Welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 13. This is episode 13. This episode is all about expectations and how they impact your happiness and your performance and

how well you're doing in life?

I live in Seattle and Amazon is of course our giant employer about a third of my neighborhood I think works for the company that's not an exaggeration

And when Amazon was on top of the world in 2021, when its reputation was gleaming and its stock price was booming, you could feel that pride and prosperity in our neighborhood. You could practically smell it. I once heard the saying that 90% of

corporate culture is just winning. When a company is winning, everyone is happy

and they are becoming rich and they're

getting promoted and they see their work as contributing to something bigger

than themselves. That's what Amazon was in 2021. And then of course things changed. Jeff Bezos left the company, the

stock price fell 50%. 20,000 employees were laid off and hundreds of thousands of more feared that they're next.

And now that is the scent that is crawling around my neighborhood and it is so

clear it is so obvious that the mood around Amazon has shifted.

So here's the question.

What do you call that top of the world status that Amazon had in 2021. Was it a gift? What is it a

reward for hard work? Was it the natural swings of capitalism? Yes, is all of those

things.

But there's another way to look at what it was, and that is in expectations debt.

Expectations for Amazon were so high in 2021 that investors and employees had to achieve extraordinary things just to break even.

And when the results were merely just good, that felt terrible and it felt like you were losing.

Expectations are like a debt that must be repaid before you get any joy out of what you're doing. That's true not just for Amazon, but for individuals,

it's true for everything you do in life. The hard thing is that every company and every employee

wants to have what Amazon had in 2021.

They want to win.

...