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Follow your dreams. Be the best and brightest. Rise to the top. Innocent words of goodwill. They encourage personal expectations, ambitions, competitiveness, hunger for success – all positive traits, right? Perhaps on average these words that encourage others to set their sights higher inspire people, but for individual cases, those words could be ill-fitting and set people up to pursue empty dreams. We could be well-meaning when we tell others we expect great things from them. But when we do so, do we not create discontentment for their current state of being and misdirect them from goals that are truly fulfilling? People have a baseline of expectations that is linked to their happiness and sense of self-worth. A few positive encouragements will raise the standard of expectations above the baseline. This is often good; it is the impetus that drives us to achieve bigger, better, greater things. But it can also be detrimental; expectations escalate, such that we derive less and less satisfaction from meeting a higher and higher standard of expectations. In my 12 years of education in Singapore (especially the last 6 years), I have been conditioned to expect great things from myself. How could I have been otherwise? My school environment consisted of brilliant, capable students, and every day someone would win some competition, award, or complete a project, internship, or ace an academic paper. Outstanding becomes ordinary, becomes expected. So many times, following the crowd, I chased achievements that were expected of me, but that held little meaning. Case in point, I took up H3 (higher 3) Maths as an "A" level subject knowing that I had no interest in graph theory, combinatorics, 1st & 2nd order differential equations or plane geometry. What kept myself and probably others attending lectures/tutorials on such a difficult and alienating subject twice a week, only to fail it (not unexpectedly), can only be attributed to misplaced expectations; the goals not aligned with the person but an ideal. Sometimes, because of lack of introspective reflection, people falsely associate happiness and sense of self-worth with an arbitrary standard of expectations. People tell us, or we tell ourselves, that we deserve the next promotion, a bigger house, a fancier car, a bigger paycheck, the list of expectations goes on… How many of these things truly gratify us? Do they not simply distract us from the truly fulfilling and meaningful? Sometimes, it is worthwhile to take stock of what has been accomplished, what we have to be grateful for, and redirect efforts toward things that will continue to bring us personal fulfillment. Instead of proffering the same, not necessarily fitting, stock phrases of encouragement to others, perhaps we should tell others to manage their expectations, to reexamine their lives and make worthwhile goals. Tell them to set their own standard of expectations, not live others'. We need not be success stories in others' eyes, just our own. |
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