165- Entrepreneur escalating expectations

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In this episode of The Struggling Biz podcast show, we discuss the perspective of escalating expectations for the entrepreneur.

This concept was promoted by a podcast episode by Todd Henry in his show called The Accidental Creative.

Although this premise was published initially for the creative professionals in business, we an also look at this for the solo-preneur of small business entrepreneur in evaluating their success by looking at the expectations they have before, during and after the projects that can give results to the business. The reason for this importance is that this type of escalation could also be equated to human health diabetes — i.e., the silent killer. He also brings in the term “invariant representations.”

In looking at the concept of escalating expectations as the “silent killer of your creative process” and its possible results, we look at the three views that are discussed in Todd Henry’s episode:

the perspective that your business and its projects need to reach goals that are so high that they may not be realistic; you may be chasing that which is NOT attainable due to the practical effort that is required, but which you may not be able to implement. He calls this passive imitation or emulation what is called “our heroes” — and we pressure ourselves to bend our business to others who have great success. And then we fall down when those goals are not reached because we are promoting other people’s standards as a burden of the business. Don’t compare your business today with the best that has ever been done before and expect immediate success: “honor the process.”
The stagnation and frustration of reaching these lofty goals for your business may have us assign the value of someone else’s success. We tend to lose impartiality when we JUDGE when we are in the midst of our business projects. Don’t worry, your customers and stakeholders will assess the value of your tasks and business results, and you should not “fall into the trap of self-evaluation” as we are performing our in-process work in our business. You should not allow these expectations to paralyze yourself and your business.
Temper others’ opinions — especially when they try to define every aspect of our business, just because it is in their frame of reference from their own experiences or just from their conversations with so-called “experts.”

So these 3 views can help us hold together our business and try to succeed without any detrimental opinions that expect us to shift our projects and direction merely to suit the views of others who love to criticize and critique (especially since they have no stake in the business as their own investment).

We recommend that you spend 19 minutes to consume this episode, but in the view of entrepreneurs who are creative in pursuing the direction of your business success. And we feel that, seeing these ideas within the view of entrepreneurs, we can then avoid the consequences of these pitfalls which can be “expectation assassins.”

Thank you for your attention.