Success Quote by Laurie Anderson

In a culture that treats ambition like cardio, Laurie Anderson’s line lands like a small act of sabotage. “I’ve been trying to avoid goal-oriented behavior” isn’t a confession of laziness; it’s a deliberate refusal of the productivity script that turns every day into a checklist and every self into a brand. The phrasing matters: “trying” signals discipline, not drift. Avoiding goals becomes its own practice, almost a counter-ritual to the cult of measurable outcomes.

Anderson’s work has long lived in the spaces where categories blur: performance art that borrows from pop, music that behaves like storytelling, technology used as a poetic instrument rather than a solution. In that context, goal-orientation looks less like virtue and more like a narrowing device. Goals imply a finish line; her art is built for the ongoing, the iterative, the weird detours that don’t justify themselves in advance. The subtext is an argument for attention over achievement: stay responsive, stay porous, don’t rush to convert experience into “results.”

It also reads as a quiet critique of the managerial mindset that seeped into creative life: grant applications, audience metrics, platform strategy. For an artist whose voice often observes modern life with deadpan clarity, avoiding goal-oriented behavior is a way to protect the fragile conditions where something unexpected can happen. It’s not anti-purpose; it’s anti-teleology. A reminder that making meaning isn’t the same thing as hitting targets, and that art’s most valuable outcomes are often the ones you couldn’t have planned.