"We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal"
About this Quote
The real trap, Brault suggests, isn’t the brick wall; it’s the open door with a “Good Enough” sign on it. Obstacles are at least honest. They announce conflict, rally pride, invite creative problem-solving. A clear path to a lesser goal is seduction dressed as practicality: a route that feels efficient, socially legible, and immediately rewarding. You don’t have to fight for it, so you mistake ease for alignment.
Brault’s phrasing is doing quiet philosophical work. “Kept” implies custody, almost a soft imprisonment, as if we’re being held back by something that doesn’t look like a jailer. The “clear path” is the twist of the knife: clarity is usually marketed as virtue (plans, metrics, timelines), but here it becomes a weapon. The lesser goal doesn’t even need to be bad; it just has to be plausible enough to become permanent.
The subtext lands in familiar modern rituals: optimizing your career into a stable role that slowly edits out your stranger ambitions; choosing the relationship that makes sense on paper; chasing measurable wins because they’re easier to justify to other people and to your own anxious inner accountant. This is a critique of how we confuse momentum with meaning. The lesser goal wins because it offers immediate narrative coherence - you can explain it at dinner, you can post it, you can quantify it. The real goal, by contrast, is often messy, expensive, and socially inconvenient.
Brault isn’t romanticizing struggle. He’s warning that the smoothest road is often the one that quietly reroutes you.
Brault’s phrasing is doing quiet philosophical work. “Kept” implies custody, almost a soft imprisonment, as if we’re being held back by something that doesn’t look like a jailer. The “clear path” is the twist of the knife: clarity is usually marketed as virtue (plans, metrics, timelines), but here it becomes a weapon. The lesser goal doesn’t even need to be bad; it just has to be plausible enough to become permanent.
The subtext lands in familiar modern rituals: optimizing your career into a stable role that slowly edits out your stranger ambitions; choosing the relationship that makes sense on paper; chasing measurable wins because they’re easier to justify to other people and to your own anxious inner accountant. This is a critique of how we confuse momentum with meaning. The lesser goal wins because it offers immediate narrative coherence - you can explain it at dinner, you can post it, you can quantify it. The real goal, by contrast, is often messy, expensive, and socially inconvenient.
Brault isn’t romanticizing struggle. He’s warning that the smoothest road is often the one that quietly reroutes you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Goal Setting |
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