I have realized that when you zoom out enough, there’s a simple way to figure out why you’re either happy or not:

Happiness = Reality - Expectations

When things are going better than you had expected, wanted, or hoped they would, you’re generally pretty happy. When things aren’t going as well as you had expected, wanted, or hoped, you tend to be not that happy.

So, if we want to be happier, we have 3 options:

Pull on our reality lever to improve our reality.

Pull on our expectations lever to manage and tune our expectations.

Pull on both.

The thing is, our expectations normalize to our reality, so if you pull only on the reality lever you’ll never be happy. You see too many miserable senior partners to know that this is true.

And if you only pull on the expectations lever, you’re selling yourself short.

We explore this, and more on today’s call.