road less travelled
ROHD LES TRAV-uld
roʊd lɛs ˈtrævəldListen
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Dictionary meaning
a course of action or life path that fewer people choose, associated with independence, creativity, and willingness to depart from convention in pursuit of something personally meaningful even at the cost of social approval or material security; derived from Robert Frost's 1916 poem The Road Not Taken, which describes a traveller choosing between two paths in a wood — though Frost's poem is widely misread as celebrating individualism when it actually reflects the retrospective narrative we construct about choices whose consequences we could not foresee; in popular usage the road less travelled has come to represent the celebration of unconventional choices, the romantic appeal of the uncommon path, and the value of discovering territory that collective wisdom has not mapped
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