To do good work you need to have confidence. To have confidence, you need to believe in your ability to do good work and you need to be confident in the work you have done.
There is a large subjective element to that confidence. That is why there are so many people out there who do good work but feel terrible and insecure. They should feel confident in their work but they are defeated by unrealistically high expectations. As day after day passes feeling like a defeat, the urge to give up gets ever greater until they eventually quit.
Imagine a baseball player that expects to hit a home run at every at bat, they will feel bad about going 3/5 with a double and two singles in a game. But relative to general expectations that is a very good day. If they could do that every day, they would be the best baseball player ever. But if they feel like they’ve failed every single game their performance will inevitably suffer. To get on track they need to change their expectations.
How do you set realistic expectations?
First, you get honest with yourself. We like to imagine that we can get a million things done in one day, but if you find that day after day you aren’t finishing what you set out to do, then you don’t have realistic expectations.
Second, you ask the people around you. You never want to do less than what you are capable of simply because the people around you are happy, but there are natural limitations to our ability to set expectations. Information from others about the quality of your work being good does not mean you should let yourself off the hook or try to do better. But if everyone is telling you that you are doing a good job, but you go to sleep feeling like a failure every day that is a sign that you should reevaluate your expectations.
To do great work over the long-term, you need to be building confidence by creating results in line with your expectations. Part of that is getting better and improving your results, but a big part is keeping your expectations in line.
Leave a Reply