You didn’t fail. You over-expected.
Managing expectations…
When I wrote my novel I expected it to be a bestseller asap and I thought I failed when it did not.
As a result I could not write more. I struggled with burn out for one and half year.
But reality was that I sold more copies than 95% of writers do. But I wanted more. I fantasized about my success all the time I was writing my book.
I started writing on Medium. The pattern was same, instead of concentrating on writing more I was constantly checking my stats. Soon, my stats were dictating frequency of my writing.
The point is failure is not absolute. It’s the result of too much expectation we have with success. And little success doesn’t mean failure.
Over expectations are results of our environment. We have been consuming rags to riches stories of spectacular successes through books and movies. We compare ourselves with these people. We imagine, we fantasize. And we feel defeated when our success is not as spectacular. How about stories that were not so spectacular. There are so many of them.
Actually, failure is just a state of mind. Often, it is result of our self-esteem crushing under burden of our expectations. And it’s a vicious cycle, our perceived failures stops us from perusing success consistently which results in more so called failures or little success. After trying hard for six months, I gave up on my novel so much that it was not available for sale up until recently.
So what we should do? We should manage our expectations. We should never be prisoner of our hopes. We should try to alienate our action (the thing that we control) from our results (the thing that we don’t).
Here is how to manage expectations:
- Show up. Act. No matter what. Consistency beats spikes in the long run.
- Stop looking at results and keep doing things. May be people who had wild success were lucky. So improve your chances of getting 'more' lucky by doing more work.
- Enjoy the journey instead of imagining about destination all the time.
- Make the process fun and part of your daily ritual results will follow sooner or later.
- Do things from place of love not rewards. Make work it’s own reward.
- Cut you feedback loops. Resist the frequent temptation to check how you are doing and keep doing what you are doing. Ask yourself ‘would worrying about my results help them? Then what would?’
- Just remember you may need feedback to know what is working and what is not but don’t associate feedback with your self-worth.
- Overnight success is sheer luck. And in most of the cases it is not an overnight success. It’s just that we are ignoring the nights before the success.
- Work hard but have conservative expectation. Reach for the stars but plan your fall if you don’t. Fail smartly so that you can rise again.
