the potential power of high expectations

When you’ve been working on something for a long time, admittedly with the odd break, it’s scary to approach the end.

I’ve found that enlisting support with my book project has pushed me to confront the final hurdles. Sometimes you become overwhelmed by inertia and remain in situ, not progressing due to the prospect of something being different once you do.

External contractors don’t care for your fears and worries - they just want to get their part of the job done and move on. Therefore, tying their work to yours propels you forward - rather than having only yourself to let down you now have another person out there relying on you to come through. This prevents you from doing nothing purely to save your own embarrassment, to look competent and productive to a total stranger.

It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own - Marcus Aurelius

Sometimes we need someone else to remind us to care, someone else to expect things of us so that we can come to expect them of ourselves. The thing I’ve been learning slowly over the past year or so is that other people care about me as a whole but not about what I’m doing hour to hour and day to day.

I need to care about that myself if I want to move forward and create the things I want to create. Having high expectations of yourself can be crippling and lead to inaction. They could though, lead you to make something special. Wouldn’t that be great?