The Freedom of Low Expectations

There’s a minute-and-a-half long video that a few people emailed to me that I mostly like — here it is.

In it, the CEO of Nvidia is talking about low expectations and resilience and suffering and, sure, he’s hamming it up a bit and he’s got the leather jacket and he’s definitely going for something (and it’s working).

But the piece I want to zoom in on is the connection between talented, successful people and their expectations when they start a business.

If you’re getting this email, you’re in the top 5% or 1% or whatever of “achievers.” Which means you’ll naturally have high expectations because you’ve been successful in the past.

Unfortunately, high expectations are a disaster for entrepreneurship because of the way entrepreneurship works.

No matter how much domain experience you’ve got, the first set of things you do won’t work and they shouldn’t work. Because whatever you try first will be the same things everyone else with a similar idea would have tried first. And if that thing had worked, it would’ve … worked. And it’d exist and the problem wouldn’t be there. Capitalism is efficient.

The successful business exists somewhere past where most people have already looked. Which means it takes time to get to. You’ve got to get all the crappy approaches out of the way first.

And, while we try to speed this up as best we can at Tacklebox, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to skip the false starts. They’re where we learn what will work. You can’t jump the line.

Here’s what it looks like:

Basically, you need to try lots of things to be successful, and very few people try lots of things. The successful businesses lie out of range of most people.

A big reason for this are expectations, but more importantly, happiness. Because that’s the whole point of expectations — they’re THE KEY VARIABLE for happiness. Which is what our leather jacketed friend leaves out.

Happiness is simple. It’s the difference between expectations and reality. If your reality exceeds your expectations, you’re happy. It it doesn’t, you’re not.

Which is why happiness is always driven by envy, not greed. The goal posts shift for envy.

Back to startups.

If you expect to be successful, then you’ll be sad all the time in the startup world. Because the first 20 things you try won’t work, and that’s a good thing. That means you’re moving along that graph towards the stuff that’ll work.

And, if you’re sad all the time, you’re far less likely to stick with your idea long enough for it to succeed.

Here’s a very scientific graph I made on happiness and startup expectations:

Low expectation people win, easily.

They’re happier fastest, they’re able to stay in the game the longest, they’ll be able to move along the curve to a successful business.

Past high achievers have expectations that simply won’t exist in the startup world, they’ll get frustrated and sad, they’ll burn out, and they’ll never make it to the ideas that work.

The fastest way to be successful and happy is to lower your expectations. That doesn’t mean don’t work hard or don’t try things - just expect that they probably won’t work, because 95% of things aren’t supposed to work.

Your job is to get through those things, to get move past the crowded area of approaches lots of people have tried, and get alone - to make it to the far right side of the graph.

Hold yourself and your work to the highest standards and understand that each thing you try that doesn’t work is just you moving closer to a thing that does.