If you have high hopes and expectations for yourself, you need to be realistic. I think being realistic and workng consistently is one of the best ways to succeed in life. If you’re unrealistic, you make crazy decisions, and you fail. If you’re realistic, you’re often consistent and able to slowly achieve results. It takes a while, but you’ll oftentimes be able to gain a clear vision of what you’re doing after a few years. Once that happens, you’ll be able to live up to your most unrealistic expectations. Or at least, you’ll have a better shot than if you had adopted them from the beginning.
Unrealistic expectations cause you to pick the wrong industries
If you have unrealistic expectations, you often end up choosing the industries with the highest obvious starting salaries. If you’re young and dumb, this often results in choosing a career related to entertainment or athletics. Making this mistake young is ok. The skills you learn can be parlayed into success elsewhere. But generally speaking, you want to learn to make money behind the scenes as quickly as possible. Focus on finance, healthcare, and tech. Don’t let the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry allow you to ruin your future.
Unrealistic expectations cause you to quit early
If you expect to get rich quick, you’re bound to quit nearly every endeavour you engage in way too early. Getting rich can happen fairly quickly. But in a lot of places, especially poor countries, it takes time. If you want to get rich or be successful at something, you’re going to have to put in the time.
Unrealistic expectations make you lazier
You’ll just work less and get a lot less done. You’ll look for shortcuts that don’t exist and expect the “right” thing to feel easy. In reality, we live in a world where it’s fairly difficult to acheive high performance. People work for years in order to achieve their goals. Unrealistic expectations will have you believe that life is all fun and leisure. It isn’t. Expect to work hard for what you have.
Unrealistic expectations make you jealous
If you believe everyone’s bragging, you’re going to be jealous of what you perceive to be their sucesses. You’re also likely to end up making mistakes and getting emotional over stuff that doesn’t matter. Keep your espectations in line with reality. If people brag to you, view them as outliers, not the norm.
Unrealistic expectations make you feel incompetent
If you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to feel like you aren’t able to get anything done. You’re going to feel sad and useless. You want to be ambitious, but being unrealistic is only going to ruin your mood. Teeat yourself nicely. Be honest with yourself, but be kind to yourself.
Unrealistic expectations make you overspend
If you think everyone around you is balling, your spending is going to increase. It’s important to remember that generally speaking, they aren’t. Work hard and keep your spending under control knowing that if you have time freedom and financial stability, you’re dramatically ahead of the curve.
Avoid the sunk cost fallacy
A problem with being too realistic is that you tend to think certain things take more work than they actually do. You get sucked into useless projects, and set yourself back months or years. This can lead to a lot of pain if you don’t think things through. Make sure your projects have timelines and end dates.
Avoid becoming delusional
One of the worst things you can do is start beliveing that you deserve stuff that you don’t or that your time has value that it doesn’t. One of the worst things you can do in this life is become delusional. To avoid becoming delusional, make sure you keep abreast of industry standards, economic events, and new technologies.
Set realistic expectations by doing research
If you do some research about what you want on the front end, you avoid being disaappointed. Find people who are successful, and talk to them. Learn about your country, industry, job, or social group on
Think long term
If you are able to think long term, you will set realistic expectations, and be able to make fairly grand visions pan out. I think that can lead to some pretty outstanding productivity, success, and beauty.
Go for stretch goals
If you think long term and have realistic expectations, you should be able to carefully map out and plan out how you’re going to take over the world. Going for strerch goals isn’t hard if you’re committed, steadfast, and have realistic goals in mind.
Don’t become discouraged
This is a bit of a see saw. On one end of the tilt, if you do too much stuff that’s gassing you uo, you’re going to make mistakes. But be realistic about normal people’s successes by your age.Unrealistic exoectations destroy productivity. If you have realistic expectations and do what it takes to fulfill them, then you’re much better off than the person who holds out for perfection. We live in a time where there’s a lot of positive growth happening, but a lot of people expect gains too quickly. Don’t expect quick gains. Expect results but expect to put in years. This general principle applies to every area of life. Expect a lot of yourself and work hard, but keep your expectations in check.
Thanks for paying attention.
