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The Hell of High Expectations
You’re doing this to yourselves.
Humans tell themselves three grand lies: memories, thoughts and expectations. Memories are a distortion of the past, thoughts are a distortion of the present, and expectations are a distortion of the future.
Why are they lies? Well, our memories are imperfect, our thoughts are poisoned by bias, and expectations are usually wrong. Nothing happened exactly as we remember it, nothing is happening exactly as we think it is, and nothing turns out as we expect.
Today, I want to tell you a tiny story about the third lie: expectations.
I think one of our grand goals in life, if we want to boil it down to its essence and most general of terms, at least on an individual level, is satisfaction. It’s what we strive for. Satisfaction is sort of the blended area of the Venn diagram between contentment, pride and bliss. We take pleasure in knowing things mostly turned out well, that things are mostly okay, that the job was well done, and our life’s work was appreciated. Satisfaction can come from a warm cookie, a completed project, a moment of pride, a kind word. Satisfaction can from from almost anywhere — Mick Jagger be damned.
However, satisfaction can also be sabotaged before we even reach those said moments: by what? By high expectations. Let’s…
