I stopped setting goals and somehow made more progress than ever. Here's what I think happened.
About a year ago I was deep in the goal-setting cycle that most self-improvement advice pushes. Quarterly goals, weekly reviews, tracking apps, the whole thing. And I was miserable. Not because the goals were bad, but because every single day felt like I was falling short of some imaginary benchmark I had set for myself three months earlier when I was a completely different person in completely different circumstances.\n\nThen I read a book called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman. These are AI researchers, not self-help gurus, and their argument shook something loose in me. They had built these algorithms that were supposed to solve problems — navigate mazes, teach robots to walk — and found something bizarre. The algorithms that were told exactly what to achieve (the objective) failed almost every time. But the algorithms that were told only to find something novel, something different from what they had tried before, solved the problems far more often. In one experiment, the novelty-seeking algorithm solved a maze 39 out of 40 times. The goal-directed algorithm? 3 out of 40.\n\nTheir explanation is what they call deception. When you set an ambitious goal and measure your progress toward it, the measurement itself becomes a trap. It tells you to move toward things that look like the goal, but the actual stepping stones that would get you there often look nothing like it. Vacuum tubes do not look like computers. A video dating site does not look like YouTube. A playing card company does not look like Nintendo. Almost no prerequisite to any major breakthrough was created with that breakthrough in mind.\n\nThis hit me hard because I realized I had been doing the same thing with my own life. I had set this specific career goal and was judging every opportunity by how directly it moved me toward that goal. And in doing so, I was systematically ignoring experiences that seemed unrelated but were actually the most valuable stepping stones I could have taken. A side project I dismissed as a distraction led to skills I use every day now. A conversation with someone outside my field changed my entire perspective on what I actually wanted.\n\nSo I tried something different. Instead of setting goals, I started following what the authors call interestingness. Not random wandering, but paying attention to what genuinely captured my curiosity and pursuing it without needing to justify how it connected to some five-year plan. When something felt novel and opened up new possibilities I had not considered before, I leaned into it. When something felt like I was grinding toward a metric just because I had written it down months ago, I gave myself permission to let it go.\n\nThe result after about a year of this is that I have ended up in a place I never could have planned. New skills, new relationships, new projects, a different understanding of what I actually care about. None of it came from setting the right goal. It came from collecting stepping stones I did not know the purpose of at the time.\n\nI am not saying goals are useless. They work fine for simple, nearby things — getting to the gym, finishing a report. But for the big, life-direction-level stuff, I think obsessing over specific outcomes can actually make you less likely to achieve anything meaningful. The path to something great almost never looks like a straight line toward it.\n\nCurious if anyone else has experienced something similar. Has letting go of a specific goal ever led you somewhere better than the goal itself would have?