The Anatomy of a Failure: My Unreasonable Expectations
I came across an interesting post from Brian Kim this morning. He was talking about setting expectations, and since I’m always being accused of setting unreasonable ones, I just had to stop and read it.
A couple of things in the article really got my attention. First, he divides the responses to setting expectations into three types. I’m definitely a “type B” — the person who sets really high expectations for themselves, then crashes and burns when the reality sets in that they’ll never be met.
The second thing that really got me thinking was this line: “You take one action and EXPECT NOTHING.”
That’s such an outlandish way of thinking for someone like me, who in addition to setting unreasonable expectations also feels the need to micromanage the whole plan down to the tiniest of details. Can you say self-sabotaging control freak with a super-sized case of overwhelm? That would be me. :)
The more I think about it, the more I definitely like the idea of taking one action and seeing what comes of it. Especially when I’m trying to tell myself that I can write an extreme amount of content in a short amount of time. (At the risk of truly embarrassing myself, you can see the last, most unreasonable of my goals lists on The Introverted Marketer’s blog.)
And while I can admit now that it was a nice idea to think I could accomplish all of that, the truth of the matter is I had no real idea when I made that list whether I’d even get a quarter of it done in the three months I gave myself.
What Kim says makes sense to me now (a classic case of hindsight being 20/20):
“…you shouldn’t expect anything IN THE BEGINNING, BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOTHING to base those expectations on.”
He’s right. I can say with complete emotional detachment now that my content writing experiment was an unqualified failure. I had no systems in place, no real concrete plan of action other than to get up and write my little fingers off every day.
Now that I’ve pretty much squandered three months on an impossible task — so impossible, in fact, that I haven’t written hardly anything in those three months — it’s time to try something different.
The first thing I have decided on is that I will not set any content goals whatsoever for the next few weeks until I see what I can reasonably accomplish in a day. Instead of saying I’m going to write 100 articles in a month, this time I’m saying that I will devote 4 hours a day to content creation, and see how much I can complete in those 4 hours. If I do this for the next two weeks I will have a better idea, when crafting my plan for the next three months, of what I can reasonable hope to get done.
The bonus of doing it this way is that at least by focusing for the next two weeks on seeing what I can without expectations, I will have made a bit of a dent in that huge list despite myself.
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Tagged with: Add new tag • Brian Kim • content creation • expectations • plans • setting goals • writing
Filed under: Goals and Challenges
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I just found your site thru Zen Habits. Looking forward to hitting the archives.
Anyways, that quote you pulled out is something I learned earlier this year. For me, the expectations or outcome can be set at first but becomes adjusted by a system of trial and error or an ongoing learning and adapting process which may see me, in the end, reach a different objective then what was set in the outcome. But, if I paid attention during the process I find that where I do end up feels more ‘correct’ then where I was aiming in the first place. Did that make sense? :)