Expectations versus reality - Issue #34
How many times have you wanted things to happen in a way and ended up being quite the opposite?
For as long as I can remember, it seems like the world always revolved around certain expectations.
For instance:
You’re expected to attend a good school, pursue college, build a career, get married, have kids, buy a house, maybe extend family, go on family vacations, get a bigger house, grow old, have grandkids, die.
If you put in a lot of work, you expect to be very successful.
If you go to college, you expect to get a high paid job.
If you start a blog, you expect to earn a lot of money from writing.
If you start writing, you expect to become the best selling author.
However, all of the things that I’ve written up there, the reality might be far from different:
You want to travel and family life is not in the cards at the moment.
You work yourself off, but fail to get appreciated by your company, so you end up being burnt out and underpaid. Or maybe your startup doesn’t work out.
You attend college, but don’t know how to sell yourself, so job hunting becomes hard.
You start having a blog, but traction doesn’t happen fast enough, you lose motivation and you quit.
You start writing but don’t have the network to get published or don’t know marketing techniques for self-publishing.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t expect things to happen or have bigger goals to work towards. I’ve always been the type to chase the bigger picture. What’s the hardest thing ever? I’m doing it. That was my approach to things. However, living for expectations and just for the future, made me miserable. Especially when you are after long term goals and the goals keep postponing it’s hard to keep yourself afloat. If you’re living for just what will happen in the future and condition yourself that you will be happy when you live up to the expectation, that’s no way of living.
There is this concept called Finite and Infinite Games. In a finite game, we know that we have losers and winners. So you play a game to achieve one thing and one thing only with the outcome that you are either a winner or a loser. That puts a lot of pressure on someone. In an infinite game, you have neither winners nor losers. You know you are playing a long-term game in which possibilities are infinite so basically, you have an infinite number of chances to try different things, experience and continuously learn. I believe that implementing the concept of infinite games in your life, might take some of the pressure off. I am not saying that finite games are not useful, but in my opinion, playing continuously finite games might lead to a lot of distress, burnout, and constant dissatisfaction with life.
I do believe that a mix of finite and infinite games approaches can be quite useful to live a fulfilling life, where you live in the moment but you’re also hopeful for the future.
What about you? What's your approach in life? Are you familiar with the concept of Finite and Infinite Games?
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