Hello,
Goals may seem like the key to success, but what if the best way to achieve them is not to focus on them at all?
Having lived on a diet of motivational and business books, I never questioned that goals were supremely important to success.
I doubt there was a self-help book I read that didn’t demand I create goals for every area of my life.
Then I read John Kay’s Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly (2010).
The British economist and first dean of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School argues that the “obvious” or “direct” path to a goal is often wrong.
Early in the book he gives an example of why.
Kay was invited to a dinner party in London close to Lancaster Gate station.
From Paddington, the best way to get there was the Underground to Notting Hill station, change trains and go two stops to Lancaster Gate.
So that’s what Kay did.
Later, at the dinner, he entertained his hosts with his stupidity.
Slavishly following the abstract Tube map, he had gone backwards to go forwards on a circuitous route involving over two miles.
If he had bothered to check a street map, he would have seen it was a quick 7-minute, 0.4 mile walk from Paddington to Lancaster Gate.
Kay was inspired to write his book by Sir James Black, a British chemist who won a Nobel Prize and whose research led to billions of dollars worth of profits for groundbreaking heart and ulcer drugs while working at ICI, SmithKline and Glaxo.
Yet Black was never interested in the profit side, only the research. He even told colleagues that the path to profits was not through research.
Later admitting how wrong he was, Black arrived at the principle of obliquity (applied to human action as opposed to the astronomical meaning of the angle between a planet's rotational axis and its orbital axis):
“Goals are often best achieved without intending them”.
How The Mighty Fall
This principle isn't just an academic insight—it has played out in the real world, shaping the rise and fall of major corporations.
Kay gives examples of obliquity in business.
During Bill Allen’s time as head of Boeing from 1945 to 1968 it developed the 737, the most successful airliner in history.
When it began development of the 747, which would define commercial aviation for decades, a non-executive director of the firm sought information on projected “return on investment”.
He was brushed off.
“Boeing created the most commercially successful aircraft company, not through love of profit, but through love of planes. The oblique approach to profitability delivered spectacular results”
- John Kay
Boeing lost its way when new CEO Phil Condit created a new emphasis on cost-cutting and shareholder value, and moved the executive headquarters from Seattle to Chicago - to be closer to Washington.
The result was a share price that initially climbed, then stagnated. Quality suffered - leading to scandals, safety issues, and massive financial losses.
After Kay wrote his book, of course, Boeing took an even darker turn, with the company blamed for two fatal crashes on the new 737-MAX craft.
A few days ago Boeing posted its results for 2024: losses of $11.8 billion and revenue down 14%, with significantly fewer deliveries of new aircraft in a time when aviation is expanding.
Kay mentions a similar story about pharmaceutical company Merck, as told by Jim Collins in his book How The Mighty Fall.
Here’s George Merck, who was president of the firm from 1925 to 1950:
“We never try to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered that, the larger they have been.”
Yet when CEO Ray Kilmartin implemented a new company mission - “being a top-tier growth company” – it led to over-vigorous marketing of products like Vioxx which caused heart complaints in some people and led to extensive payouts through litigation.
The lesson:
Oblique approaches are less muscular and seem more unsatisfying at the time, but often end up being more successful.
Why?
They take full account of human irrationality.
It seems important for humans to have missions or goals that cannot be quantified, and indeed pursue things that often make no sense in respect of the bottom line.
Sir James Black and George Merck intuited that it’s only in pursuing higher-level objectives that you create an organization that is motivated to outperform. Profit comes as a result of the greater meaning and value that you provide the world.
Look For Stepping Stones, Not Goals
The problem with goals - BIG goals, the ones that are really worth achieving - is that the paths to many of them are not known in advance.
This is the argument of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (2015) by American computer science academics Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman.
When you start out on something, the most important thing is to find the right “stepping stones” - meaning, the elements you will need to combine to create something truly new or original.
Every great advance or invention is like a big room full of objects, say Stanley & Lehman. Only in retrospect can you see which objects - or stepping stones - really relate to each other.
For instance:
The first computers used vacuum tubes, but these originally had nothing to do with computing. Few would have seen their role, other than the tinkerer playing around with materials.
Until Chester Carlson created the modern photocopier, no-one had connected three unrelated technologies – photoconductivity, electrostatic charging, and powder (toner) development - in the novel way he did.
