At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps won a record-breaking eight gold medals. Amazingly, in the race for his eighth, his goggles were filled with water. He finished the race swimming completely blind.
While many would have panicked, Phelps was calm, because he trained for this. He practiced swimming with loose goggles, which enabled him to create a solution. If my goggles leak, then I will count my strokes, he thought.
Because he had both foreseen this possibility and practiced it, he was incredibly effective at overcoming the obstacle.
While many times we are told to visualize success, Andrew Huberman, Ph.D. points out something important:
“Research on goal-setting and motivation indicates that people can achieve the greatest degree of ongoing effort by imagining failures, preparing for them, and by trying to avoid worst case scenarios. Visualizing worst case scenarios is actually highly motivating.”
Not only is negative visualization motivating, but it’s a superpower. As investor and writer Morgan Housel mentioned in his article, “Low Expectations,” when asked about the secret to a happy life, 98-year-old billionaire Charlie Munger replied:
“The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results good and bad as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism.”
One thing I’ve learned this year is that thinking about having low expectations and actually practicing it, are two very different things.
Stoicism
As Munger alluded to, Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that author Ryan Holiday defines as the most practical of all philosophies:
“The philosophy asserts that virtue (such as wisdom) is happiness and judgment based on behavior, rather than words. That we don’t control and cannot rely on external events, only ourselves and our responses.”
While many people think of philosophy as abstract and wordy (which it definitely can be), Stoicism has been used by ancient Romans, the Founding Fathers, and other leaders throughout history. It’s also had a profound influence on my life.
So how do we apply Stoicism to low expectations?
Two words: premeditatio malorum.
Latin for the pre-meditation of evils, it’s essentially a “pre-mortem,” where we imagine things that could go wrong or could be taken away from us.
As DailyStoic summarizes it, setbacks in life are inevitable, and nothing is guaranteed for anyone (except death and taxes). It’s a way for us to better psychologically prepare ourselves for these setbacks.
Or as ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca cautioned in Letters from a Stoic:
“The fact that is was unforeseen has never failed to intensify a person’s grief. This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events” (178).
A common criticism of having low expectations is that it’s easy for us to seem like a “mopey pessimist who’s accomplished nothing,” as Housel pointed out.
But it’s not about being negative. It’s about being more prepared. This exercise of premeditatio malorum helps us prepare for obstacles, like Michael Phelps, in order for us to turn obstacles to our advantage.
Applying This
One excellent way of using this exercise in your life is doing author Tim Ferriss’s journaling exercise, called Fear Setting. It’s an extension of asking, what’s the worse thing that could happen if I do ___? (I wrote about this in the past, so click here to read more).
Ferriss proposes that defining our fears might be more important than defining our goals. Thinking through problems is not enough. When we actually write things down and vividly imagine a worst-case scenario, we realize that “fear is a liar,” a phrase coined by entrepreneur Oliver Cookson.
Many of our fears are augmented by our perception, and there’s no better way to see this than through physically writing them down.
Another way to implement “pre-mortem” in our lives comes from a common saying in the military is that “two is one and one is none.” A similar idea is Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
For civilians and military alike, this means that we should always have a backup. Even just imagining the possibility that something won’t go according to plan and how we will respond, is powerful and liberating. Especially for perfectionists and control freaks, it truly helps with acceptance for when things do go wrong.
When the Spring semester was delayed by two weeks due to omicron earlier this year, I imagined future scenarios and my response. The worst-case scenario, of course, was that if school went completely online, I would take the semester off. I’d move back home and get a job somewhere.
While it is truly uncomfortable to imagine these worst-case scenarios, it opened my mind up to new possibilities and fostered greater acceptance for things I can’t control.
Hope for The Best, Practice for the Worst
We’ve all heard the saying, “hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” But it’s easy to focus on hoping and underemphasize preparation.
It’s our default to say, “I hope this turns out OK” or “I hope this happens, and if it doesn’t I’ll figure it out later.” This is the easier thing to do. It’s more comfortable.
But Michael Phelps wasn’t practicing with his goggles tight, hoping that they wouldn’t leak. He practiced for the worst.
Preparing for the worst can only be done through practice. I’d encourage you to get out a piece of paper and try Fear Setting. Instead of saying, “I hope,” take a couple minutes to think, “If this doesn’t go according to plan, what will I do?” Once you physically write these things down, you’ll surely be less anxious.
While this might seem overly analytic, I think it’s the best way to use our mental energy, instead of worrying excessively. Most events are truly out of our control, anyways*. As Oliver Burkeman best defined worry:
Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again — as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. - 4 Thousand Weeks
Of course, worrying is human. Everyone knows that most things are out of our control, but accepting this can be difficult, especially for perfectionists (like me). This acceptance can only come when we actually practice for the worst.
While we can never fully knock out worrying, we can balance it with something more practical and real. It will make us better off in the future, even though it’s uncomfortable in the short run. It’s just like exercise, but for the mind.
When we worry, we hope, but when we practice premeditatio malorum, we come closer to both action and acceptance. As I’ve experienced this year, rehearsing low expectations had led to:
Greater mental resilience
Peace of mind
Less anxiety
Greater creativity in problem solving
More comfort with uncertainty
Some of the best things in life come completely unexpected. If this is merely an extension of having low expectations, shouldn’t we be doing this more often?
Footnotes
*Obviously, in extreme scenarios and death, worry is more prevalent. If you have a family member who’s sick, it’s unlikely you’ll be thinking, “while I hope he doesn’t die, if he does, this is what I’m going to do.” Acceptance comes much later, as part of the grieving process, but, nonetheless, this exercise can help with acceptance in less grave matters :)
Photo by Brian Matangelo on Unsplash