Any suitably aspirational goal will require we complete a bunch of steps before we can cross them off our list, and the stair-step nature of these paths can cause us to lose sight of the actual thing we hope to accomplish, losing ourselves in the intermediary sub-goals that will supposedly get us there.

We may then commit ourselves to attracting a bunch of social media followers, glad-handing the right people, or accumulating a pile of wealth, and with time, these sub-goals can come to seem like the actual goals: like things we truly care about, rather than the things that are meant to help us achieve the things we truly care about.

This distinction is important, partly because there are many ways to complete a given path, and if we fixate too much on just one route, we may overlook others that are more navigable or more suited to us and the way we want to live our lives on a day-to-day basis.

It’s also important, though, because there are many forces in the world that will try to convince us that their intermediary sub-thing is the actual thing: social media fame is the point, not a point of leverage; wealth is the primary goal, not a means of achieving the primary goal; scoring points with the right professional colleagues becomes the apex of our ambitions, rather than being just one means of many to attaining our more vital objectives.

Any sufficiently grand undertaking will include multiple steps, and it’s important that we take those steps with as much care and intention as we can muster. There’s a lot to learn along the way, and each segment of the journey can lend us a lifetime of enjoyment, experience, and know-how if we pay attention.

That said, it’s vital that we don’t lose sight of the macro-scale purpose of these in-between things. If we’re not careful, the things meant to get us to the real things can consume all of our time, energy, and resources, leaving us bogged down with rewards we don’t want, challenges that no longer fulfill us, and a muddled sense of self, purpose, and direction.

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