[Aurornis]

> I‘ve found that the „high expectations“ were acutely stressful because they were concealed: there was no way to match them.

That's a very good point.

I remember the first time I was in a cycle of trying to meet impossible expectations. We kept putting in a lot of effort and doing some very impressive things, but every time we got close to delivering something the goalposts would move.

After far longer than I'd like to admit, I realized that those lofty expectations weren't designed to be met. They were designed to keep us perpetually insecure. Always feeling like we needed to try a little harder. And it was working on us, at least for a couple years.

The illusion was briefly shattered when a manager gave us a goal that numerically meant that one of our vendors would have to serve us at a loss. He wanted us to negotiate a contract where they paid us to be their customer, when you added up all the factors. When we showed him, he did a pretend-angry routine and lectured us on how we should be thinking bigger all the time. We "failed" to meet that impossible expectation, to the surprise of absolutely nobody on the team. After that, it was like the team had been freed from the shackles of impossible expectations. We did our best and shrugged off the disappointed manager routine when it didn't meet the arbitrary expectations. It was interesting to watch as the manager realized his power over us had been broken, which quickly gave way to a slow-motion process of sidelining us for younger replacements who were more receptive to the disappointed manager routine.

I miss many of those coworkers, but I do not miss that job.