Week 85 - "The world doesn't owe you anything. It was here first" - Mark Twain

Around a year ago, I wrote about how sometimes, you have to jump into the deep end of life and take on everything at once. At the time, that seemed like a pretty good idea, but almost one year later, it feels like that “drowning” phase of jumping into the deep end is a lot harder and longer than I remember it.

Maybe it’s maturing or just having more pressing responsibilities, but for the first time in my life, I’ve started to feel like some of the many things I’m juggling are going to have to drop.

Which is a terrible feeling.

Yet I’m still hesitant to walk back on my words from a year ago.

In light of everything going on in my life and all the stress it’s bringing me, I still see light at the end of it all. The only difference is that it might not be as bright as I once expected it to be.

However, I’m beginning to realize that’s pretty normal.

I love a fairytale ending just as much as the next person, but the older I get, the more I realize how uncommon they are.

I’m aware that might come off as very cynical, but I do honestly think things will always work out.

It’s just what you think that’ll look like and what reality has in store for you probably won’t be the same.

So like everything else, it’s about managing your expectations. If you can’t settle for anything other than the storybook ending for whatever it is you’re doing, you’re probably going to be disappointed. But if you can adjust what you think you deserve, you’ll be much better off.

I say this all because of a recent experience where I worked extremely hard towards something, and had the result be so far from what I had hoped, I wondered if it was all for nothing. It was a terrible feeling and made me question if there was even a point to all the stress I put myself through.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that my disappointment stemmed from the expectation that all of my work warranted a perfect ending. I thought I deserved a certain outcome for everything I had done, so anything but that would be a letdown.

In reality, no one is more or less deserving of any particular outcome, regardless of how much effort they put in. We often assume that the winners are the most deserving, and yes, in many cases, they are. But if someone doesn’t win, does that mean they aren’t deserving? I don’t think so.

Our mistake is that we assume we deserve some outcome for something we may have caused when in reality, there is no such relationship.

Nothing you do or don’t do makes you more or less deserving of what’s going to happen. All it does is increase or decrease the probability of certain outcomes.

The sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll be able to separate how hard you work from the result you expect. And once you can do that, you'll be able to work independently of the outcome and find joy in the effort itself.

An ability that’ll take you very far in life.

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