In one of the most interesting books I've ever read, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, authors Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman dismantle the widely-held view that to accomplish anything of importance, you must first set it as an objective—a specific goal with clear, legible, preceding steps. Our reliance on objectives is everywhere, from education to business, government to finance, and even science, art, and technology. Even the word objective encompasses a dual meaning: first, a goal or thing aimed at or sought, and second, a concept that exists beyond our personal feelings or opinions, anointed by facts and capital-T truths.

It's no wonder that objectives are held in high esteem, but the idea is so pernicious it affects how we make decisions in almost every domain, from the way we organize society down to how we manage our personal lives.

Though it feels right and natural to set an objective to strive towards, doing so handicaps creativity, discovery, and innovation in weird, counter-intuitive ways.

Why Objectives Falter

Stanley and Lehman show how a reliance on objectives often does more harm than good. They cite Campbell's Law, which pops up all the time in social sciences: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Campbell's law is related to the cobra effect, a type of perverse incentive where rewarding certain measures makes the underlying problem worse than before. The cobra effect is named after a famous example from when India was under colonial British rule. The British government wanted to reduce the number of cobras in Delhi, and they offered money in exchange for dead cobras. At first, this worked to reduce the number of snakes in the city. However, enterprising citizens realized they could generate reliable income by breeding cobras and killing them for the reward. By the time the program was finally dismantled, there were more cobras in the city than there had been before.

Why does this happen? There's a gap between the outcomes that we want and the indicators that purportedly measure it. There's a common failure pattern with objectives, and it looks like this:

• We choose an outcome worth pursuing

• We decide that anything worth doing can (and should) be expressed as an objective

• The objective is defined and measured

• We make progress on the measurements but move no closer to our objective (or even further away from it)

This dynamic is made worse when the scope of what we want to achieve broadens. The relationship between measurement and objective breaks down the bigger and more nebulous the objective.

Objectives are so ingrained in our culture that we rarely question the wisdom in pursuing them. A neatly-defined metric that we can mechanically pursue offers comfort against the harsh unpredictability of life. Even if we fail, we can point to our objectives as concrete measures of what we were trying to accomplish. It's better to fail in a clearly defined way than to succeed in a hazy, indeterminate manner.

These effects aren't exclusive to colonial government programs. You've probably experienced it in your personal life at some point. Let's say you wanted to lose weight. There are many reasons to desire this outcome, but the most common reason is to improve one's health. In the pursuit of greater health, you focus on a single metric: weight on the scale. Focusing on this objective might encourage you to undertake activities (like surgery or experimental supplements) that, while they may improve the underlying metric, might also harm your general health, paradoxically bringing you further from your goal: better health.

Or, let's say you wanted to improve your writing, so you set yourself a daily writing goal of 1,000 words. If you're not careful, you'll quickly find yourself churning out words just to hit your daily quota without considering the quality of the output. You generate words but not the right words. You hit your goal, but your writing is not improving. It's getting worse.

Objectives remain seductive, however, because they promise to take complex phenomena and reduce them to measurable standards. If you want to be a great writer, it's hard to determine what to do in service of that goal and track whether you're moving in the right direction. But counting words makes it easy to measure your apparent progress. There's a logic to setting goals, but as Stanley and Lehman point out, "The greatest danger is when the logic is wrapped within a lofty objective, lending it instant credibility and seemingly putting it beyond question."

There's prestige around objectives—and comfort. We set objectives because we're afraid of what it would mean to live without them. Without an objective, we worry that we will become lost.

Everything Already Exists

Objectives are particularly bad when it comes to invention, creativity, and discovery. The more ambitious your objective, the more setting one can be harmful to that end.

Stanley and Lehman imagine us to think of a giant room that already contains everything that can be created. All creations, whether a new painting, a scientific theory, a mathematical proof, a novel, or a new piece of technology, can be thought of as objects in a vast room. You can then imagine yourself searching through this space, looking for interesting objects. However, the objects in the room are not arranged randomly; they have a relationship to each other. The more you explore the room and understand that relationship, the better your understanding of where you might be able to go next.

