Living with Insanely Low Expectation
0.01%. While in rehab I started asking myself if I could make myself better by that margin in a single day. I had, as it turns out, pushed myself to such an extreme low that any directional change towards climbing myself out of that pit seemed like a win. So I settle on a single one-hundredth of a percent as my daily goal.
I measured my improvement in many objective and subjective ways. Was I nice to someone in a situation where I would have previously been frustrated? Even if I was able to dissipate the frustration or annoyance 1 milli-second quicker than I would have yesterday I chalked it up as a win for the day. Did I pull that rowing machine bar one extra pull after doing my daily 2,500 meter row before lunch? 0.01% improvement complete.
What I found when I applied the 0.01% rule was that I was generally not constraining my improvement to a single aspect of my life (e.g. I was being nice AND pulling that row bar one more time). Additionally my improvements were generally a tad bit larger than 0.01%. What I discovered is that choosing to do the work is really the barrier that we face to improvement, not the actual work itself.
Want a surefire way to burn yourself out fast? Set your expectations too high and as soon as you start missing or stumbling, instead of keeping at it, you’ll eventually come up with an excuse to not do the work and things will start falling apart. I haven’t gone more than two days straight without dedicated time committed to moving my body since I went into rehab. That’s including time in the hospital with my wife and daughter. This is not because I have some insanely high physical fitness goal, nor am I a discipline machine. Instead, it’s because my measure of success is so God awfully low, that I have removed the fear of missing the mark from my mind.
Let me bring some numbers in to prove my point. Below I have a chart. It lays out a 1% daily improvement mindset versus a 0.01% mindset and maps the percentage improvement across a single year. The results are staggering. Taking a 1% mindset leads to an improvement a year later of nearly 38x (38,000%!!!) from your initial starting point! Compared to a measly ~4% gain over a year for the 0.01% mindset.
Why, then, would I highly suggest to select the lower target goal if such improvement is possible with daily 1% gains? Pretty simple - you’ll find more joy in life and you’ll discover a level of stick-to-it-ness that you never realized you could attain. Plus, a 38x improvement in most areas of life are just straight unreasonable. Today, I can crank out about 20 pushups before I take a break. I’d have to be able to do 756 non-stop pushups a year later to keep up with the 1% improvement mindset. Likely not happening.
Finding joy due to setting your expectations low was a complete surprise to me. I never realized how ridiculously high of standards I was setting for myself, coupled with such a severe lack of self-forgiveness that caused me to absolutely hate myself for my inability to achieve my goals. I had friends open up to me and tell me I had to relax and be kind to myself, but I wouldn’t have any of it. How can one achieve great accomplishments without a rigid application of self-discipline and exceedingly high standards?
What has completely shocked me is how much more I have achieved by starting my day with low expectations. Today is the middle of a hectic week. Family in town, appointments to make, projects to finish for Chapter 3 Stigma, an actual work day to fit in and I have one single item on my to-do list for today: “Write one new paragraph for the newsletter”. It’s 5:56 am and I have obliterated that item already. I have momentum behind me, and I feel a sense of accomplishment.
Because I exceeded my own expectations for today, I will sit down to write tomorrow as well… or maybe I won’t even need to because my momentum from achieving today’s objective is carrying me forward and I really have no reason to stop writing now. Maybe I can just finish things up and go into a quick edit mode tomorrow. Next morning follow up - I indeed only had to edit this morning.
To tie this all back to my battle with alcoholism - when I would commit to a long stint of sobriety (always doing it for someone else, mind you), I would set these crazy expectations and very long and difficult to achieve goals. No drinking for 9 months. End of story, just gut through it, don’t actually work on yourself, the goal is simply not to drink. And then something would catch me off guard or throw me for a loop and end it all. Alcohol would come rushing back into my life in a more powerful way because I felt I had come up short and I felt no sense of control.
Today as I continue on my path of active recovery I am focused on today and today only. Yes, I am committed to a life in active recovery, but I can’t tell you if that means three more days or three more decades. I don’t know that fact so I’m not going to worry about hitting my 30 year sobriety date today. Today I am going to stay in active recovery until my head hits the pillow tonight. Then tomorrow I’ll reassess, but I have a high level of confidence I’m going to wake up with a desire to stay on the path of recovery.
Perhaps the best thing of all for me is to remember that my serenity is inversely proportional to my expectations. The higher my expectations of… other people are, the lower is my serenity. I can watch my serenity level rise when I discard my expectations. But then my “rights” try to move in, and they too can force my serenity level down. I have to discard my “rights,” as well as my expectations, by asking myself, How important is it, really? How important is it compared to my serenity, my emotional sobriety? And when I place more value on my serenity and sobriety than on anything else, I can maintain them at a higher level—at least for the time being.
-Alcoholics Anonymous pg. 420
I have experienced a lot of relapse, in my own story before entering into active recovery, as well as witnessing close friends relapse time and time again after rehab. There are numerous warning signs that can indicate an individual is at high risk of relapse, but one that stands out and is pertinent to this topic is the person who talks about achieving years and years of sobriety ahead of really finding themselves on the path of active recovery and putting in the work required on themselves.
An additional and similar red flag is when you realize that another person’s ability to stay sober or in active recovery is actually dependent on the actions and outcomes of others. I myself have gone back to alcohol following a stint of sobriety after being exposed to someone else struggling. I tried helping them and set my expectations to a level that ‘I can solve their problem AND my problem… I’ll be a hero!’
My constitution was so weak at that time that as soon as I witnessed someone else struggling, the flood gates opened for me and alcohol came crashing back into my life. I have a well loved friend that relapsed because he had to intervene with another one of our acquaintances after that other individual’s relapse. It threw my friend into a two week long bender where he disappeared on us.
So what does this have to do with expectations? Ultimately - Don’t expect anything from anybody. Staying on the path of active recovery is entirely YOUR responsibility and should not depend on any other individual. So don’t hold people accountable or expect them to keep you on the path. The beautiful thing about this? You’ll likely find loved ones who do step up and help you along the way, but that can’t be your baseline expectation, it has to be genuinely unexpected from your perspective.
The World Happiness Report was released recently and one of my personal favorite authors and thinkers Michael Easter published a piece about it. In it, he delves into the findings but at its core is our culture’s perverse relationship with happiness, achievement and ultimately success. In my experience, expectations are at the root of the vast majority of the gaps that we face as a society and individuals.
2% with Michael Easter - 5 Lessons from the World's Biggest Happiness Study
If, somehow in some way, you have managed to read and stick with the newsletter this far (some live expectation setting for you there on my part), I would challenge you to look for a single area in your life and question your expectations. Maybe its your marriage, your friendships, your routines, your work performance. Select one area and really push against your expectations. Try to set them low, and mean it for at least a week. Don’t expect anything from anyone, say the serenity prayer in moments when you need to accept life on life’s terms and I believe that you’ll witness yourself find joy in life when your expectations are exceeded.
I just turned a desire to complete three sentences into a new post. That feels pretty dang great.
All the best, that’s all I’ve got.
Kyle