You know what I want to do today is I want to make your lives better and the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to give you a social tip that works in a certain situation literally 100% of the time.

Let's say that you are going out to play a friendly round of golf or tennis or basketball or any sport that involves

competition.

It can be the thing where you slide the little metal and plastic things up and down on

the little sandy piece of wood at a bar.

Anything that involves skill, this is going to work for it.

And this is going to allow you to talk yourself up as being awesome, a whole bunch bunch until you're actually in the moment of play

and still save face when you utterly and completely fail.

Here's the trick. You just say something like this as you get limbered up and you put on your sweat band and you're twisting back and forth and you're doing deep knee bends and you just say it's been a long time since I've played.

This is the social equivalent of your childhood ping shield which was impenetrable to all manner of bullets and laser bolts.

You just say this and then automatically whatever happens next it's just because you're a little bit rusty but you obviously used to be awesome

the technique here is called lowering expectations you lower or temper expectations and then anything you do is going to be above and beyond

awesome.

It's like when you go to a restaurant and they're like, yeah, it's going to be about 15 minutes

and then they actually give it to you in seven minutes and instead of being mad

you'd wait for seven minutes you're like that's eight minutes early.

VIP treatment this is amazing. Normally the tempering expectations technique is one that you and I use for one of two things.

One is to lower expectations as you backpedal from previous boasts that you can't actually back up and it softens the blow and

humiliation of the impending colossal failure you're about to put on display and the other

once again is the thing where you under promise and over deliver.

In Matthew Chapter 13, Jesus is going to open his kingdom parables discourse with a passage that effectively lowers

expectations. He's going to temper the excitement and the anticipation that people

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