Managing Expectations

People rarely look beyond their own expectations and evalute the objective evidence of a certain scenario on their own and come to a reasonable conclusion. If you give people an expectation, they will take that expectation and run with it, even if the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Why? Well, there's an easy way out: if things don't go the way they wanted, it's always easy to blame the pesron who gave you the expectation in the first place, right?

Despite my bitter tones about this, I think the expecters have a right to do the expectin'. In an ideal world, everybody would be ultra-attentive and would not resort to relying on others' responsibilities. But we live in a practical world, not an idealistic world, so it seems perfectly reasonable to use people at the face value of their words.

Lesson learned. Managing expectations pays off in the long run...