Success Quote by Roy T. Bennett

Bennett’s line is motivational writing at its most streamlined: it flatters the reader’s agency while quietly scolding their drift. “Great goals make great people” is less a description of human development than a moral bargain. If you choose an elevated target, you get to claim an elevated self. Greatness isn’t treated as a mysterious gift or a social accident; it’s framed as an outcome of intentionality. That’s the seduction: a democratic promise that selfhood can be engineered.

The second sentence sharpens the first into a kind of commonsense trap: “People cannot hit what they do not aim for.” It’s obvious, almost tautological, and that’s why it works. The quote borrows the authority of physics and archery to make ambition feel like realism. If you’re dissatisfied, the implied diagnosis isn’t bad luck or structural constraint; it’s that you didn’t set coordinates. The subtext is accountability with a motivational sheen: stop romanticizing potential, stop waiting for clarity, pick a direction and let effort follow.

Contextually, Bennett writes in the modern self-help tradition that competes with scrolling, burnout, and a gig economy that asks for endless hustle but offers uneven reward. The line functions as a portable mantra: short enough for a caption, clean enough to repost, pointed enough to sting. Its blind spot is also its power. By treating goals as the primary engine of “great people,” it compresses identity into productivity and risks implying that those who struggle simply aimed too low. But as rhetoric, it’s efficient: it turns vague aspiration into a concrete demand for a target.