🙈How Expectations Can Ruin Our Perfect Days🙈

Christian Champ

Apr 01, 2022

🔥Welcome to Volume #00083!🔥

I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.

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🙈How Expectations Can Ruin a Perfect Day🙈

Ridding a wave back into shore, I felt the disappointment roll over me. I failed to surf how I envisioned it. My performance missed my target.

The waves did their part. They showed up with size, giving me plenty of rides.

What I didn’t do was perform.

The experience failed to match my expectations.

I’m supposed to be in the wave at the right spot. I’m supposed to be cutting back when the wave loses power.

I’m supposed to build off where I left things the year before.

Sitting in paradise in Nosara, Costa Rica, the expectations ate at me. I successfully left the disappointment in the water, but the mistake was tasting it while in the water.

I surf about once a year for a week. The rhythm starts to come together, and then I’m back on a plane ride home. I start to improve as the trip ends.

"Expectations create agitation in mind, and then merging with oneself is not possible. The great Siddha Yoga master, Swami Chidvilasananda has said, "Expectation exists when there is fear."
Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery

My expectations kept getting in the way. Instead of surfing the wave and taking what was there, I remained greedy. I limited myself and my experience because of these damn expectations. The fear of wasting sessions since I only get seven days of surf crept into my mind space.

The correct answer is to take what is there. No second-guessing, no hope, no expectations, just raw concentration, effort, and doing.

When we bring the wall of expectations, we trip over them and crash into them.

It limits our progression and our possibilities.

What happens when we release the pressure we put on ourselves, letting us flow into the moment?

What happens when the moment is a gift instead of something that we need to maximize?

It took writing and reflecting on the trip to remind me of this. I needed to get out of the water to remember how to act in the water.

Imagine what we can do when we spit out that taste of failed expectations and just do the damn thing.

📓Things to Think About📓

Understanding and Mastering the Metagame to Get Good by Cedric Chin

We want to find the metagame in the things we care about. These things allow us to improve our results or beat the game when found.

We won't ever get really good if we don’t know the metagame.

You need to build up your basic skills to ever get to the metagame. First comes mastering “boring fundamentals,” and then you get to play the metagame.

We need to see the metagame and find the metagame when we want to get better. We need to remember that the metagame changes as the rules, tools, and technology change.

What is interesting about the meta is that metagames can only be played if you have mastered the basics of the domain. In MtG, Judo, and Splendor, you cannot play the metagame if you are not already good at the base game. You cannot identify winning strategies in MtG if you don’t do well in current MtG; you cannot adapt old techniques to new rules if you don’t already have effective techniques for competitive Judo.
What is true in sports is also true in real world domains like marketing and business; it is true even if you are aware of the meta’s existence. The nature of the metagame demands that you play the base game well. It lives on top of the pattern-matching that comes with expertise.
This seems like an obvious thing to say. But as with most such things, the second-order implications are more interesting than the first-order ones. For instance, because expertise is necessary to play the metagame, it is often useful to search for the meta in your domain as a north star for expertise. The way I remind myself of this is to say that I should ‘locate the meta’ whenever I’m at the bottom of a skill tree. Even if I can’t yet participate, searching for the metagame that experts play will usually give me hints as to what skills I must acquire in order to become good enough.

Scott Berry Kaufman on In Defense of the Psychologically Rich Life

We need to get out in the waves and see what happens. We need to put ourselves in positions where we chase the metagame and where we may succeed, or we may fail. No matter the outcome, the experiments and the chase create the good life.

In recent years, a long-neglected version of the good life has been receiving greater research attention: the psychologically rich life. The psychologically rich life is full of complex mental engagement, a wide range of intense and deep emotions, and diverse, novel, surprising and interesting experiences. Sometimes the experiences are pleasant, sometimes they are meaningful, and sometimes they are neither pleasant nor meaningful. However, they are rarely boring or monotonous.

Seth Godin Offers Guidance On Giving Feedback on Someone Else’s Work

A colleague and I got into a long conversation on the best ways to give and receive feedback. It is no small challenge. You need a ready listener to any feedback and perhaps, more importantly, the person giving feedback needs to make it practical and actionable.

Giving feedback is an immense skill and takes deep practice and concentration.

Seth offers a recipe to start with someone else’s work to critique as a way to make feedback that makes it easier for the person to hear. It gives the added benefit of helping you work on your feedback and alert the person to what you think is meaningful and important.

Powerful feedback lets people know that you care about them. It isn’t easy and takes guts and effort for both the giver and the receiver.

It’s easier to hear, because it’s not your work. They’re busy criticizing a chapter that JK Rowling wrote, or a logo that the late Milton Glaser created.
“Oh,” you’ll realize, “this isn’t about the work, it’s about me, it’s about someone trying to help me avoid heartache later.”
It turns out that most people are unpracticed and unprofessional at giving useful feedback. Learning to differentiate well-meaning fear-on-your-behalf from actually useful insight is a great first step in understanding who to ask when it really matters.

💣Words of Wisdom💣

"I was struggling to explain coaching, struggling to explain why it was that, to help people lead well, I was pushing to help them know themselves better." (Jerry Colonna, Reboot)

"As your skills increase, you will see your unique style become firm and recognizable. Guard it, nurture it, and cherish it, for your style expresses you. As with the Zen master-archer, the is yourself." (Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain)

"While in physics the opposite of a good idea is generally a bad idea, in psychology the opposite of a good idea can be a very good idea indeed: both opposites often work." (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)

"When we ship, we’re exposed. That’s why we’re so afraid of it. When we ship, we’ll be judged. The real world will pronounce upon our work and upon us. When we ship, we can fail. When we ship, we can be humiliated." (Steven Pressfield, Do the Work)

"A meaningful path is a path of action. The goal is achieved through practice. Without practices, a path is mere philosophy. Be careful of that. A philosophy is thought about and talked about, but a path is for walking." (Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery)

"The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school." (Haruki Murakami and Philip Gabriel, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)

"When someone sees the world differently, they show up differently, and they create results that looked impossible a moment before. That is a miracle." (Steve Chandler, Rich Litvin, The Prosperous Coach)