 I can make a fair prediction about you already if you click this. Some people's minds. This isn't a judgment, it's something that I've experienced and as I've talked to a lot of people over the years, some people's minds go as deep as a stream in your backyard. As deep as Lake Ontario, as deep as Lake Superior, like Michigan, you know what I mean? Other people's minds, and I predict that this is like yours if you click the video, are as deep as the Pacific. As deep as the Atlantic, like real deep, and the deeper you go in the ocean, what happens? The darker it gets for sure, but there are so many different strange creatures in the dark that very, very, very few people ever see. Like the animals and creatures, animals, the sea creatures that evolved at the bottom of the ocean to survive are unlike anything at the surface. And you have a unique experience to be careful at the depths of the ocean, to explore a little bit, to see what this is all about down here, but eventually to come back to the surface for some light. And I bet in times of curiosity where you're exploring your deep mind, this deep ocean, you've come to the realization, is this it? Is this it? I'm talking about our expectations of life and things in life and scenarios and events and experiences. We ask ourselves, is this it? That's all it is. Have you come to that realization sometimes, and it hits you really hard? And usually when it's that this is it, we get caught up in our minds and we're deflated because we hadn't expectations of even what life is in general, but we're going to get to specifics. And I'm going to ask you a very important question that you're going to ask yourself this week. It's going to completely help you out and remove a sense of guilt and worry possibly as you work through disappointments and times in your life where things just didn't feel like they matched up. Like the puzzle pieces just didn't fit. It looked like it was coming together. And then you're like, oh, that's a corner piece shit. Expectations, high expectations, certain expectations of worldly achievements can deflate us when we actually reach somewhere. Can, not always, but think about it. I climb Ben Nevis in the UK. Ben Nevis, Ben Nevi, if you're French, N-E-V-I-S, tallest mountain in the UK. It's in, I took a train up to Fort William, climbed this mountain. I was so anxious because it was my first time doing a big trip. I didn't eat, man, for like two days. And I signed up to do this, stay in this hostel, do the mountain, trekked up the mountain, took me three hours and then two and a half hours down. Not nothing but like a cliff bar for three days. I pushed myself so hard. My legs were cramping the first like 20 minutes. I'm like, okay, all right. And I remember thinking to myself like, let's see what the body's capable of. Let's see what it's capable of. And I'm going to reach the summit and I'm going to be proud of myself that I did it. That I did it, that I left home, that I'm in Scotland doing this thing alone, listening to a Braveheart music. Woo, I'm climbing, I'm climbing, I'm climbing, I'm climbing. I'm like, yeah, we're getting higher and higher and higher. And the wind's getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And as I get higher, I'm like snow, didn't expect that cold. Okay, I wore shorts, didn't expect that. This is the first real mountain I've ever climbed, right? I get to the top. The view isn't what I expected. It was cloudy. It was freaking cloudy, man. And I hiked for three hours. And I got to the top and I'm like celebrating because I made it, but also I look around and I'm like, damn it. Kind of pissed off, damn it. Should have chose a better day. Why did I do it? Well, that was a waste. I forgot about the journey. I forgot about the resilience and the pain and everything I overcame to get to the top of the mountain because I expected to feel different when I reached the top. And a lot of us, and people realize this when they get older, and you're, I'm going to say special. We're all special, but you've seen the depths. And I think you've realized, because a lot of you are 30s, 20s, around my age, about 50, 50, female and males. And you've realized, and older people do that, you work the corporate ladder. You get the list of worldly achievements. You buy the house. You get the cottage. You do the thing. You get the VP position. You do all of this. You get the new car. And you think that with the more stuff and with more labels and with more worldly positioning in this hierarchy, that you'll feel different. And nobody ever does. They come to the same conclusion that you reach the top of the mountain and nothing's there. You've experienced it before. And if you haven't, I guarantee you will because the people that are attracted to these talks of Scott's fun little sermons of mindfulness and meditation and Christianity and mental health, you've been to those places and you've experienced that. And please put your experience in the comments if you have, because people need to know this. It doesn't mean to not set up goals. It doesn't mean to not chase worldly desires and experiences, but it's to realize not to judge yourself and not to judge others based on their worldly achievements. Think about this. If you met me a year ago, let's say, a year ago and you asked me, what's new? Oh, Scott, I see that you're living in the same condo. Yeah. Hey, Scott, I see that you're still making videos about stuff. Yeah, yeah. Scott, I see that you saw the same guitars that you did in 2009. Yeah, I see that you still have the same mattress and pillows. Yeah, you still got the same couch, yeah? Yeah, not married? No, not yet. No, you still have that same waffle shirt that you got from Old Navy in 2017? Uh-huh, yeah. No car? No, public transit, yeah. Are you happy? Yeah, I am. Yeah. Worldly