Chapter 3 -- Which goals?

 
Regardless of whether those boys ever reached their distal goals, they moved forward by seeing the connection between their distant dreams and the drudgery of daily life.

But the link between the two goals had inspired him along the way, and he took solace from the results. “On the whole,” Franklin concluded, “tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”