Susanna Clarke explores a similar idea in her novel Piranesi. In the story, Piranesi wanders a world composed of infinite halls and vestibules lined with statues, no two of which are alike. This world is infinite, and so, too, are the statues. They already and always contain everything that can be expressed. Examples include "Angel caught on a Rose," "Statue of a Woman holding out a wide, flat Dish so that a Bear Cub could drink from it," "an elderly fox teaching some young squirrels and other creatures," and "the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive." Piranesi has dedicated his life to the task of describing every statue: "I have begun a Catalogue in which I intend to record the Position, Size and Subject of each Statue, and any other points of interest." Piranesi is not the only person who exists in this world, however; there is also the Other, a scientist who "believes that there is a Great and Secret Knowledge hidden somewhere in the World that will grant us enormous powers once we have discovered it."

Clarke's world, like the room Stanley and Lehman ask us to imagine, contains an infinite number of objects that can describe anything that can be imagined, and hidden amongst them might also be secret knowledge of great importance. Both Clarke's world and Stanley and Lehman's room describe the same concept: a search space.

Used in computer science, mathematics, and AI, a search space includes the set of all solutions to a particular problem. Of course, the difficulty is that the search is quite complicated. You do not know where the solution is hidden or even where to start. There are different ways to go about searching the space, but you don't know which one is the most optimal before you begin.

As it turns out, creativity is a type of search.

Creativity is how you move through "an enormous room" where innovations are waiting to be discovered.

In Clarke's novel, Piranesi and the Other suspect that the world contains great knowledge, but they have no idea what the nature of that knowledge entails. At certain points, they speculate that it could be one of seven possibilities:

1. vanquishing Death and becoming immortal

2. learning by a process of telepathy what other people are thinking

3. transforming ourselves into eagles and flying through the Air

4. transforming ourselves into fish and swimming through the Tides

5. moving objects with only our thoughts

6. snuffing out and reigniting the Sun and Stars

7. dominating lesser intellects and bending them to our will

The most interesting thing about the search space is the implication that all discoveries, great and small, already exist. They are simply lying there, waiting to be found. The statues in Piranesi's world are always and already there, whether Piranesi or the Other see them. As the search widens, more and more of them are discovered.

Stanley and Lehman describe creativity as a process of combing through a search space: "Let's pretend you wanted to paint a beautiful landscape—so that's your objective. If you're experienced in landscape painting, it means that you've visited the part of the room teeming with images of landscapes. From that location, you can branch off to new areas full of landscapes that are still unimagined. But if you're unfamiliar with landscape painting, unfortunately, you're unlikely to create a masterpiece landscape, even if that's your objective. In a sense, the places we've visited, whether in our lives or just in our minds, are stepping stones to new ideas."

Herein lies the difficulty of discovery:

• You must first become a master at something (like landscape painting). This alone is a lifetime of dedication.

• There must then exist something novel and interesting adjacent to what you have mastered (but you do not know if this is the case when you set out to become a master in the first place).

• You must be open enough to explore that adjacent "room" and discover what lies next to your area of expertise.

But there's another, more sinister problem: when you think you're making progress towards a great achievement, you likely aren't because actual progress does not look like progress at all. The path to discovery is littered with traps.

The Way Does Not Look Like the Way

Objectives work in the short term, in the day-to-day. They work when the next step is clear, and the cause-and-effect relationship between action and outcome is well understood. But the bigger the goal, the trickier it is to use objectives.

Stanley and Lehman again: "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 is this so? As the authors point out, "The key problem is that the stepping stones that lead to ambitious objectives tend to be pretty strange" and that "the stepping stone does not resemble the final product."

Here is the crux of the problem—objectives fail in the pursuit of discovery, creativity, and invention because the way to get there does not look anything like the goal. To set an objective, then, is to doom yourself to following a fruitless path.

The stepping stones to great discoveries didn't look anything like the final outcomes. Here are a few examples from the book:

• Vacuum tubes are a stepping stone on the way to computers

• Combustion engines are a stepping stone on the way to airplanes

• Microwaves are a stepping stone on the way to ovens

In all these examples, the genius of discovery was not in figuring out every step needed from scratch but rather in realizing that "the prerequisites are in place, laid before us like predecessors with entirely unrelated ambitions, just waiting to be combined and enhanced." For centuries, man dreamed of taking to the skies, and in pursuit of that goal, fashioned devices that resembled flight in nature (the wings of birds). Yet those devices all failed; what was needed for the invention of the airplane was the internal combustion engine, a device that was not invented with the problem of flight in mind. Similarly, the inventors of vacuum tubes did not imagine they were paving the way for the first computers.

