The paralyzing pain of high expectations

On resilience, reps, and relationships

Author

Ashley Abercrombie
March 22, 2024

Hi there — we hope your (almost) second quarter is off to a great start.

Here’s our theory: If you are a recovering perfectionist, a jack of all trades, a part-time people pleaser, and a bit of an armchair expert with impossibly high expectations, then you’re probably a marketer. 

Why are we like this? Was it our childhood? Was it our just-like-Meryl-Streep-in-Devil-Wears-Prada first boss? Is it our creative precisionist, neurodivergent brains? Is it our obsession with pleasing understanding people?

Either way: “People with very high expectations have very low resilience.”

Ouch. That zinger from Jensen Huang, $NVDA’s CEO, got us good. He spoke to a room full of Stanford graduates about the advantage of low expectations and why he uses words like “pain and suffering” gleefully in culture. This is a minute and thirty seconds worth your time. 

In our work with cultures and teams, we’ve found that in healthy, productive teams, low expectations create psychological safety, prevent burnout, and cultivate collaboration and creativity. Resilient people know that impossibly high expectations leave you living in perpetual disappointment, a crazy state of mind. And to that we say, no thank you. 

Along the same lines, our Strategy Lead and Data Guru, Hannah, spoke on a panel at Pepperdine University last week. She shared with students the power of putting in reps. Her first assignment as a new marketer? Write hundreds of tweets as Wolverine. Yes, THE Wolverine (#SNIKT). Naturally, there were no parameters, no rules, and the only context was a blank Google doc. She just had to figure it out. Good things come from putting in the reps. The best ideas are found through iteration, and at some point, you’ll strike gold.

Thanks for being with us - we’re thankful you’re here. See you next month! Alec, Hannah, and Ashley

P.S. We're trying something NEW and could use YOUR HELP. We believe there is an underserved opportunity for brands to integrate internal culture with external messaging -- and we're exploring the idea of equipping OTHER AGENCIES to do this transformative work. We’ll run a beta mastermind group with 6-8 agency leaders this Spring — equipping them to run our "internal culture evaluation playbook" as a strategic foundation for their creative offerings. If you, or someone you know, might be interested, we'd love to hear from you.