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 if you have any or sit and stare gloomily at the wall, sulking about your abortions or inability to settle for someone as ugly as you if you don’t. 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’s deported and decide to play dumb two years later when your then 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 shit.”

Paranoid schizophrenics also hear voices, but if they’re smart they ignore them or take medication to make them stop.

And yet people not only entertain such meddlesome voices, 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 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 know that that’s psychobabble for malarkey, and buying into it is akin to purchasing a helicopter ride to a windowsill on the top floor 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 very, very low and not worth the effort, and even if you did manage to accomplish something “noteworthy” within the ephemeral boundaries of our mortal realm, you and everyone who was alive to witness it will be fertilizer soon, and corpses don’t read history books.

Fortunately, none of the stark reality contained in all of the preceding words is any reason to despair. Indeed, the fact that we’ll all be gone soon and either soon forgotten or remembered by people living outside of our lifetimes whose admiration of our accomplishments is completely meaningless on account 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 this 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, this last Sunday I endeavored to pick up an asada burrito from a Mexican restaurant down the street and eat it while watching the Chargers game, 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.

And for those who question the lack of “meaning” in increasing their level of success through lowered expectations, I suggest you take a walk outside of the city at night, look up at the stars and contemplate just how stupid you are.