If we imagine the room of discovery, it turns out the airplane was next to the combustion engine, the computer next to vacuum tubes. While it may seem obvious in retrospect, there's nothing about these problems that would have indicated this would be so. As Stanley and Lehman state, "The paradox is that the key stepping stones were perfected only by people without the ultimate objective of building microwaves, airplanes, or computers." Objectives can distract you from pursuing its own stepping stones because ambitious objectives are deceptive.

Discovery is hard because the path is littered with false paths—the next steps that resemble the final product but that lead you further from it. The next steps that are strange and novel end up moving you closer even though it feels like you're moving further away.

Imagine literal stepping stones in a lake. It's a foggy day, and you cannot see across the water to the other shore. Your goal is to get across. Stones that bring you further across the lake seem like they're bringing you in the right direction, but the actual path to the other shore might involve moving in the opposite direction, back toward where you started. What feels like backtracking is actually moving you forward.

Or consider the Chinese finger trap. The natural urge to pull your fingers apart only keeps you more ensnared. To separate your fingers, you must, paradoxically, move them closer together.

Objectives fail because they are blind to the idiosyncrasies of stepping stones. The combustion engine does not seem like the path to flight, but it is.

The principle doesn't just apply to invention, it applies to art and creativity, too. No one set out with an objective to invent rock and roll. Jazz musicians were just exploring what was musically interesting to them. Jazz, it turned out, was a stepping stone to rock and roll. As Count Basie, an innovator in jazz music, said at the time: "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."

Instead of trying to follow a clear, pre-determined path to an objective, discovery involves following interesting stepping stones wherever they lead. Discovery is simply realizing that the pre-determined steps are already in place—and that the next stepping stone is right there, waiting for someone to take it.

Aimed Aimlessness

Objectives help us feel grounded in a chaotic world, and the alternative—aimlessness—offers little comfort. It turns out there's a third way, a way between pursuing objectives and wandering aimlessly. The question is how to explore a search space intelligently without relying on objectives.

As Stanley and Lehman write, "Being aimless isn't always a good idea, but when it's paired with a thirst for exploration, it might indeed hint at great potential." This idea is well crystallized in the popular quote from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, "not all those who wander are lost." Tolkien differentiates between a wandering with purpose and one without. The full poem that contains this line drives home the point clearly:

"All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king."

There is a clear and intended purpose to which the poem drives toward: the return of the king. But the how, where, and who is not stated. It is unknown. From the in-universe perspective of the poet, it cannot be known how the king will return, only that he will. What is interesting about this perspective is that the wandering is part of the exploration. Because it cannot be known how the king will return, one must wander freely until the solution can be found.

The subtle idea that permeates every page of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned is that setting a specific objective brings you no closer to achieving it—and often, counterintuitively, brings you further away. What's maddening about this concept is the implication you are more likely to stumble on a great idea than following a plan to achieve it. It will happen by accident. You're betting off picking an interesting direction with no particular aim in mind and sticking with it. It's what the Cheshire Cat recommends to Alice in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:

"Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don't much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.

Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.

The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough."

But total aimlessness won't get you anywhere interesting. Not all choices are random, and not all destinations are equal, an idea echoed beautifully in Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken." The speaker in the poem considers two different roads open to him. He weighs the two paths and concludes that, despite their differences, they are "really about the same." Yet there is no way to choose both, and in choosing one, it would be impossible to "ever come back," but the outcome of that choice will "make all the difference" in the end. The poem is often misunderstood, as readers focus on the penultimate line, "I took the one less traveled by,” and interpret the poem's meaning as a positive message to go against the grain and explore a unique side of life. But that interpretation doesn't square with the rest of the poem. First, the speaker says, in multiple ways, that the two roads are identical ("the passing there / Had worn them really about the same"), so there is no clear "less traveled" path. Plus, the speaker looks back on their choice later with sadness ("I should be telling this with a sigh"), undercutting any potential individualistic triumph in the choice to take "the one less traveled by."

