Chances are that if we plan a path based on our objective, then it will miss the stepping stones. This insight raises some troubling questions that relate to the tricky nature of stepping stones: Do increasing test scores really lead to subject mastery? Is the key to artificial intelligence really related to intelligence? Does taking a job with a higher salary really bring you closer to being a millionaire? Is cancer going to be cured by an insight from someone who is not a cancer researcher? Are improvements in television technology bringing us any closer to holographic television?

It often turns out that the measure of success—which tells us whether we are moving in the right direction—is deceptive because it’s blind to the true stepping stones that must be crossed. So it makes sense to question many of our efforts on this basis. But actually the implications are even more grave than just questioning particular pursuits and their objectives. At a deeper level, we might ask why we think ambitious pursuits should be driven by objectives at all.

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It’s not hard to find great ideas that were never objectives for anyone, at least not until almost the moment they were discovered. Rock and roll music took inspiration from jazz, blues, gospel, and country music. In a way, those genres acted as stepping stones to rock and roll. But no one was trying to discover rock and roll because no one knew it even existed as a possibility. Jazz musicians weren’t trying to influence the birth of rock any more than ragtime composers consciously tried to shape jazz. Even so, strangely enough, ragtime did shape jazz and jazz did shape rock and roll.

Count Basie, who was a respected name in jazz during the birth of rock and roll, described how new musical styles really come about: “If you’re going to come up with a new direction or a really new way to do something, you’ll do it by just playing your stuff and letting it ride. The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.” The funny thing is that not only was it completely unpredictable in the early twentieth century that jazz and blues would lead to rock and roll, but no one was even worried about it because rock and roll was not an objective. We just happened to be traveling the right path through the search space of musical genres to bump into it in the late 1940s [6].

One of the biggest names in popularizing rock and roll is of course Elvis Presley. Interestingly, his unmistakable sound wasn’t planned either. Guitarist Scotty Moore recalls, “All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. …[the recording engineer] stuck his head out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know [6].’ ” Who would have thought that “acting the fool,” and not some ambitious drive to overhaul popular music, would transform the world of rock and roll? The stories of Elvis and rock and roll in general illustrate that not only can objectives block discovery, but that having no objective can lead to the greatest discoveries of all.

However, the problem is that it’s hard to simply abandon objectives because they are a powerful security blanket. At the least they seem to protect us from the wild unknowns of the world. They give us a sense of purpose and the promise of success if only we try hard enough. No doubt, the thought of aimlessly wandering through the space of possibilities with no clear purpose is not going to inspire many can-do achievers. But that is not where this argument leads. We don’t face a false choice between slavishly following objectives and aimless wandering. Instead, the true implications are both more subtle and more liberating than that. We want to show you that it’s possible to explore a search space intelligently even without an objective. In other words, there is a third way—just because you don’t have an objective doesn’t mean you have to be wandering. We can align ourselves towards discovery and away from the trap of preconceived results.

Over the remainder of this book an important principle will begin to emerge: 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. While it seems like discussing objectives leads to one paradox after another, this idea really should make sense. Aren’t the greatest moments and epiphanies in life so often unexpected and unplanned? Serendipity can play an outsize role in life. There’s a reason for this pattern. Even though serendipity is often portrayed as a happy accident, maybe it’s not always so accidental after all. In fact, as we’ll show, there’s a lot we can do to attract serendipity, aside from simply betting on random luck.

We hope you’ll find this message liberating. Our world has become saturated with objectives and metrics for success that mechanize our lives and distract us from our passions. But there are other paths to happiness and success. We’ll show you why not only can you trust your gut instinct when it tells you something important is around the corner, but you should trust it, even if you can’t explain what that something is. You don’t need to make up a tortured reason to justify every little impulse you feel. And not only is this attitude more healthy for us as humans anyway, but it’s backed up by solid scientific evidence that this book will present. We’re missing out on a lot by clinging to objectives.

The objective culture around us is not natural anyway. How many children do you know who formulate an objective before they go out to play? How many great scientists really formulated a hypothesis before their great idea? Do you ever tell yourself that you can’t do something because it’s not justified by a clear purpose? Do you ever blame yourself when you can’t achieve your highest goals despite your best efforts? Why do so many of us feel our creativity is stifled by the machine-like integration of modern society? We weren’t born for this. It isn’t healthy for us, and deep down we know that. Something is wrong at a fundamental level with the assumptions that justify where our time is invested.

At the same time, this book is not only about personal liberation. In fact, objectives have become so pervasive that their absence would impact nearly everything. Their absence can change how science is conducted, how engineers conceive their projects, how architects generate new concepts, and how designers seek success. It can alter our understanding of natural evolution and how computer scientists develop algorithms. It can turn engineering into art and art into science. It can build bridges between disciplines and break down walls between others. It can redefine entrepreneurship and refocus our targets for investment. It can teach humility to the overconfident and confidence to the insecure. In short, objectives are a pillar of our culture, but they’re also a prison around our potential. It’s time to break out and discover what’s outside.

Both of us, Ken and Joel, are computer scientists by training. Neither of us originally set out to attack or even question a topic so universal and seemingly solid as the benefits of objectives. Instead, we were (and still are) interested in artificial intelligence (AI), which was our primary area of expertise. However, it’s funny how you never know where your path might lead, just like the theme of this book. It turns out that even in the field of AI objectives are everywhere. Many of the computer programs that AI researchers develop are designed to follow one objective or another, almost as if they’re mimicking our own culture’s drive to define success in the same way. For example, the objective for an AI program might be to help a robot learn to travel through a maze. With the field of AI itself so immersed in objectives, perhaps it was inevitable at some point that researchers in AI would eventually have to confront the downside of objectives themselves.