Unhappiness is caused by the gap between your expectations and your experience.
If you expect coke and you get water you'll be unhappy. If you expect great service and you get bad service you'll be unhappy. If you expect loyalty and you get betrayal you will be unhappy.
The trick, then, is to calibrate both your expectations and your experience to minimize the distance between them.
In many ways this is a large part of the work of becoming an effective and successful adult who is in control of their emotional and practical journey.
Further, I find that, not only is my happiness inversely proportional to the size of the gap, but I also get a great deal of extra happiness in playing a little game of gap optimization. It gives me extra joy when I manage to make the gap consistently smaller though intentional work over time.
How?
I intentionly and continiously work on both sides of the equation. Expectation and experience.
On the Expectation side:
- Maintain good perspective and empathy about people's strengths, capabilities and incentives. This includes remembering that everyone is the hero or their own journey and going through their own internal emotional roller coaster ride that I can't possibly understand.
- Avoid people who consistently fail to meet my minimum bar expectations
- Avoid conflating my ideals and my "what I would have done" with what I actually expect to happen
- Quickly and consistently recalibrate my expectations based on the actual experience I'm having with someone or something
- As a last resort, I recognize that my expectations are still too high and simply lower them
On the Experience side:
The only way to consistently improve your experience is by effective communication and execution in the world. This includes (but not limited to).
- Pick the right people, projects and processes. Pay more if you have to. That's half the battle.
- Clearly communicating and getting alignment on my expectations with others. This includes clear contracts and project management tools
- Ensure incentives are aligned (recognizing that people will usually act in a way that they believe is in their best interest)
- Take ownership of my part in any failure
- Breathing and pacing yourself - having patience and endurance with yourself and others
- Quickly learn and adapt based on the feedback I'm getting from people and processes
What did I miss? How do you maintain your happiness?
Edit: It's interesting how many people have replied to this post arguing that you can only control the expectations side of this equation. The reason I wrote the post is precisely because I think too many people are ignoring their complicity with the experience side. By "just lowering your expectarions" you're essentially blaming others for "not being good enough" and you are not taking enough responsibility for your management and participation in an experience.