Instead, what the poem explores is the incongruence of choice. Choices matter, but not immediately. Not in the present but in the long run—after the fact, looking back with the gift of hindsight. Small choices compound, over time, into large effects. What Frost's poem evokes is the subtle sadness that hovers around choice, that we cannot know the full outcome of our choices in advance. We do not know what roads will lead to what. It is often impossible to choose between two paths that look "really about the same" and yet will eventually "make all the difference."

Tolkien, Lewis, and Frost are all pointing at a middle way: a way to be directed but open, aimless but focused. A way to seek a destination without having it in mind.

The point is not to stop trying to achieve something great but to stop trying to achieve a specific great thing.

The point is to open yourself to possibilities, to see that the answer might not lie where you expect to see it. In an experiment by Richard Wiseman, subjects were asked to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. "It turns out that those who focused on the goal of counting the photographs took significantly longer to complete the task than those who were less focused on the objective. Why? The more open-minded participants noticed that on the inside of page two Wiseman had written, 'Stop counting: there are 43 photographs in this newspaper.' While some might say that noticing the answer on page two is only luck, the deeper lesson is that focusing too much on your goal can actually prevent you from making useful unexpected discoveries."

How, then, can you decide what to do? Choosing matters, but it is not clear what future paths open or close based on our choices, and objectives are nothing more than empty palliatives that, while making the difficulty of choice easier to swallow, do not help in the long run. What criteria can possibly help in this situation?

Novelty is Knowledge

One answer is to pursue novelty. Novelty is a good stepping stone identifier because "anything novel is a stepping stone to more novelty." Novelty is a useful shortcut to identifying the quality of interestingness—ideas that open up new possibilities.

Novelty is like compound interest. The more of it you have, the more of it you can find.

To demonstrate why novelty can help lead to interesting results even without a specific objective, Stanley and Lehman provide a thought experiment about designing a robot that can travel down a hallway with an open door at the end. Most experiments of this sort would set the objective for the robot to travel down the hallway and pass through the door. However, the authors also show how the same behavior could be accomplished using a novelty-search algorithm. They code the robot to try something different every time it goes down the hallway. At first, it crashes into the wall. Then it crashes again and again. It may seem frustrating to watch the robot continually crash into walls, but from the perspective of a novelty search, this is a good thing because it will ultimately lead to a desired behavior. At some point, after crashing into enough walls, there will be no more locations for the robot to crash. It will have exhausted all crash opportunities, and the only way for the robot to do something novel will be to not crash.

Learning to avoid walls was never the robot's objective, yet it achieved it merely by implementing a novelty search—by trying to exhaust all the existing possibilities. It's the same idea as Adam Douglass's lesson on learning to fly by missing the ground.

Novelty search doesn't just work for robots and algorithms. You can make serious progress in any chosen field by embracing novelty. The more you do things and simultaneously avoid redoing things (and this is the crucial part), the more interesting stuff reveals itself. It's why many seasoned creatives advise novices to quickly generate a lot of bad work. It's a form of novelty search. Ray Bradbury tells young writers to write a new story every single week for a year. Writing fifty-two short stories is not unlike the robot crashing into the wall. You'll crash-write a bunch of crap, but by searching for that many story ideas, eventually, you'll "go through the door" and write a good one. In novelty search, volume is your friend.

Novelty works like this because it's related to knowledge in a fundamental way. As Stanley and Lehman observe, "Because eventually you have to acquire some kind of knowledge to continue to produce novelty, it means that novelty search is a kind of information accumulator about the world in which it takes place."

The prime example of novelty search in nature is evolution. Evolution works by encoding knowledge of the world in genes. For new niches to arise and for new species to develop, it must seek novelty at every turn (which is why transcription errors are a feature, not a bug). As the biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, biological evolution must become more complex to generate more novelty ("biological diversity"). Evolution never set out with the objective of creating human brains, yet it did so in the search for novel ways to survive and reproduce on Earth. In its search for novelty, evolution encodes more and more useful information about the world.

Follow the Fun

While it's fine and good to shun objectives, the problem arises when you try to decide what to do instead. Part of the reason objectives are so seductive is because they offer a clear choice of what to do next. There isn't much practical application in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned beyond:

• Pursue novelty for its own sake

• Embrace the role of the treasure hunter

But the physicist David Deutsch, whose work aligns nicely with the ideas in this book, seems to have developed a useful framework for how to pursue activities without succumbing to the siren lure of objectives. He calls it the fun criterion.

