I mentioned before that I started a business a couple of years ago and secured a partner to help me reach my goals. Life it often happens in business (I think), you may deal with people who have “issues.” These may be financial, legal, personal, or whatever else, but whatever they are, they have a way of creeping into your affairs with this person if you aren’t careful. In my case, my partner had been one of these people who borrowed a lot of money during the financial craze, and by the time I met him, people were knocking on his door. Being a lawyer, I was able to assess these legal risks in relation to me, and decide that I could work with him and license his product without worrying about the safety of my assets or any of that. What I did not account for was, being an attorney, I would be his around-the-clock “let me run this by you” person. The toll this line of communication would take was huge.
The lesson I learned about expectations, though, was not directly from me becoming his legal advisor and general counsel on the side for nearly two years (what? you can’t hire a general counsel for free?). What happened is that in hearing about all these legal woes, I was sucked into the story; in an effort to shorten the length of these ridiculous conversations, I often accepted my partner’s conclusions about events, rather than taking the facts and judging for myself (more on that later this week). Those conclusions piled up over time until I was working on the most unbelievable projects, all under the guise of protecting the asset that he had, that I needed, which would help me in the long run. Right? Not quite.
I’ll be more specific. On top of managing my own business and working, going through a long and annoying regulatory approval process, and giving pep talks to my partner’s employees every two minutes, oh and driving back and forth to Utah to do it, aaaaand having hours-long phone calls with this guy everyday, I was fielding phone calls from various lawyers of his and doing research on different topics to be able to speak intelligently to them about everyone’s respective rights and remedies. Please remember that I had started this business to get out of the legal profession by the way. When I started to really get to the end of my rope with all of this, there was something of a breakthrough in the software that was the basis of this relationship in the first place. However, as usual, more money was needed to do this or that upgrade- he was always battling the programmer- and so he decided to use another project of his to fund the final programming effort. That other project was almost done, but there were a few items that needed to be “checked on.”
What were those few items? And why would I be involved? Those few things were just a couple of requirements… in all 50 states. You know, a simple 50-state survey of this particular area of law, as soon as possible (Everying. is an emergency, of course), for free, in my spare time. It mattered to me because if we got this project running, it would create the cash flow to finish the software that I needed for my customers. So I worked by buns off on this stupid thing.
That is, until 3 or 4 am hit one morning, and I said a lot of works to myself that sounded like this: &#@!*%. This had gone entirely too far, which I’m sure was obvious to you about five paragraphs ago. That was the final straw in the relationship.
People do stupid things, and by “people” I mean me. A little while thereafter, I was recounting the story to someone much, much smarter than me. I framed it as me having gotten caught up in all the reasons why everything needed to happen. How could I have believed it? Why didn’t I draw my own conclusions? etc. This guy framed it differently. He asked me why I thought my partner was justified in expecting all of this out of me. Obviously none of it was in our black-and-white software licensing contract. We weren’t friends. I didn’t offer. I wasn’t employed by him to do this stuff. So what the hell?
He was an evelope pusher, and I was a push over. All he did was ask. I never said no. And not only did I not say no, by me being me, my proprietary blend of wanting to do whatever was necessary to succeed, ego, fear, people-pleasing, and under-estimating the value of my work caused me to really go the extra mile on stuff he had no right to ask for, let alone come to expect.
There are two more bad outcomes here. First, while his expectations grew, mine shrunk. I got to the point where taking whatever I could get would have been a huge relief (getting attached to one path to success is another no-no I will write about this week). What a disaster. And second, allowing fixed expectations to become fluid- another friend uses the dentist as an example… everyone is quite clear what is expected in that relationship- masked the real problem. This guy couldn’t deliver, and not because he didn’t have the goods. That was really hard to swallow because it is so different from the way I see things.
The many reasons why he couldn’t deliver should not have been my problem. If he is in the business of licensing software, and he doesn’t do it, the game is up. I find someone else to do it, not get in the middle of it. If he is interested in the business, then he should fix his own problems so he can participate in the market. Instead, a dummy like me tried to come to his rescue.
In this case, I really thought I was doing the right thing for myself in the long term. But now I know I wasn’t, and I have also learned to apply this to other kinds of relationships. Not every interaction is governed by a contract or a defined set of rules, like a business deal or a trip to the dentist, but every relationship is governed by expectations. What those are and whether things have gotten to the point where the people are expecting too much (or too little) is up for discussion, but using expectations is a really awesome tool for fixing interpersonal issues in life I have found. It definitely highlights the cause of a lot of stress.
So tell me, have you let someone expect much more out of you than is reasonable or required by the circumstances, or vice versa?
