Having High Expectations
No. You are not normal.
Having high expectations for yourself is great.
It’s an internal obligation of needing to meet a certain standard, compelling behavior that is conducive for winning.
High expectations for yourself at work will lead you to work long and fast, helping you climb the career ladder and get raises, promotions, and unexpected opportunities.
High expectations for yourself in the gym will lead you to consistency, progressive overload, and dieting, which translates to abs, strength, or whatever fitness goal you have.
It’s without a doubt having high expectations for yourself is generally a good thing. It’s something to be proud of.
An unexpected downside to having high expectations is falling out of touch with reality.
Slowly, you normalize what high expectations are.
To you, your high expectations are completely ordinary. You grapple with them, you strive for them, and you torture yourself if you fail to reach them.
You live and breathe with your high expectations. They become part of your identity and how you see yourself.
Your high expectations are not high expectations anymore. They simply are expectations. They become a minimal level of acceptable performance.
Like a drug addict who’s now looking for an even larger dose to feel a high, you keep raising the bar for what high expectations are. After all, you want to improve right?
Over time, your performance gradually moves away from what society understands as normal, yet you still think you are the norm.
You’re at the 95th percentile, yet you still think you’re average.
This creates friction when interacting with others and assessing your own strengths.
Since you believe you are the norm, you believe everyone must live like the way that you do.
You believe everyone works out everyday and eats their body weight in grams for protein.
You believe everyone works 60+ hours a week.
You believe everyone practices the fundamentals of good sleep hygiene or avoids the infinite scroll of social media.
And when people don’t meet your curated level of high expectations, you think they’re wrong. You think they’re weird.
You think: “doesn’t everyone live like I do?”
In reality, you’re the one in the wrong. You’re the weirdo. Not them.
When your high expectations become normal to you, you don’t realize your strengths.
You don’t realize how many standard deviations you are from what is considered normal.
Even as you enter new fields or climb to new heights. You believe everyone in this new stratosphere must be operating with the neuroticism for performance you have.
After all, you’ve been chasing these people for so long. You think there’s a reason why they’re so far ahead.
But when you finally reach them, you have a pang of disappointment.
You think: “How come they don’t meet my expectations?”
Thinking it’s just a fluke, you tear yourself apart to meet your own rising bar of expectations.
Certainly, the next group of people you’re trying to catch will be everything you expected.
The cycle of having continually rising expectations continues.