A quick breakdown of the idea follows. Deutsch identifies that there are many different kinds of ideas in the mind (many more than are usually recognized by words or philosophical constructs). These ideas interact with each other, and many of them are necessary for thinking: solving problems, conjecturing solutions, and so on.

Deutsch divides the ideas into two main categories:

• Conscious ideas (you are aware of these ideas in your mind)

• Unconscious ideas (you are not aware of these ideas in your mind)

Furthermore, conscious ideas can be further divided into two types:

• Explicit ideas (what can be expressed in ordinary language)

• Inexplicit ideas (what cannot be expressed in ordinary language)

Good examples of inexplicit ideas can be found in sports. Say you're playing tennis, and the ball is coming over the net, and you need to decide if it is going out of bounds. Based on that decision, you will decide to either run toward the ball or not. An idea exists in your mind, it is criticized, and a decision is made, but never in this mental processing do the words "the ball is going out of bounds" appear in your mind.

We're left with three main buckets of ideas that exist in the mind: explicit, inexplicit, and unconscious. But it's not that simple! First, these ideas coexist in your mind and cannot be easily translated from one to the other. To make matters worse, no idea is wholly explicit, inexplicit, or unconscious. For example, even language—which is the definition of an explicit idea—contains an inexplicit component: grammar. We can understand grammar, and those who are good with language can recognize when grammar is "right" or “wrong," just like a good tennis player has a strong sense of where the ball will end up, but in both cases, it is hard to define those ideas with words.

Since these ideas are all ways to create knowledge, Deutsch applies Karl Popper's theory of knowledge to each one of them:

• None are justified

• Any (or all) can be mistaken (we expect them to be, in fact)

• They are all corrected by problem-solving, conjecture, and criticism

When we encounter a problem, there are often many theories involved, and while some will be explicit, some will be inexplicit, and some will be unconscious. It will, therefore, be difficult to criticize these ideas because, first of all, you won't know what all the theories are (they are unconscious), and second, even those you know about will be difficult to express in language and therefore hard to criticize (they are inexplicit). When you're faced with this situation (which happens all the time), you need a criterion for how to resolve conflicts between these different ideas.

When the decision involves two explicit ideas, it's fairly easy and obvious how to decide: you criticize the two approaches or run an experiment to see which one is better.

But if you have an inexplicit idea, it's harder, and if you have an unconscious idea, it's almost impossible (and you may have multiple unconscious ideas in conflict with each other). When an unconscious idea conflicts with your other ideas, it will affect your feelings. You will have a mood.

This, by the way, is why you get tired when you think about doing hard work. Let's say you want to write a novel. You might have an explicit theory of how things will go. It will be “easy," according to this theory. A novel is about 100,000 words, and you can write 1,000 words per day, which means you can write a novel in only 100 days; you can even take a day off every three days and still write a novel in a year (hell, you can even write only 1,000 words per week and still write your novel in two years). However, every time you sit down to write your novel, you find that you cannot do it. You find you are "not in the mood" to write; this is because your unconscious has a conflicting theory that this endeavor is going to be much more difficult than your explicit theory has presented it, and your unconscious is trying to keep you from wasting your time. So you always feel "tired" when it's time to write your novel, regardless of how much or little sleep you got the night before, and that feeling indicates a conflict between an explicit idea and an unconscious one.

There are different criteria for how to choose between these different ideas. A common criterion is to try to disregard everything but your explicit theories. In the novel writing example, you ignore your "mood" and plow through your 1,000 words per day; 100 days later, you have a big pile of words, but they're not very good, and your novel structure is a mess, and to "finish" would require a lot more work than you expected. Your unconscious is vindicated.

Another criterion is the "romantic" one, in which you dismiss all explicit ideas as mechanistic, inhuman, or ignoble. In this criterion, what is real is what you feel, and ideas that look too much like logic are dismissed. In the novel example, you spend years not writing a single word because you are never in the right mood. You never write a novel, but someday you might when the stars align.

Both of these approaches, Deutsch argues, are irrational because they ignore the content of the ideas in favor of judging them based on where they came from (whether they are explicit, inexplicit, or unconscious).

