Hi,

I have a friend who struggles with bipolar disorder. Sometimes he is up, and sometimes he is
down. He went through a bad stretch a while back. He was real depressed. Every time I saw him, it seemed, he just looked really sad. Until this one day, it was like he had snapped out of it! I had to ask him what happened. He told me he had been to his therapist.

I asked him, did she give you great advice or what? Because you sure look different. He said she taught him about this idea of high hopes and low expectations. I’d never heard of this idea, so I asked him to explain it to me.

He said high hopes and low expectations is exactly what it sounds like. You can have high hopes but have low expectations at the same time. And if you do that, you can handle disappointments much easier. I’ve thought about that a lot since then. I’ve even applied it to my own life, and it does work. I’ve been able to be more realistic than I was before. I look at things differently now.

And it has even helped me to make decisions. Ok, here’s an example. I had what I thought was a great idea for a new ad campaign for a new product I wanted to sell on the website. I was really excited about it. But I was going to have to put a lot of money into this campaign. So I did a lot of thinking about it first. And I remembered what my friend had said.

I definitely had high hopes for this product. So I had high hopes that this ad campaign would
be successful in selling it. So far so good. But when I checked my expectations, they were also very high. That meant that if the campaign didn’t do as well as I hoped, I would be very disappointed, maybe even depressed. So it looked like I needed to lower my expectations.

If I had lower expectations, I would be more realistic. That way, the campaign could still do good, but if it didn’t do as good as I hoped, I’d still be ok. I could settle for that. So that’s the attitude I carried with me into the ad campaign.

Well, what happened was, the ad campaign did good. Not great, as I had hoped, but it did good.
So I felt good about it. I wasn’t disappointed, because I had already figured on it with my high hopes low expectations philosophy. But the way I looked at it was, it could have done great, but only for awhile, and then fizzled out, and then where would I be with this new product? No, I’d rather have it turn out the way it did.

You can apply the high hopes low expectations philosophy to all kinds of areas of your life. My friend did it and it brought him out of his bipolar depression. I used it in my business and it helped me to make a sound business decision. This philosophy helps to keep you realistic. That’s the main thing.

Well, I have to go!

Your Friend,

Dave