The Deception of Expectations
Always expecting to have it figured out and know how to reach our big goals is unnatural.
Players who land on the cover of Madden NFL, the video game, are said to be cursed. The cover of every annual installment of the game features an NFL player who was voted one of the league’s top players the prior year. Subscribers to the cover curse believe that players on the cover will subsequently be “jinxed” the following season. If they are featured, players will experience an injury or decline in performance. But, of course, American football is a violent game. Staying healthy is a constant battle for the players. Performance isn’t guaranteed.
So does the Madden Cover Curse exist?
Some fans are determined to believe it does. Fans vote for the cover athlete and often won’t vote for their favorite players in hopes they avoid the spell.
However, numerous players have evaded the curse. Patrick Mahomes appeared on the cover and in the following season, not only won the Super Bowl but the MVP. Tom Brady appeared on the cover and won the MVP the next season. Calvin Johnson set the single-season record for receiving yards after he was “cursed”. Of course, some players struggle. Christian McCaffrey was this year’s cover athlete and spent most of the past season injured.
But despite people wanting us to believe, the Madden Cover Curse is fake. The athlete performed exceptionally well in the prior season with the assistance of luck, and luck is fleeting. They were crowned one of the league's best players, and fans treat them as such. Fans raise their expectations and place absurd objectives on them. After all, once one objective is reached, it is not celebrated the stakes are raised. The players become slaves to expectations and are forced to face impossible perfection. The curse is only players failing to meet those unrealistic expectations.
The Madden Cover Curse is not specific to the NFL. In the NBA, Mike Brown unanimously won the Coach of the Year award two years ago and led a dumpster fire franchise, the Sacramento Kings, to two straight winning seasons. Before Brown, the Kings held the longest active postseason drought across the four major North American sports. He brought them to their first winning season in 17 years. He was fired earlier this year after the Kings won 13 of their first 31 games.
Dwane Casey led the Toronto Raptors to their first NBA conference finals in 2016. In 2018, he won Coach of the Year. However, he was fired in 2018 after losing in the conference semifinals. Insanity. Both got crushed by the weight of irrational expectations.
Society demands expectations and goals for everything we do. A clear outcome is needed to allow others to judge it as a success or failure. If you participate in online dating, you are expected to know what you’re “looking for”. You put filters on height, education level, relationship status, and distance. At 18, you go to college with the expectation of knowing what you want to study. You enter the workforce and are expected to know what you want to do with your life. Grand plans, big goals, expectations, and objectives are always needed.
Once we have everything planned, we can place all of our efforts into achieving it. We measure our progress somehow. Our measurements inform us if we are getting there. For example, some players want to be the best player in the NFL. Landing on the cover of Madden NFL will let them know their standing. When trying to find your life partner, going on dates, becoming official, and meeting each other's families helps gauge if you are progressing towards something special. If you can’t get past a first date, you may need to change your approach.
Expectations are necessary, and when they are modest and realistic, great. However, things get much more complicated as they rise. Why is this so? The main issue with rising expectations is we assume we know how to reach our ambitious goals. When you decide to get serious about dating, you assume if you go to the bars or the gym, you will meet your partner there. When an NBA team starts to experience success, management and fans expect their path to success to be linear.
Expectations are deceiving because they convince you that you know how to reach an ambitious objective. But the steps that lead to the goal rarely resemble what you expect. People meet their partners in the most peculiar situations. Teams win their first championship after years of hardship. Kids find out what they want to major in after taking a random elective. People find the career they love when they are fired from their job. Sometimes, it barely makes sense.
Scottie Scheffler, an American golfer, won the 2024 Olympic gold despite being six shots back heading into the final day. I would bet he never expected his path to victory to include a six-shot deficit with 18 holes left. Maggie Rogers got her break when Pharrell Williams came to her music class at NYU and loved her samples. I bet Maggie expected to get her break much earlier and never planned for it to be in her college class. I walked into a grocery store in the summer of 2018 looking for a part-time job. Never did I think I was beginning to work towards my full-time career. The people who have the most success dating are the ones who have fun with it. Not those determined to find a partner. Not trying to find something can lead to the most fruitful discoveries.
Always expecting to have it figured out and know how to get there is unnatural. I switched my major four times before landing on finance. The New York Yankees last won the World Series in 2009 despite expecting to win it every year since then. It stifles our creativity and opportunities when we are always stuck in our expectations.
Humans tire of always expecting more and unreasonable expectations. Sebastien Bras is the owner of Le Suquet à Laguiole, a three-star Michelin restaurant – the world’s highest culinary honor. It had three stars for 18 consecutive years. Le Suquet à Laguiole didn’t lose the distinction after 18 years because it fell out of the graces of the Michelin judges, but because Bras asked Michelin to stop coming. He realized the expectations and system restricted his culinary creativity.
Huge expectations and expecting we know how to reach goals are deceptive. They ignore luck, stifle creativity, and convince us we know how to accomplish our big goals. The Madden Cover Curse doesn’t exist because of voodoo magic. The players are ridiculed under the weight of unrealistic expectations. Coaches get fired after being named the best coach in the league not because they lost their touch but because people assume success is linear and expectations exponentially grow.
Expectations provide a false sense of hope. They crush us when they become inflated. We think we know what to expect. We assume we know how to reach them. They convince us of certainty. Life is anything but.
-Scantron
Appreciate your time. I would love to hear any thoughts.