Borrowed goals feel fine until the hard part. That’s when you find out whose dream it really was.

A goal taken from somebody else sits perfectly comfortably while it stays easy, because the cost has not arrived yet. The hard stretch is the test: a goal that is genuinely yours draws a strange sort of fuel from difficulty, while a borrowed one just feels like being made to do something. That is useful information rather than shameful. Far better to find it out at eighteen than at thirty.

Notice what you do when your current goal gets properly hard. If the honest answer is resentment rather than stubbornness, ask whose idea it was.