What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Life and Greatness
Free chapter from my upcoming book, The Time is Now: a Guide to Honor Your Time on Earth
Greatness can only be achieved if you stop demanding what that greatness should be.
— Kenneth Stanley
(watch the YouTube video on this chapter)
In their provocative book, Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley turned the world of the conventional hustle-mindset upside down, arguing that objective-based living is by far the worst strategy we can choose if we have set our sights to achieving greatness.2
For me, the book was an eye-opener, articulating what I’ve felt for a long time now and have written throughout these pages: We are not built to live a scripted, goal-oriented life. We are not built to reach greatness by following a linear path towards our “dreams.”
In reality, these grandiose dreams bring us further and further from our visions and ultimately, distance us from long-lasting fulfillment in our lives. How can such a thing happen? How is it the case that the more we focus on achieving any goal, the less likely it is we actually achieve it?
Even more intriguing, why is it that when someone does reach their goal, does achieve greatness, does get to the finish line, they feel rather depleted of energy and disappointed, often articulating words when arriving such as “is this really it”?
This happens because we are built for maximum serendipity, not for maximum optimization.
In a deeply intriguing experiment, Kenneth and Joel show how an AI robot, programmed to find novelty rather than just arrive at its destiny in the most efficient way, actually reached its objectives more rapidly.
The robot was placed inside a maze, and the purpose of the experiment was to see how quickly the robot would exit the maze, depending on its algorithm.3
In a series of trials, every single time the robot that was programmed to just look for novelty, without explicitly stating that the novelty was exiting the maze, it found the exit much faster than the robot specifically programmed to find the exit.4 Mind boggling, right? Being led only by an awe-infusing program, the AI Robot reached its goals faster.
This is a profound lesson for all of us: the more we try to reach our goals in a direct, literal and efficient manner, the longer it may take us to reach them — and even potentially never realizing them.
Some of the greatest athletes of all time are clear examples that mindset and goal setting are the keys to success (e.g., LeBron James and Kobe Bryant). To a certain extent, I agree. Without their mindset, they would have never achieved their goals and greatness. On the other hand, LeBron expressed a deep love for the game of basketball that goes back to when he played the sport at five years old ‘on a crate,’ and Bryant expressed multiple times that he was ‘deeply obsessed’ with basketball.5
These out-of-this-world athletes show how pursuing what we deeply love to do for the sake of just doing it because it feels right within ourselves actually boosts our potential to achieve greatness. Did LeBron ever say when he began shooting hoops at five years old, “I want to do this because it will bring me greatness?” Of course not, and neither did Kobe wake up one day as a child and decide how he would reach top one-percent status by becoming one of the greatest athletes of all-time.
There are far more lucrative, less demanding endeavors these men could have chosen to achieve their goals, but they achieved them by simply pursuing what they deeply loved. In other words, when pouring our hearts into a craft we are intrinsically connected to, greatness will take care of itself, regardless of its shape or form.
Perhaps you won’t become the greatest point guard of all-time or the highest-grossing actor who ever lived. But if you calibrate your radar only with goal-oriented coordinates, not only will you instantly distance yourself from achieving that which you want to achieve the most, but you will completely shut the door down between yourself and the serendipitous nature of the journey — all in a fraction of milliseconds. You won’t even notice, won’t even know — perhaps for an entire lifetime — how magical your journey could have been.
Paradoxically, the less you focus on achieving your goals, the closer you are to achieving them. The less objective-driven your life becomes, the more your odds of success. The less mechanized a life you build, the more opportunities you will have to become inspired.
The less you chase your dream, the more likely it is that you will realize it.
The less scripted your life is, the more awe-inspiring it becomes.
No doubt, these concepts are difficult to digest, as our entire modern existence is based on goal-setting, optimizing, and careful calibration. Indeed, that is practically the modus operandi of every single human living in the modern world.
Understanding the challenge of embracing a non-goal-oriented lifestyle isn’t easy for me either. Based on a personality test, I learned that I’m highly industrious and extremely conscientious — I thrive on efficiency and clear goals. So, it’s quite a shift to consider that success can come more naturally to me when I stop trying so hard to achieve it. Just know that if it’s tough for you to see life this way, I’m right there with you struggling with the same realization.
As Joel and Kenneth write in Greatness Cannot Be Planned, we have been conditioned from an early age to think of our lives as a function of who we need to become when we grow up. If you notice, most games we used to play when we were young (such as role-playing games based on who we wanted to be in the future) set us on a path to associating fulfillment, sense of purpose, and social recognition by what we can accomplish, instead of who we already are, and who can we become.6
Goal setting is not a natural law that should drive our lives. Artificial Intelligence has revealed that serendipity and novelty seeking play a much larger role in all the successes and paradigm-shifting discoveries than we previously thought, and provide a much better framework for living a fulfilling, creatively driven life for all of us.7
When we follow our interests without a hidden agenda, this is the best way of reaching greatness, and when we don’t define what greatness should be, we might find it in its purest, most unconstrained, most natural form.8
Kenneth and Joel expand upon this idea by discussing several discoveries that have been made throughout humankind’s existence, like the computer and rock and roll. The first computer, in fact, was built using vacuum tubes — devices used to ‘channel electric current through a vacuum.’9
The strange part here, Kenneth and Joel argue, is that the creation of vacuum tubes has nothing to do with computers. Those who were working on vacuum tubes were focused on electricity, not computers. The pursuit of their interests opened the door to the advancement of computer technology.10
Another example is born out of a combination between jazz, gospel, blues, and country music, Kenneth and Joel write. The eureka moment here is that neither jazz, gospel, nor blues singers had the intention of creating rock and roll. The pure reality is that these artists were just being themselves, and their passion ultimately became a ‘stepping stone’ for rock and roll to be discovered. What’s startling about these findings is that if, in the above examples, the innovators had set out to create a computer or rock and roll, they may never have achieved their goals, or they would have delayed the process, riddled with challenges for a long time.11
Goal setting can actually constrain our ability to achieve greatness. When we put on our horse blinders in the spirit of focusing on what we should achieve, we foreclose the potential stepping stones that could bring us closer to the peak of our creative potential.
