The danger of invisible expectations

Have you ever been silently frustrated at someone because their behaviour does not match your expectations?

Have you worked in earnest, without feeling like you’re where you need to be, but also don’t know specifically what winning looks like?

Do you compare yourself to a competitor who appears to be crushing it, unsure of whether you can ever catch up to their ever-widening lead?

This pattern is something I like to call…

invisible expectations

It's SUPER common among founders and is one of the driving forces behind burnout.

Here are some examples:

• you made $10k last month, but you won’t be “legit” until you make $83k/mo (aka the invisible $1m arr threshold of legitimacy)

• your peers tell you that you’re crushing it, but you have a creeping sense of dissatisfaction even though you attained your targets for last quarter

• you grind yourself to the bone to get through a difficult project, but you don’t take a second for a breather or to celebrate how far you’ve come (the invisible sisyphean work loop)

• you don’t even know how to spell balance - your health is waning, your relationship is stretched and you feel lethargy holding you down (the invisible flattening battery)

So, what can you do if you’re in this loop?

First, if this post resonates, don’t shove it away. read it twice and let it sink in.

Then, dig into one of these invisible / below the line zones. It can take some doing and if you get stuck, AI can help.

An example prompt to put through your favourite LLM could be:

I'm feeling a sense of dissatisfaction with how my business is progressing. Here is what the last few months have looked like [insert summary here]. Can you help me triangulate what invisible expectations I might have that are draining my energy and making me feel like I'm not where I need to be?

Next, give yourself five minutes to create an arbitrary goal for an area where you have invisible expectations.

This might be your current growth rate, your product development velocity or your team engagement.

Invisible expectations hide in corners where things can be difficult to measure and are more felt/vibey than quantified.

A good indicator is that you’re not happy with where something is at, but you also don’t have a metric to know whether you’re tracking on target for it.

Then, brainstorm a bunch of actions that can help you move the needle towards your newfound goal.

There's a possibility that one of these actions might be to accept that you cannot influence a certain area, but you decide to fully take that on board and move on.

Create a dedicated window, ideally when you’re at most productive, to tackle this fuzzy area. The actions should be clear enough that you can verb noun them, see:

• chase accountant for xyz

• meet w/ designer to understand gap

Pop those in your calendar and you’ve got some to-dos.

Finally, create a placeholder calendar invite for when you achieve the goal that was once invisible, ambiguous or fuzzy. Push this out n = 3 weeks from today.

It only needs to be 30 minutes long. and frankly, you’re probably not going to take yourself out to dinner because you “did what you should have already done.”

This practice creates a new pathway in your brain and leaves you with a process to lean on when things are wonky, but you don’t know the way out.

If you have a sticking point like this in your biz and can’t figure out how to find it or fix it, reply to this email. I can help.