Novelty-driven search

The book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned explains why our obsession with objectives might stop us from achieving our objectives. It’s still good to have goals in situations where the problem space is well known, but the key word in the title is “greatness”. If you want to do something truly great, you can’t walk down the well known paths. If the problem were simple enough for OKRs to measure, other people would have already executed a well-designed plan.

Which also explains why our brains are so easily hijacked by social media and TV. Novelty is valuable. Following our interests can lead to greatness, but only as long as we don’t have devices that can keep feeding us new content.