How no expectation enhance your experience

I get a call around 6:00 pm on Friday. I’m at work and is a friend, he wanted to know if I’m interested in going with him to a Romanian Rock Concert. He had a extra ticket (so for me is for free), even if I felt tiered and had just 2 hours to get there, I thought: “why not”.

My friend, called me twice to see where I was, he wanted me to be there on time. I found it odd, since its a rock concert, who cares if I’m late, there is always a opening band. When I got there quarter past 8 pm, I see him dressed nicely, making a big fuss of not making any noise and that they had started. At this point I’m lost, thinking “what is the deal here?”. Then we enter the balcony, and while taking a glimpse at the stage and the people in their seats (of the Sodra Teatern in Stockholm) : I see four persons on stage, three with Violins and one with a Cello. I had misunderstood, it was a Romanian Quartet Concert, not Romanian Rock Concert.

Let me tell you, that the experience was mind blowing. First my favorite instrument to listen too, is the violin. In addition, I recently got the album of Yo Yo Ma’s playing Bach Suites (1 to 6) on the Cello. Finally, it was interpretation of folk music, occasionally adding some visual elements on the screen. It was great stuff, I couldn’t ask for more.

All this got me to thinking, that be best experiences come when you don’t have any expectations. In my case, I didn’t expect nothing, I didn’t have any time to even get the wrong expectations ( me thinking it was a Rock Concert). And there I was delighted, thankful and with a experience to remember.

We will always have expectations of things to come or people that we will meet. We have expectations when you take a trip, go abroad to study, go to watch a movie movies, buy a new laptop or when we go for a date. We know something is coming, we can’t resist the uncertainty of not knowing nothing, so we start to research and form ideas on the head of what the experience will be (comparing to previous ones). In some cases we might live experience before the event has happened.

Expectations are like a ball with holes. When we start to have them, the ball starts to form, however it can NOT be completed because to be filled, we have to live the event or use the product we bought. So, there we are with a ball with holes, waiting for them to be filled when we reach that moment. Sometimes we get what we expected, sometimes they exceeded or all wholes are not filled, so we need more time. In other occasion we are disappointed . Our disappointments come when we are presented with something different, that doesn’t meet or fit the ball we created. It actually could be because it sucked, however (especially with people and places) we forget to see the big picture or form a new ball, which permits us to have a different experience.

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Expectations are part of our life and are difficult not to have them. However managing expectations is key aspect, not just in how we experience life but in business and management. Everybody has expectations of the products we launch, the service we provide or how our employees perform. Sometimes those expectations are linked to money, meaning that for X amount of money we EXPECT a return equivalent to X. And then is when things get more complicated, because how do you measure a return, when expectations may blur the way you see things.

As a consumer or a producer, as a manager or a employee, most of the time we don’t have the option of having no expectations, instead we have to manage them and align them in a way that everybody understand what is coming and what is not. However in life that is another story as The Ink Spots say in one of their songs: “The best things in life are free”. Should I expect everything that is free to be the best?