achievements in the material world, Scott hasn't done much. I'm so fortunate to have a roof over my head. Music makes me happy. You all know where happiness comes from and people judge based on these kinds of achievements of what you can show for it all. What can you show for it? What can you show for it? For your time on earth, what are you showing me? You gonna give me a tour of your house? No, you're not like that. You'd give me a tour of how many people you've touched spiritually, emotionally, how many lives you've improved, the things you've gone through, the connections you have with the environment and the people around you. That's the ultimate. So here's the question for you. Where do your expectations come from? Where do your expectations come from? I expected at this age, I would have a better job and a better salary. Okay, where did that expectation come from? Why'd you expect that? Because everyone around me is getting that salary because they have the similar titles and same education. So I thought if I worked for a similar company, I'd get the same stuff. I expected not to have these kinds of health problems at age 40. Why did you expect that? Well, most people at age 40 don't have these, okay? So we're comparing the people around us. We're making ourselves a statistic, okay? I didn't expect a deal with anxiety. I didn't expect to have to go through depression. Yeah, fair, totally fair. You didn't expect it and yet it comes. Where did that expectation come from that you would have an easier ride through this journey, that the path would be a little smoother, right? Do we get these ideas from Hollywood? You know, the Oscars just happened. Do we look at these people and say, man, they got it, because we see some blips of them getting an award? Do we look at social media and say, man, they're around my age. Look at they got that, they got that, they got that, they got that. Man, am I behind? I expected I would have that. I want that. Where do your expectations come from and also meaning where do your wants come from? Why do you want certain things? Because other people said they want it or because they have it, right? You expected, you know, let me tell you a little story about university. You know, you all know a bit of my story in 2008. Hit with a wave of depression and anxiety. I went to university and I had the expectation it would just be different. And I don't even know what different would have meant. You know, sometimes we're disappointed, like we go to a concert, a venue, a dinner party, a friends party, a new city, somewhere we travel and we're just like, oh, not what I expected. But you ask yourself, well, what did I expect though? And you can't really get detailed. But something's missing. So when I went to university, I'm like, this is it? I go into the lecture hall. My first lecture, it's everyone's first lecture. It's this German guy can barely understand a word he says, the professor. He's first complaining that they put milk in his green tea. And I'm like, all right, and everyone's laughing. I'm like, that joke sucked. What's everyone laughing about? Am I insane? And people have all their laptops out. And I'm like, I don't have a laptop. First of all, I couldn't afford that shit. Second of all, all through university, I never used a laptop for taking notes. Memory works better when you actually write things out with your hand. And I'm looking around and everyone's just sat on the professor. It's microeconomics, boring as hell. He's doing demand and supply curves and everyone's like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he makes a joke like, oh, if bread is going up but ice cream is also going up, we call that a correlation, not a causation. And everyone's like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Oh, bread and ice cream, what the hell is going on right now? Have you ever been in those moments? I was in another lecture hall and this was the second day and the professor, this is a lecture hall like 400 people and the lecture, I'll never forget it. I felt so out of place. My expectations were so warped of what university meant and what it meant to be a university student. And I'm around these people that were in my residence and the professor's like, so do we wanna do MLA or APA citations and references? And I'm just like, what's MLA and APA? I'm 19 years old, I just wrote essays, I just did work cited. I don't know what the terms are here. And everyone's raising their hand, can we do MLA? Please, MLA! And everyone's like, MLA, MLA. And I was like, fucking nerds, oh no, what have I done? And I felt so alone in that moment and so betrayed by my own expectations as well that I'm like, am I in the right spot? Did I make the right decision? Back to the first lecture, I'm looking around like, can everyone else look around? Like, we're doing this thing, we're in university but everyone's just all on the professor laughing at the jokes and I asked myself that very question. Is this it? This is it. This is what university is. And a lot of people have that. But you can say, oh, this is it. This is the moment. I didn't have big expectations, small expectations. I just, I went with the flow a little bit. I said, I made a decision, I ended up here and let's see how it unfolds. I feel like that's a better mentality that I've kind of adopted over the years. But if we have an expectation of, oh, I'm joining the workforce. Oh my gosh, I'm gonna be so much happier because I'm gonna be making money. I'm gonna have a little more responsibility. I'm gonna get my own place. I'm gonna be in the world. I'm gonna be making big decisions with companies and doing this and this and this. And what happens? Well, it happened to me every new job I had. I got to the office, I did the interview. I started doing the work and I said, this is it. This