You’re not always going to meet your own expectations for yourself and the expectations of others. No human being is perfect. A part of being human is understanding that you are incapable of perfection. When you have not met your responsibilities, don’t sit there and wallow in your self-pity—dust yourself off and try again. If you have made some poor choices, it’s okay. Learn from those poor choices and strive to not make them again. If you make them again, keep working not to repeat them. Too many people put too much pressure on themselves to be perfect. For many, it’s almost like a surprise when they don’t do things perfectly. Why would you be surprised? You have not been perfect from the day you were conceived.
You cannot let what you feel others may think about your poor choices worry you that much. You will drive yourself insane trying to please people all the time. It’s impossible to please people all the time because many people don’t even know what “being pleased” is.
Being disappointed is not a good feeling. We have to make sure that we are doing our best to prevent disappointments from occurring. However, no matter how much you are doing to attempt to prevent disappointments from happening they are still going to happen. The effort that you devote to foiling disappointments from occurring can help to reduce the number of disappointments you experience.
If you are never disappointed with yourself, you will never know how proud of yourself you should be when you do something really good or great. Disappointments come to improve us. If everything goes just great for you all the time, you would not feel human. It would also feel like you cannot feel. Do you really want to go through life not being able to feel? I don’t think you really want to go through life not being able to feel.
People think that everything always goes great for me. They look at my level of success, accomplishments, titles, positions, degrees, talents, and etc. and think that every day and everything is wonderful for me. Yes, I’m very successful and highly accomplished but my success and accomplishments did not come without my share of disappointments. In fact, the more success and accomplishments I earn the greater the pressure I place on myself to be even better. With the tremendous pressure I place on myself to become greater and greater, I experience many disappointments.
Don’t make me be less than human by thinking that everything is always going great for me and that every day is a successful day for me. I am not a robot. I feel. Although my external wrapper and internal coating is much stronger than most, I still feel. I have cloudy days and cloudy moments just as you do. I encourage you not to perceive people who are successful and accomplished to be something larger than human. Yes, we are successful and accomplished but still human.
I take comfort in my disappointments because I did all that I could reasonably do to avoid being disappointed. At the end of the day, all I can ask myself to do is the best I can do. When I’ve done all I can reasonably do to do my best, it’s then that I recognize I don’t have a need to feel disappointed with myself.
Antonio Maurice Daniels
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Revolutionary Paideia 
I have always thought that life was a balance of self-actualization and persistence. You have to evaluate yourself but not over-evaluate yourself to the point you begin to hinder yourself. I gotta forward to this to someone I know needs to read this right now…Big ups on this!!
Thanks, Darryl! Very true.
I think the most important thing is to make sure you did everything you could do. I agree, once I evaluate that I’m straight. I think the problem I have after that is something I just harp on what happened or even try to figure out what I could have done better. Face it, nobody wants to be disappointed. It’s a part of life we’d all rather not deal with.
I agree. Your use of “harp” is a good thing, though. This means that you are seriously thinking about the things that happen in your life and that you do. This is good reflective thinking, which is a great thing and not something you should think is just “harping.” I actually want to deal with disappointment because it helps me to learn what I need to become even greater. A little disappointment helps to prevent us from getting complacent. Although I may not enjoy the disappointment immediately, I embrace it eventually.
If you never fail yourself, you aren’t setting your goals high enough.
Keep up the good work AD…..I’m getting back in the blog game
Sean! You’re back! That’s very true: “If you never fail yourself, you aren’t setting your goals high enough.” I like that very much! I’m heading over to read your latest post. I’m glad you’re back blogging again. The blogosphere needs your presence very much.
You have no idea how helpful this is! Thank you!
Thank you very much for reading and I’m glad that you were able to benefit from the article. I wish you all of the best.
its easy to say .all this ……but hard to accept…….;(
You must, however, find the will to accept it if you’re going to achieve your desired outcomes. Thanks for reading and your response!