I recently led a discussion in an undergraduate dorm on the topic, “What is your ideal job?” The students were asked to conduct a thought exercise on themselves by imagining a job consistent with their interests, values and experiences. This exercise is a helpful corrective to the tendency we all have to focus on day-to-day concerns and challenges. Our usual time horizon is the present and the short-term future.
Paying explicit attention in the dorms to longer-term goals does something else. It supplements the fine programs offered by BEAM (Bridging Education, Ambition and Meaningful Work; formerly the Career Development Center) and the Design Your Life Lab. “What is your ideal job?” is an ideal question to pose in dorm-based discussions as a way of linking students’ current lives to their imagined future.
During our discussion, one student said, “I’m told all the time that I should follow my passion. But I don’t have a passion. I have interests. But I feel I’m inadequate because nothing burns inside me.”
The student went on to express concern that she will end up as “an ordinary person.” “I keep hearing about all these great people who are doing great things. But maybe I won’t be one of those people; I’ll just live an ordinary life. How should I handle this problem?”
The student had identified the disabling potential of expectations, especially at a top educational institution like Stanford. What do you, as students here, do with them? How can you distinguish the ones you set for yourself from those you think you should have but don’t, as well as from those that other people have of you? How can you respond to the sense that your goals are not high enough – or that they are too high? In either case, the result can be unhappiness: That you failed to realize your own potential, in the first situation, and that the world has conspired to prevent you from realizing your ambitions, in the second. How can you plan for success if you continually fear the prospect of failure?
An answer, I think, is that it’s possible – and desirable – to couple high life expectations with the realistic understanding that the world “out there” won’t permit us to fulfill many of them. The tension between the ideal and the real should be understood as an “ordinary” part of existence, not as a problem. If the distance between ideal and real becomes too great, one should devise less ambitious “backup expectations.” It’s worth spending some time now considering what they are.
It’s also important not to define unmet expectations as a personal failure. From all that I hear about today’s college students here and elsewhere, anxiety and fear of failure have become constant, unwelcome internalized companions. The student who spoke had the courage openly to express those feelings. Her expectations had become a burden, quite possibly the last thing she needs or wants.
Adding to the burden, I suspect, was her sense of what her expectations should be, given her presence at one of the world’s most prestigious, pressure-driven institutions, where only the best of the best are admitted. How could she measure up? How could she feel happy and fulfilled in an imagined future of ordinariness, when all around her are peers setting out to do great things?
One response to these questions is that if high expectations have become a burden, they should be changed as well as lowered. You can shift them from career success to the kind of person you hope to be when not in career mode. You can do some long-run planning for being a kind, decent, public-spirited human being. You can set high-quality interpersonal relations as a valued goal, a basis for assessing the worth and impact of your life.
To the extent that your expectations are influenced by an unrealistically positive prediction of what your fellow students are poised to accomplish, you’re adopting a self-damaging as well as inaccurate standard of performance. That standard deserves to be abandoned.
The expectations people set – and those we allow others to install within us – can have remarkable power. They can affect whether we are satisfied or unhappy with our actions. Improperly set, they can ruin our lives. The good news is that we have the power to change them. The potential to use that power is increased when expectations come out of the shadows and are consciously recognized. This is the great advantage of talking about them.
Conversations about the challenges and burdens of expectations should take place in many campus settings. It would help if these conversations were encouraged in the dorms, reinforcing the work of programs explicitly devoted to career and life planning.
– David Abernethy
Professor of Political Science, Emeritus
Contact David Abernethy at dba ‘at’ stanford.edu.