In other words, when we write our recipe for success, build a checklist of steps to take along the way, and proceed to execute them, we become blind to potentially better ventures that are within our reach.
Even more surprising is that when we set goals for ourselves, we potentially send ourselves toward dead ends. Although all metrics might indicate that we are getting closer to our goals, the numbers and methodologies deceive us, and we find ourselves the furthest we’ve ever been from achieving them.
Imagine you’re in a maze and have been programmed to reach a treasure. To evaluate your progress on whether you are getting closer to the desired destination, you use a progress bar that increases in percentage value when you approach the goal and decreases when you are farther away. You begin your quest by trying to raise the value of the progress bar, and voila, the further north you go, the closer you get to it. In fact, you reach the 99.99th percentile of closeness to your destination if you just head north. However, when you get that close to your destination, you encounter a wall between you and the treasure that you cannot traverse.12
That is, you are literally a step away from your treasure, but you cannot reach it — not ever.
You see, the risk of goal setting is that it is extremely harmful and deceptive. Based on all the metrics, you took the best possible route and you are literally the closest you can be of your desired destination. Yet, you feel exhausted and frustrated because all you see is a wall, never having access to the treasure on the other side.
Now, let’s say that you are programmed to search for novelty. So, the goal here is to be amazed by the maze rather than trying to solve it and get to the treasure. Let’s say you take the northern route again, and you get to the same wall as before. You see this wall as a novel experience, you record it, and move on. Then, you take the eastern route, and you go through the same process. You are amazed by it and move on. Ultimately, you go through this same process for all the routes until you get to the coveted treasure!
While you were not programmed to search for the treasure, this strategy proved more useful for two reasons:
(1) you enjoyed the path for the sake of exploring the path; and
(2) you were ultimately rewarded with a treasure, thus you killed two birds with one stone.
In other words, you can — you are more likely to — achieve greatness without ever setting your sights on greatness.
Reaching greatness by defining what greatness should be is seriously constraining and harmful. If having a career packed with achievement and recognition would cut it for everyone who achieved “greatness,” then all of us would attain long-lasting satisfaction by following this path, but we don’t. In fact, job dissatisfaction is at an all-time high.13
If that were the actual definition of the term, we would not be as depressed, isolated, and stressed as we are.
If becoming a Hollywood star or a famous singer would offer a stairway to success, all actors and singers would live high quality lives, but they don’t. There are countless examples of people experiencing severe depression, substance abuse, and committing suicide as they followed these coveted paths (e.g., Kurt Cobain, Anthony Bourdain, and Robin Williams). Even my favorite comedian, Jim Carrey, has dealt with depression.
Jim Carrey once gave a commencement speech for the 2014 class of the Maharishi International University of Management.14
In his speech, Jim took the crowd on a journey of laughter, insights, and direct truths. He essentially put this chapter’s theme into one sentence:
“I’ve often said that I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame so that they could see that it’s not where you’re going to find your sense of completion.”15
In other words, do not allow yourself to be bound to golden cuffs that promise greatness, which, in reality, only tie you to a dead end. A true sense of completion will never manifest itself within you if you realize the mechanized dreams you design often based on wealth and success, but rather, from pursuing what emanates from inside you.
Jim goes on to describe a vital lesson his father taught him:
“My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn’t believe that that was possible for him. And so, he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant. And when I was twelve years old, he was let go from that safe job and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”
Our mind is an expert in deception. As discussed previously, its intention is not to con us out of our dreams and passions, but to protect us. Taking a leap of faith is the least rational choice anyone can make, especially in modernity, when the path of security has never been as attainable and as “guaranteed” as society professes.
As Jim tells us in the story of his father, we can absolutely fail at what we hate doing, so we might as well try and fail at doing what we love. On the flip side, we can succeed at doing something we hate, so why not try to succeed at something we love? It’s so much more fulfilling and sustaining, after all.
It’s difficult to quit something that has yielded ‘great’ results. In other words, we’re good at playing games we don’t like. We receive the promotions, the big bucks, the stability, the comfort, and the applause.
These perks are very hard to give up on, but that is precisely why they exist in the first place — to make us play broken games; to keep us hooked. That’s what the money’s for; that’s what the comfort of the biweekly paycheck is for; that’s what the applause is for.
Most of the time, we go through the motions of our work and career half-heartedly and still achieve amazing results. Now, imagine what we could accomplish if we would give all our hearts to pursuing our passions without guardrails and without feeling the dread and drudgery of our jobs!
It is worth repeating that safety, paradoxically, can be the most dangerous decision we may ever make.
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