is what full-time work is. These are the suits that I saw walking into buildings. They come in here and they have meetings about stuff. This is it. I work for a Fortune 500 company and this is how we do business and we have the meetings and then they have the Google Calendar and we write emails and oh, that's it? Holy shit. I wonder how many scenarios you've gone through where your expectations have led to a deflation. And you can remember that little bit of a rhyme. Expectations which are a balloon kinda blown up. Like we're blowing it up, we're blowing it up and the expectation is so big like when you're blowing a piece of bubblegum it goes bigger than your head and you can't even see in front of you because the bubblegum has made such a huge bubble. Huge balloon. You can't even see in front of you your expectations have blinded you so much and when you finally get there, you get deflated. The whole thing deflates and your experience is just like, what? This is the reality of the situation. It's sobering. That's what happens. It's a sobering realization when we get to a place where we had this idea of what it would be like and we hit the ground hard and we're like, oh, shit. Well, this isn't special at all. This is it. This is it. My friends, I know that you've had these moments and I'd love for you to comment and share when this happened to you. Ram Dass says it perfectly like, you play the game. You play the life game. You play the milestone game of I'm gonna go to school. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna get married. I'm gonna have children. I'm gonna do then retire and you reach the top of the mountain and nothing's there and you realize that the whole time you've been had, you realize that the game was rigged that it wasn't about the winner loss at the end. It wasn't the point score at the end versus other people, even versus yourself. It was about the practice. It was about the team you were playing with. It was about the camaraderie. It was about the connections that you made with your teammates, your family, friends. It wasn't about the end and we've all realized that we've been had by the companies that say they value us and that we're in value employees and we get laid off. We realize how disposable we are in the world. We realize how fragile we are as human beings and how fragile our parents and children are. We realize how little control we have over the environment and where we get led to in life and it doesn't mean that we're a cork in the ocean that we're just being toppled by waves. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that we are a ship in the ocean and you create your ship and you have teammates rowing and you have all these people on board and you can't control the wind man. You can't control the waves but you can control the sails. You can make the best of the situation. You can steer in the right direction that you wanna go but we only have so much control and one thing that we can control is our expectations. What do we expect to happen in this situation? Where do we expect to be? And if you're comparing everybody else's worldly achievements with yours, where are you gonna end up? I'm in this position but they're in that position. Therefore I did something wrong because I expected to be where everybody else is. The deflation that comes with that is tough. It's tough. I'm not to say to lower the bar so low that you just kinda tiptoe over it. You gotta play a little limbo sometimes or you gotta do a little bit of high jump and these are goals and it feels good to progress to something, to keep making progress, to something that we deem as valuable and important that aligns with and solidifies with our values as a person. Know what your values are. Set the expectations reasonable but to create an imaginary world into the future that is just perfect and you get there, it's never what you dreamed of and people have this all the time with oh, I'm gonna retire, I'm gonna go to the beach and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna golf. Six months later, the people who are retired are massively depressed, they lost all meaning, they lost all their friendships at work and they thought laying on the beach and relaxing would give them some type of meaning and they thought they would be happy. Doesn't work that way. You thought that oh, I'm gonna move to this country because it's warm and the fruits are more fresh. There's no GMOs, people are friendly, there's sunshine, there's beaches, there's surf, I can work remote and these remote workers, a lot of them have found out that that lifestyle was inflated in their head and they get there and oh, well it's harder to meet friends and the time difference is 12 hours in Bali and I miss my family back at home and it's really, really unbelievably humid and hot and I don't really have that much time to swim and the list can go on. Set your expectations reasonable. Set a goal, strive towards it and have no expectation of what it will feel like in the end. How would that work? If you had absolutely no expectations, you wanna achieve something but no expectations about how you will feel once you reach that achievement. How would that change your mood? How would that change your way? How would you blow up the bubblegum? Will it be as deflating when you reach it? There's nothing on top of the mountain but there's so much on the path and I hope you walk slow enough up the mountain to see it all. God bless you my friends, where do your expectations come from? I hope to see you in the chat, I hope to see you on patreon.com slash scott-saint-marie and sign up for a couple bucks and I hope to see you, I hope to do bi-weekly calls with you and we can chat, bring your true self to the calls, do a little meditation, sit with yourself and enjoy the journey. Take care, bye-bye.