Resetting Expectations

One of the things that Richard Feynman mentioned in his anecdotes in Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and What do you care what other people think? was to treat everything in life as an adventure and an experience. My guess is that in the heart of hearts Feynman was as much of a geek and an introvert as the next person and his telling himself to take everything in life as an experience and an adventure was his way of getting himself to do things which he would otherwise be hard-pressed to undertake.

This hasn’t been the first time that I came across that concept. My mom’s been tried to din the same thing into me for years now and one of the sayings in my school journal used to say: Life is an experience… live it. However, the concept behind taking risks and essentially doing things which would go against the grain of preserving one’s image is something that definitely doesn’t come easily to me.

People (including those close to me) have over the years developed expectations of how I act, behave and how I would react to things. But the truth is that the “expectations” that they have developed are based on a façade and they really do not have any idea of how I would really react to behave under a given situation - especially if I wasn’t always trying to live up to their expectations. My external reaction is often determined by what people expect of me in a given situation, and not what the nascent reaction would be. So it’s a catch-22. A chicken and egg proposition. People expect me to react a certain way and therefore I do thereby reinforcing their expectation of how I should be acting. The net result is that I often come of giving people the wrong impression of what I really want or think.

Recently, I’ve tried to make a concerted effort in order to do things which people would not normally expect me to do – because I believe it’s about time I stopped worrying about what other people expect me to do and instead do what I think and feel. Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done - and every so often I find myself taking two steps forward and one step back and sometimes - one step forward and two steps back, because it’s not easy to reset expectations.

Blogging is simply one form of doing things which people would not expect me to do. I doubt anyone I know would have thought that I would go out and start publishing my thoughts in a public medium, let alone be talking about things which I do not even discuss with people in person (including this). The others I’ll refrain from mentioning here, since it’s something people will just have to figure out for themselves and some … maybe not.