Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Lehman and Stanley flips the usual goal-setting advice on its head. Instead of arguing that clear, specific goals guarantee success, they show—through their AI research—that rigid objectives can actually box us in and lead to dead ends.
In their experiments, systems that explored what was new and interesting outperformed those chasing a fixed target. Breakthroughs often happen indirectly—not by forcing an outcome, but by following curiosity.
The takeaway? For big, complex pursuits, exploration can be more powerful than strict planning. Sometimes greatness is discovered, not engineered.
