Managing Expectations is Tiring

Hello everyone 👋

It’s been a while. I had to say goodbye to one of my best friends as he flew off to Vancouver this week. That kind of makes the end of summer real now, and soon enough we’ll all be going back to our separate lives once again. It’s quite bittersweet.

So a default setting of mine is to just write when my thoughts/feelings are all jumbled up. I mean, it’s more like a slew of words than anything poetic or Shakespearean, but I actually find that it helps me lay everything out on paper (or in this case in an email/blog — whoever you read this) and begin to start picking up the pieces. I’m hoping that it will help me do that same thing today as well.

It’s currently 10:32pm on Saturday night. I’m typing away on my desk with my green strip light and my fellow lightning bolt turned on. I’m also listening to this really calming playlist linked below on one of the voice channels on discord, trying to calm down some of my thoughts.

It’s really difficult to meet expectations, especially when they come from other people. I mean, I already set up some pretty high expectations for myself towards all aspects of life. But sometimes, it’s honestly just tiring. Just by doing a little bit of reflection, that becomes prominently obvious for me, especially throughout this summer. I set out to reclaim the pace of my life over the past few months, to embrace wherever life takes me and the spontaneity of it. I believe that I found success in that goal, and I’m really grateful to all of my friends who have helped me along the way throughout that pursuit of mine.

However, it’s tough. I had to make some unnatural sacrifices. I say unnatural because it slightly bothers me in some weird type of way. To understand this, the sacrifices I’ve made were mostly on the creation side — YouTube, this blog, and building up iAscend. Those were the things that I felt like I was able to cut out temporarily to carve out some more time for myself and those experiences I wanted to live out. Now, I’m trying to reintegrate them into my life, and it’s been challenging.

I’ll admit, I’ve forgotten my why’s.

Being surrounded by people who’ve done so much, and seem to always have the time to do whatever they set out to do subconsciously imposes a pressure on me that I have to do the same. When curating for an audience, there’s an additional expectation that I have to produce something. When people vouch for you, when you get into X position/role, there’s always that pressure to deliver. And that can get overwhelming.

Managing expectations is tiring.

Managing expectations is tiring when you lose sight of why you started. That was my flaw as I pondered over how I was going to get back to the things I did pre-summer. I let these external (and sometimes subconscious) expectations define why I did the things I did. It went from making content to inspire/empower other people, to making content to continue to grow my platforms/catch up with people who have grown 3x faster than me.

It’s not a good look, forgetting the origins of your actions, and definitely something to strive towards improvement in. But hey, we all face it don’t we?

Thanks for reading through this. I’m fortunate to have a platform where I can share these thoughts and perhaps help one of you out there. Feel free to leave a comment or share it with a friend who may need to hear this today. As always, thank you for reading, I mean it.

We’ll start this back up in two weeks. I’ll have a couple weeks off first haha :)

I really appreciate you for being a part of The One Percent today! if you are enjoying this newsletter, I’d love for you to share this with a friend or two by hitting the share button below. I’ll see you back here again in a week’s time!