The fault is in the expectation

Many of you know me from wine. This is a different thing, and it has been going on quietly for some time.

For years I have kept a practice: a short written entry most mornings, a review most evenings, and a standard I hold myself to whether or not anyone is watching. It began as private discipline. It has since become a body of work, published under a pen name, Ludovicus Aurelius.

This newsletter is not that work. The work lives on its own site and stays there. What arrives here every second week is one piece of it meeting something real: a situation, the practice applied to it, and an honest account of what it cost. Roughly five minutes to read.

A philosophy that does not change what you do on Tuesday is a hobby. These letters are the Tuesdays.

Here is the first.

The situation

A shipment was late. Not catastrophically, but late in the way that moves a date, which moves a conversation, which moves a payment.

What I noticed was not the delay. It was the temperature of my reaction to it. Out of proportion, arriving fast, and aimed at a person rather than at a problem.

The word I reached for was "should." He should have told me. I should have known sooner. That word is the tell. It arrives whenever irritation is about to be dressed up as principle.

The entry

The Leadership Standard has a passage on this, and it is unkind in the way useful things are:

Irritation appears when expectation meets reality and reality declines. The disturbance feels like the world owing you something and refusing to pay. But the fault lies in the expectation, not in the debt.

That is the whole mechanism. I had built an expectation without confirming it, held it privately, and then experienced its collapse as a wrong done to me.

He had never agreed to call. I had assumed he would.

What it cost

Two things, and the second was the expensive one.

I answered before the practice caught up with me. What I wrote was correct in every fact and wrong in temperature, and repairing that afterward cost more of the relationship's credit than the delay itself had.

And I lost the better part of an hour to being annoyed, which is the cost people rarely count. The response, whatever it was going to be, was available almost immediately. Everything after that was rehearsal of the grievance.

The practice

The correction is not to expect less of people. It is to notice that an expectation is yours until it has been agreed, and to move it out of your head and into the open where it can be accepted or declined.

So the operational version, which I now apply:

When irritation arrives, look for the word "should." Find the expectation behind it. Then ask one question: did I ever say this out loud to the person now failing to meet it.

Most of the time the answer is no. That does not excuse them. It relocates the problem to somewhere I can act on it, which is the only place where action is possible.

The disturbance loses most of its force at that moment. Not because the situation improves, but because it stops being an injury and becomes a piece of work.

The standard

Charity toward others is maintained by holding expectations lightly and stating them plainly. Both halves are required. Held tightly and unstated, an expectation becomes a trap you have set for someone who does not know it is there.

The full entry, and the forty two others alongside it, are here:

https://hoc-est-opus.com/leadership-standard

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