Kenneth O. Stanley

“Objectives are well and good when they are sufficiently modest, but things get a lot more complicated when they’re more ambitious. In fact, objectives actually become obstacles towards more exciting achievements, like those involving discovery, creativity, invention, or innovation—or even achieving true happiness. In other words (and here is the paradox), the greatest achievements become less likely when they are made objectives. Not only that, but this paradox leads to a very strange conclusion—if the paradox is really
true then the best way to achieve greatness, the truest path to “blue sky” discovery or to fulfill boundless ambition, is to have no objective at all.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective

“you have to acquire some kind of knowledge to continue to produce novelty, it means that novelty search is a kind of information accumulator about the world in which it takes place. The longer the search progresses, the more information about the world it ends up accumulating. And of course information and complexity go hand in hand—more complex behaviors require more information.”
― Kenneth O. Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective