What If You Don’t Need to Know Where You’re Going ?

By Richard Snee

I’ve been thinking about a conversation I heard at Crane’s Festival ever since it happened. (Spoiler alert: that conversation via video is now available for all to view!)

Ken Stanley was sitting onstage with Crane co-founder and partner Scott Sage, talking about a deceptively simple idea:

Sometimes knowing exactly where you want to go makes it less likely you’ll get somewhere extraordinary.

That is a difficult idea to accept.

Most of us have spent our lives being taught the opposite.

Set goals. Make a plan. Measure your progress. Be disciplined. Know where you’re going.

We do it with careers. Companies. Education. Our children. Our finances. Even our ideas about what constitutes a successful life.

Ken has spent more than two decades questioning that assumption.

His argument isn’t that goals are bad. He makes an important distinction between ordinary objectives and genuinely ambitious ones. If you want to make a sandwich, as he rather wonderfully puts it, having that objective is probably helpful.

But if you’re trying to discover something that doesn’t yet exist—to build something extraordinary, make a scientific breakthrough, create something genuinely new, or perhaps simply construct a life whose destination you cannot yet see—the situation changes.

Ken calls it the objective paradox.

His research in artificial intelligence revealed that when the destination was ambitious and the necessary steps were unknown, algorithms could sometimes perform better by abandoning the objective and searching instead for novelty and interestingness.

Why?

Because the stepping stones that eventually lead somewhere important often look nothing like the destination.

Ken uses the development of the computer as an example. Computers required vacuum tubes. But the people developing vacuum tubes weren’t trying to build computers. They were exploring something interesting that, much later, became an essential stepping stone toward something they couldn’t possibly have imagined.

Sitting there listening to Ken, I found myself thinking less about technology and more about life.

How many of the best things that have happened to any of us were actually part of the plan?

A person we happened to meet.

A job we weren’t looking for.

A city we unexpectedly loved.

An interest that seemed impractical.

A conversation that changed our thinking.

A failure that sent us somewhere else.

We like to reconstruct our lives afterwards as if there were a coherent plan all along. Usually there wasn’t.

There were stepping stones.

At the very end of their conversation, Ken suggested, human progress doesn’t require all of us to pursue the same grand objective. It emerges from lots of people pursuing different interests, collecting different stepping stones, and creating possibilities that others can eventually build upon.

Scott closed the conversation by wishing all of us luck on our “stepping stones in the fog.”

Months later, I still think about that phrase.

Maybe a meaningful life isn’t always about seeing the destination more clearly.

Maybe it’s about getting better at recognizing the next interesting stepping stone—even when we have absolutely no idea where it leads.

Today, I’m proud that we’re making Ken Stanley’s complete 45-minute conversation with Scott Sage at Crane Festival available publicly for the first time.

Watch it.

And then perhaps give yourself permission to follow something simply because you find it interesting.

You never know where that stepping stone might lead.