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 l...