Sometimes I have different expectations for myself vs for other ppl. I’m sure this goes both ways, but I mostly notice myself holding Alek to a higher standard than other people. There is an idiom in Chinese “严以律己宽以待人” — it means that it’s good to hold yourself to a high standard while being forgiving towards others.
My thoughts on this are as follows:
- Temper high expectations for yourself with the same forgiveness and love that you’d apply when talking to a friend.
- If you have trouble with this, you can ask a friend for advice, or ask GPT for advice, which works pretty well too especially if you already know what advice you need or if what advice you need is kind of obvious.
- Having high expectations for others is a mark of respect. I should correct in the direction of having much higher expectations for others — e.g., trusting them to listen to my thoughts and change their mind if appropriate. But I need to also learn a productive way to do this; I’ll think about this more in good arguments.
The most live examples of this for me right now are as follows:
- Do better at celebrating Alek’s victories, small or large.
- Start conversations with the assumption that people agree with my core beliefs — goodness(universe) + how I want to spend my life (for the record, I think most people do endorse these posts) — and that people are capable of rational discourse. This second clause, being capable of considering sometimes unpopular or uncomfortable arguments and actually changing your mind if the evidence requires it, this is pretty rare. So anyways, have high expectations for others, but also have patience. Coming to grips with ideas like xrisk or the notion that you should try to make the world a better place — these are things that I still am working on personally “accepting”, and having some patience and kindness towards myself + other ppl seems more likely to work than the alternative.