345: borrowed goals
Our goals are often not our own. They’re borrowed from the expectations we imagine society has for us. From childhood, we watch our parents, friends, mentors, and later celebrities or cultural icons striving toward something, and we quietly take note. When they achieve, we don’t just celebrate them, we often internalize their achievement as an implicit instruction: that is what I should want too.
The French philosopher René Girard named this phenomenon “mimetic desire.” His claim was simple but unsettling: we rarely want things in isolation. Instead, we want them because others around us desire them. Our goals become copies, echoes of what we see others reaching for.
As a personal trainer, I’ve seen this countless times. Clients walk in and tell me they want to look a certain way, lift a certain weight, or achieve a certain milestone. But when I ask the follow-up question — why? — their answers often fall flat. They’ll point vaguely to a celebrity physique, a friend’s progress, or even just say, “I don’t know, it just seems like what I should do.” Their vision of success is not born from their own reflection but borrowed from someone else’s story.
It’s tempting to assume some goals are universally desirable — health, wealth, status. And to some degree, that’s true. But even these broad categories are deeply personal in practice. Health might mean dropping twenty pounds for one person and building joint resilience for another. Wealth might mean erasing debt for one, accumulating assets for another. Status might mean recognition in one’s profession, while for another it’s simply being respected within their family or community. The numbers attached to each — body fat percentages, bank balances, titles — are unique, but we often don’t take the time to define them for ourselves.
Why? Because asking, What do I really want? is hard work. It forces us to confront uncertainty, to wrestle with questions that don’t have easy answers. Borrowing someone else’s goal spares us that burden. Mimicking the visible markers of success gives us the illusion of clarity. It feels safer to chase something already validated by the world than to sit in the discomfort of designing a vision from scratch.
And it’s not just about the thing itself. We also mirror what appears to bring admiration, respect, or attention. If someone is celebrated for their fitness, wealth, or achievements, we unconsciously conclude that having what they have will bring us the same reward. We rarely stop to ask whether their recognition comes from that attribute at all, or if it comes from something deeper, or even unrelated. Still, we latch onto the surface-level marker and pursue it, hoping to inherit the admiration attached to it.
The problem is that these borrowed goals rarely unfold as we expect. They look straightforward when observed from the outside, but the lived reality is messier. And when obstacles appear, as they always do, borrowed goals lack staying power. Resolve falters, because the desire was never truly ours to begin with. We abandon the pursuit and interpret it as failure. But how do you truly “fail” at something you didn’t authentically want in the first place?
Perhaps this is where failure needs rethinking. What feels like falling short is often just the unraveling of imitation. We follow someone else’s map, hoping it will lead us to the same destination, only to realize the terrain doesn’t match our steps. It’s not that we took the wrong turn, it’s that we were never meant to take their path at all.
This isn’t a tragedy; it’s an inflection point. We should follow others only until their path no longer makes sense for us. When the steps you’ve been copying stop lining up, when the trail disappears, when the “why” behind the goal no longer holds weight — that’s not failure. That’s the moment imitation ends and originality begins. That’s the signal you’ve stepped off the borrowed road and onto your own.