Cryptography, double entry bookkeeping, and Hayekian decentralization all existed before bitcoin was invented. It took Satoshi Nakamoto to combine them into a new form of money based on a “blockchain” - an irreversible electronic ledger.
No-one thought that jazz, blues, gospel, and country would lead to an entirely new sound - rock n roll - that would take the world by storm, until Elvis Presley “played the fool” in the studio, combining these traditions in a novel way.
But if we know roughly how this process works, why aren’t more people coming out with amazing new inventions and cultural products every day?
The reason, Stanley & Lehman say, is that “the stepping stones that lead to ambitious objectives tend to be pretty strange. That is, they probably aren’t what you would predict if you are thinking only of your objective.”
Or to put it another way, “The problem is the stepping stone does not resemble the final product.”
A new and successful arrangement of elements is totally unpredictable beforehand.
Therefore only people who go deeply will find the secret structure.
In my own work, I’ve been surprised to discover that an immersion in Tibetan Buddhism is yielding insights into the nature of success. On the face of it, the concept of “emptiness” or neutrality has no link to achievement or prosperity, and yet I’m finding that it is central to it. I’ll go into why in another newsletter, but the point is that you just have to explore what you find fascinating, even there is no obvious end-goal.
Serendipitous Success
That not having objectives can be advantageous goes against everything our civilization stands for.
Setting a goal is an accomplishment in itself. It establishes momentum and shows you are “going somewhere”.
Yet goals can also be a security blanket that provide the illusion you are in control.
Stanley & Lehman delineate three paths:
Having clear objectives - which can take you very efficiently to the wrong place.
Aimless wandering - which won’t prepare you to find what you’re looking for.
Exploring a space - which involves playing around and finding the connections between things, leading to “serendipitous” discovery.
Remember, nature itself is a non-objective system.
Evolution creates ever more complex organisms that survive and reproduce, without any objective or grand design involved.
Many of the breakthroughs in art and science have come through the protagonist having no other aim than going deeply into what intrigued them.
My book Never Too Late To Be Great is full of examples of successful people who seemed to walk on many random, unconnected stepping stones to finally cross their river of success.
People like Emily Kngwarreye, who worked on outback cattle stations for much of her adulthood. She had painted on women’s bodies and drawn in sand all her life, but a government-sponsored batik project allowed Emily to express herself in a new medium. When she got her hands on canvas and acrylic paint, the results were amazing. In the latter years of her life, her paintings fetched millions and her style was adopted for airplane livery.



You may be thinking:
What about something like JFK’s goal for man to land on the moon? Wasn’t this an example of the need for a big goal to achieve something?
Actually, if the goal had been articulated even 10-15 years earlier, it would have been fantastical. It was only by the mid-1960s that the elements of computing power and rocket capability became sufficient that a manned moon mission became possible.
With the right stepping stones in place, it became a case of implementation, if on a grand scale.
Final word
The pursuit of novelty leads you to information or experience that is rich in complexity, even if it has no apparent direction.
So ask yourself: What stepping stones are you ignoring? What seemingly unrelated passions might lead you somewhere unexpected?
Allow yourself to pursue the novel even if it has no apparent use.
Allow yourself to explore with no obvious goal in mind.
Find your stepping stones.
Direct paths can be dumb, and oblique ones smart.
Do add your thoughts and experiences in the Comments.
Please Like this post if you found it insightful.
Very kind regards,
Tom
Tom Butler-Bowdon
Author - 50 Classics
Bestselling series in 26 languages
Editor of the Capstone Classics
Making wisdom accessible - 1 million copies sold
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Anyone who has read Tom’s books would hardly be surprised that he has described uncommon ways of reaching goals without heading directly for them. In his book, “Never Too Late To Be Great”, he makes it clear that we often have more time than we think to achieve wonderful things. I liked it so much that I wrote a LinkedIn article about it to call attention to it. It might just be the motivation needed to move us to something great. Thanks for all the encouragement and information you provide Tom. I’ll be 80 next month, but I know it’s still not too late! Keep it coming. And I’ll keep trying obliquely to accomplish something worthwhile…
Loved the way you presented this Tom. A subtle yet factual reminder that accepting our locus of control plays a significant role in our ability to achieve those goals that we aspire to. Often times, there is an element of good fortune that supplements our persistence, determination and commitment toward achieving whatever desires we have determined to be worthy of our focus.