When your ideas conflict, you have to create new knowledge to solve the discrepancies. You need conjecture, criticism, and error correction. But that's difficult to do if you can't translate your ideas into the same language. Explicit ideas, inexplicit ideas, and unconscious ideas, however, can all take each other into account, even if they cannot "communicate" directly. You want to get into a state of mind where all these different ideas are affecting each other, and that state of mind feels like fun.

A lack of fun is, therefore, a type of criticism of the current situation you find yourself in. The fun criterion is not a method for choosing what to do, but it is a way to criticize your method of choosing what to do. It's an ingenious way of choosing activities without relying on objectives. It is a manner of criticizing across the explicit-inexplicit-unconscious barriers. Because when you feel fun, your explicit, inexplicit, and unconscious theories are in alignment.

Deutsch's definition of "fun" sounds similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's definition of "flow," the mental state of being fully immersed in an activity. When you're in flow, you experience effortlessness, a sense of connection, focus, and timelessness. All your ideas are communicating with each other, whether explicit, inexplicit, or unconscious.

How, then, do you decide what to do without objectives? You choose activities that put you in a fun/flow state.

A few caveats. First, the fun criterion does not justify doing only what feels good. It might feel good to smoke weed and play video games all day, but if you do that for too long, you'll likely experience feelings of dread or unease, a sense that you are wasting your life. This is an unconscious idea that will conflict with this way of life. You're also likely to have many explicit ideas about how type of activity is not good for you long-term. Therefore, activities like this conflict with the fun criterion even though they seem, at first glance, to be "fun."

Likewise, on the other end of the spectrum, "just grind it out" fails the fun criterion. Too often, we justify tedious, boring, or unenjoyable work for the promise that it will "all be worth it" in the end. Deutsch questions this line of thinking because you can always reframe your approach to your work. If you are interested in a problem and doing what seems like "boring work" as the best way to explore the problem, it will not be tedious to you because you will be undergoing the work in the context of the problem you are trying to solve. In your work lies hope, ideas, and creativity. "Boring work" is only boring when it is someone else's problem. If you're interested in the problem, it doesn't matter how "tedious" the work appears to an outsider. You will find it interesting.

The idea of working for months or years on a boring thing is terribly dangerous—especially in science, art, and invention (everything I have been exploring in this essay), where there is zero assurance that it will have been "worth it." You can run science experiments for a decade with no clear answers; your invention may never work or never hit “product-market fit"; your novel may never sell. You have to do it so that even if it's completely wrong, or terrible, or whatever, it will still have been fun.

You can spend your entire life in the search space—in the Piranesian hall of statues—looking for something novel, for something interesting, and you may never find it. But that does not mean that spending time searching will have been worthless because what is worthwhile is the search itself. As Stanley and Lehman demonstrate in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, you likely won't find what you were looking for, but if you keep looking, you are likely to find something.

To demonstrate why the objective does not matter, Deutsch gives the example of a search party. Imagine that someone has been lost in the mountains during a terrible blizzard. A search party is sent out to look for them. Experienced mountaineers and teams of dogs hit the slopes trying to find the missing person. Even if they don't find them, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the search party who will say it was not worth doing. And even if they find the person, the specific member of the search party who found them is no different from the rest of the search party. The missing person, once found, will thank "everyone involved in the search."

Because the search is the most important part. The search doesn't guarantee you will find anything, but you can't find anything without the search. As the Cheshire Cat says to Alice, you're sure to get somewhere if only you walk long enough.

So keep going. Keep exploring. Relax your reliance on objectives. See what's out there. Follow what's interesting. As Deutsch says, do what is fun. Try and solve problems that are interesting to you because even if you fail (and you likely will), it will still be worth it.

And you never know: you might find something you never even imagined was possible.

If you enjoyed this essay, you can collect it right here on Paragraph. Or, if you'd prefer, you can collect a screenshot version of this essay on Zora:

Some news and links:

• One of my short stories was recently accepted for publication! I'll have a horror story, currently titled "Open the Door" coming out on The Witch House in late October. Check it out around Halloween if you're interested!

• Speaking of creepy stories, I also published a new story/essay hybrid over the summer on my Substack, The Unnerving. It's about what happens when you try to quit social media. Check it out here.