Zero Expectations

I avidly follow Gary Vee. I took a while to come around to him, but once I did, he became someone who's content I consistently revisit.

I find his core messages intuitive and inspiring. For example: happiness > financial success, the value of being compassionate to other people (and to yourself), of approaching negativity with kindness, to embrace exploration until you find what's right for you, etc.

But there's a principle he recently promoted that I had a hard time with. It was the idea of having "zero expectations". Expectations, he says, are the root of unhappiness. Because as soon as you expect things, for example, if you expect other people to behave a certain way, or expect a particular business outcome, and you don't get it... you feel miserable. So he advocates for getting rid of expectations.

I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Because you have to have expectations for your life. What's the point in starting a new job if you don't expect to enjoy it and succeed? Or of leaving one if you don't expect to find something better? In going out if you don't expect to have a good time? You need expectations to direct your life. It seems obvious. It also ran counter to the book I'd just read about improving decision making by trying to predict outcomes. Making predictions about the future helps you test your judgement and beliefs. And a prediction is a form of expectation.  

So to be honest, I didn't engage much with the idea – I dismissed it as not right for me.

Then, by chance, I was reading a newsletter by Victor Cheng (another awesome business thinker, author, and strategist) who mentioned the The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism. Roughly translated its "expectations are the root cause of human suffering". Again, this idea made no sense to me. But I couldn't dismiss it now. This wasn't one person's opinion... it was based in a religion with hundreds of millions of followers. So I dug a little deeper. And sure enough, eventually, something unexpected started to resonate.

Here it was: It's not expectations themselves that cause suffering. It's the emotional investment we feel in a particular outcome. It's not making the prediction that's bad, it's that we want a certain outcome to unfold. If you predict there will be a storm in Peru, you're not very invested in the outcome either way (unless, of course, you live in Peru). But if you take a job because you expect it to make you happy, you have a lot more at stake. Yes, money is at stake and you can't avoid that. But the argument is, though you can't remove all types of investment, you can detach your emotions. Treat all decisions, emotionally, like you're predicting storms in Peru.

In truth, I'm only partly there with it. The term "zero expectations" doesn't seem to leave a lot of room for living life intentionally. But it might be a misnomer. Perhaps it's possible to lower the emotional investment we have in certain outcomes. How? I don't understand that part yet. Perhaps by imagining that, no matter what happens, all possibilities will lead to good? Life will always be fine? Maybe it's about taking the long view – if any given outcome happens on any given day, in the grand scheme of a ~90 year life, it's all a drop in the bucket.

My psych background is yelling at me about how difficult this is to do. The IKEA effect says that, as soon as you put effort into something, you feel emotionally invested in it. Its science, a principle of human behaviour. It feels unreasonable to think people can get around that. But... who knows. Maybe a scientific trend isn't deterministic. Maybe some people do.