Why greatness cannot be planned?

You ever dreamt of being great? Achieving something remarkable? Discovering something? Being truly ambitious? Maybe you have been told that all you should do is go right after it. Well, the question is, should you?

The other day I was talking at lunch to my friend Louis, and I was sharing with him how I find the environment around ETH very competitive, and I see everyone applying for jobs and positions, and I am myself not so sure where my path leads yet, and I do not feel like pushing just for another thing that somebody expects of me (it feels like for the first time in my life I can do whatever I really want, as I have exhausted the expectations of my parents studying university more or less).

What started as just a midday vent turned into a conversation about this book: I was recommended to follow what I find interesting right now. Why? ‘Cause you can never tell where it is going to lead. It might feel like that next best move is to ace another exam to be able to apply to jobs with the best possible GPA (this is intentionally naive). But it feels that people with most success tend to be led by their curiosity.

I quickly went on to read on the book and it turns out: there is scientific evidence that curiosity (rather than fixed goals) leads to remarkable discoveries! One can think of finding a solution to a problem as solving a maze. However, for most mazes marching directly towards the exit will only lead you to so many walls. Conversely, looking for new paths in a maze can instead lead you to the exit, even if that is not your primary goal. A beautiful case of this in real life is the solution of a combinatorics puzzle proposed by an anonymous user on 4chan.

In Data Science lingo: it feels like the best way to explore the posterior distribution sometimes is to forget your prior, however that is not what most of us do. Personally, I have to admit I have always been a reward hacker. Since primary school I have been acing those tests; but now towards the end of university it seems like that is not the way forward through life. GPAs are inflated, and the environment of science is even more deceptive as it seems that new discovery does not come from just improving the last stepping stone, but maybe finding a new one.

Coming from a social-democratic background, one might argue that this mentality is not for the common man. And that is true, for most objectives following your goals works very well. If you want to eat, going shopping and cooking might be your best path. And thinking about what you can contribute to the society, learning about it and finding a job in that field might be a great way to sustain yourself and finance your family. However, it feels like that for extremely ambitious goals it is not like that.

In Czech culture the ice hockey player Jágr is glorified. Apparently, he has been putting an insane amount of hours in when others would rest. However, thinking about it from the perspective of reading this book maybe what he was doing in that time was not just naively repeating stuff during his training sessions but rather thinking of new ways to play and creating new techniques (this is full speculation though). Maybe if you want to be like the famous #68 the point is not to spend the time playing hockey, but the time being creative about it.

Anyways, I set myself the goal of being more creative and more explorative. Pay more attention to new ideas, and to not be scared to step aside from the daily rush and ponder them. But maybe that is exactly what I should not be doing: the true way of achieving something seems to be letting it go.