
The future is full of possibilities. When you think about what could happen or for that matter, what you want to happen, it is possible to get carried away. It is possible to get lost in picturing what life could look like.
And sometimes, when life doesn’t meet our expectations and when our assumptions don’t hold up, we suffer. We suffer because all that energy we had built up to channel in a particular way, now has nowhere to go.
But you cannot live without having expectations and without making assumptions. Without them, you cannot navigate the world. So what we need is a way to deal with situations where our expectations and assumptions fail.
What we need is error bars and backups.
Error bars help you to be sincere about what to expect and assume. Error bars help you to not take your expectations and assumptions too seriously — and not too lightly either. They are the regulators that help you manage your intensity and help you turn it up or down as needed.
Backups are alternative channels for your energy to be put into when Plan A fails. As the Navy SEALS say: two is one, and one is none. Having a backup allows you to channel your energy somewhere, even if all other options are taken away. It gives all that tension somewhere to go.
So expectations and assumptions are necessary. They are evil only if you don’t know how to regulate and use them.
