"What happens, happens for the best" said all the wise men/women. Optimism at its best. So when life doesn't meet your expectations, you change the scale and call it delight? Who are we faking to? You don’t get a 100%, you are not into "MII". That’s it. And your life will be very different from those who did get.
Now, if we ponder on the reasons of not meeting our own expectations, we can have a long list… may be we were not realistic, may be our caliber was not up to it, may be we didn’t try hard enough. Same goes for other aspects of our lives when we feel let down, disappointed… The gap between our expectations and what the ground reality is makes for the end-of-the-world feeling. The larger the gap, the more intense the feeling of hurt. It is obvious then we should either accept the reality as it is or try harder to meet the expectations. But many a times, we don’t do either… I was wondering why?
When we build our hopes on illusions, wishful thinking and start living a lucid dream when the difference between the dream and reality becomes a blur. We start expecting results which are obviously unachievable by the very nature of the characters in that dream, after all they are a figment of our imagination, the way we see them. And the clashes begin. You wake up then… but soon enough you go back to sleep coz that world is so much better… and then you are jolted back again…
Personalities, studied in depth by stalwarts like Freud, are shaped by experience with the world, moral values passed on and the inherent needs of the person. And for every person, these three parameters have unique and permanent values because each one of us have different experiences with the world, our morals may be different too and our inherent needs of hunger, thirst, rest, etc are unique to us too. And once shaped, personalities hardly change. So, it is important to realize and accept the way people are and not the way we want them to be, to realize the way you are and not what you are expected to be. Then you take it or leave it… the world doesn’t end.
Yes, all of us encounter such clashes of The Expectations Vs The Real, reason being, at first sight you don’t know how big the gap is… and by the time you see it clearly, you are drained out trying to bridge the gap. Two people are like fingerprints… unique. So obviously there will be differences that give them the meaning of their existence but the question is to decide on the +-% of deviation you are willing to accommodate. And if two people are like the North pole and the South pole, they'll always be facing the opposite direction. The other person here can be a real person or the goals we wish to achieve.
So, to have a peaceful, fulfilling life, one needs to be very vigilant in surrounding oneself with people and goals which fall into that +-% flexibility… in all spheres, be it work or personal. Recruitment process also stresses on this particular alignment of personality and expectations and my HR friends would more than agree with the fruitfulness of it. I don't believe in pseudo optimism or consolations, but only if we could look at Life with such objectivity, manage our expectations and surroundings, there won't be a word in our dictionaries: Disappointment.
