Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:43)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:06)
My guest today is Ken Stanley. Ken is a professor in computer science and a pioneer in the field of neuroevolution. He is also the co-author of a book called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, which details a provocative idea that setting big, audacious goals can reduce the odds of achieving something great.
We discussed that revelation in detail and how to apply it in our day-to-day lives. Please enjoy this great discussion with Ken Stanley.
So Ken, we were just together at Capital Camp this past week in Columbia, Missouri, and you gave, I think, what's proven already to be the most popular of the presentations during the week, mostly because it really got people thinking and we're going to try to replicate that phenomenon here today. I came across your work because of the book that you wrote with your co-author Joel called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. And I'll probably refer to a few things that I read in the book throughout our conversation as sparks for our talk. There's one very early on that I think I'll start with that'll allow you to sort of introduce the broad idea of your work, which is that sometimes the best way to change the world is to stop trying to change it. A provocative starting idea. Maybe you can use that as a jump off point to explain your research, your work and its core thesis.

**Kenneth Stanley** (3:18)
That statement is a common kind of a saying. You hear things like that sometimes. The best way to find someone you love is to stop worrying about love or you hear these cliches sometimes. And I think that that reflects that somewhere within our culture we recognize that there's a bit of a problem with setting goals and strictly adhering to them with this belief that that's ultimately going to cause you to get what you want. And yet, what the book is about is that we have a tendency in our culture, a strong tendency to basically design everything that we do around exactly that archetype, which is that let's set a goal, stay our objective, and then let's set some kind of metric so we can decide how close we're going to that goal.
And then let's put all our effort into just moving directly in the direction of the goal.
And we believe somehow that this is going to lead to all the things that we need and want to accomplish, keep us ahead of the curve, avoid disruption, all the things that we're worried about, that this is the formula basically for everything.
And what the book is about is that it actually doesn't work. And it's kind of an interesting allegation to say that this doesn't work because it's not like most controversies. Most controversies in our culture are very controversial. There's already sides. People are debating these things. And they're often very political. This one, though, there's no debate right now. Nobody's talking about this. There are no sides.