Low Expectations = High Success

If you’re like most people, you’re not much of anybody. You wake up; go to a place that pays you to perform a function a well trained monkey could do, eat a sandwich, go home and scream at the kids you wish you never had, or if you don’t have kids, sit and stare gloomily at the wall and sulk about your abortions. Maybe you go see the Grand Canyon or drive a jet powered watercraft over some fragile marine ecosystems before you drop dead. Maybe you don’t. Perhaps you catch herpes from an Indonesian coworker you promised to marry the night before she got deported and decide to play dumb two years later when your newlywed wife comes down with her first flare-up, letting her think she’s the one who contracted them first. Or maybe you don’t. Big deal. These aren’t the types of things that will get you into any history books, meaning that you’ll be forgotten soon after you croak – a fact that sticks in the craw of most peoples’ subconscious minds.

If you’re like most people, you regularly experience an urge to take some initiative, to assert and even apply yourself to become “somebody”. A voice in the back of your head might say something like, “Hey there, you know you could really make something of yourself if you get up off your butt and try. Maybe you could be an optometrist or one of those chefs on TV or some crap.”

Paranoid schizophrenics also hear voices. The smart ones ignore them or take medication to make them stop.

Still, people not only entertain such meddlesome urges, they pay hard earned money to attend seminars and buy products to draw them out and nurture their insidious messages. They fill their heads with insane propaganda that tells them that they’re special, that they have something unique to offer the world that will make them a lot of money and cause people they don’t know to give them nice compliments. They call it “Emotional Motivation”, but anyone with a functioning brain who’s managed to pay attention to the world around them for at least a few short periods of time during their life knows that that’s all psychobabble for malarkey, and buying into it is akin to purchasing a helicopter ride to the roof of big flaming ambition tower, from whose dizzying heights there’s only one way down.

Another form of motivation, branded “Intellectual Motivation” by its unscrupulous progenitors, is such an oxymoron that it doesn’t warrant discussion.

The truth is, regardless of how smart or talented you are, or think you are, there are always at least a million people better than you, making the probability of doing anything anybody would consider exceptional before dropping dead very, very low and not worth the effort.

Fortunately, none of the stark reality contained here is any reason to despair. Indeed, the fact that we’ll all be gone soon and either soon forgotten or remembered by people whose admiration we’ll never know because we’ll be dead can only be viewed as depressing to people who are trying way too hard to fulfill expectations that are way too high.

Lower your expectations and success will follow.

Though some may argue that the definition of success is highly subjective, my dictionary defines it as, “The favorable termination of attempts or endeavors”. This means that more success can be achieved by reducing the difficulty of the things you endeavor to attempt, demonstrating the value of keeping your expectations low. For instance, when I started my website, I set a goal to attract at least ten unique visitors a month, and so far I have achieved that. Also, as an example of a more short term goal, recently I endeavored to pick up an al pastor burrito from a Mexican restaurant down the street and eat it while watching the Chargers game on TV, and I managed to affect a favorable termination of that endeavor as well. I was successful, as I usually am, which literally qualifies me as a highly successful person.