Emotional Leverage

If you are good with word associations, you need not read further. You will obviously have a fair idea as to what to expect.

If you are not good with word associations and you are bored with a butt load of time to kill, even then you shouldn't bother to read further. I'm sure you can think of something better to do than read my rants.

On the odd chance that some of you people are still reading, well what can I say. Best of luck.

It is important to explore one's abilities.
It is important to realise one's limitations.
It is important to manage one's expectations.
It is important to handle one's disappointments.

If anyone knows how to do that, please do tell me.

I used to think, "no expectations, no disappointments".

Now, I know it is not possible to have no expectations. Thus leading to the conclusion, it is not possible to have no disappointments.

The more we explore our own abilities, we start to build our expectations. Failure to recognise our own limitations invaribaly leads to disappointments.

Only thing not factored into this theory is "emotional leverage".

The extent to which we explore our abilities does not commensurate the increase in our expectations. If we discover that we are capable of doing "x" number of things, our expectations increase by a factor of "x".

Similarly, the extent by which we fail to recognise our limitations does not commensurate the disappointment it causes.

This introduces what I like to call as "social risk". Our expectations are a function of more than just our abilities. We expect things not only from ourselves, but from others around us. Odds are those expectations will not be met.

Applying emotional leverage here, we can see that, more the number of people we interact with, higher are the expectations from them. And if you are a hopeless optimist, then you will never realise the limitations in anyone and you will get hurt. Badly at that.

My workaround for this - It's simple.

Try and limit your expectations to yourself.

That way you will only have yourself to blame. That also means you will run out of excuses when something goes wrong, but it also cuts a lot of crap out of your life.

On the up-side, when something goes right, you will be smiling both on the outside and the inside.