I feel like a man with dreams of being a deep sea fisherman stuck in the arid plains of Nebraska. For nearly three decades I have circled aimlessly towards the sea. I meander alone through the desolate moonlit plains accompanied only by my thoughts of failure and fleeting time.

As I traverse the beaten down waves of grain suddenly a beautiful fluttering wind arises. Lady luck swooshes in across my desolation, she flutters in close beside me and whispers in my ear a message of future prosperity, “Lower your expectations.”

Maybe I don’t want to be a deep sea fisherman.

Maybe I’m not stranded in Nebraska.

Maybe lady luck was really some person who wrote a blog (with crude language at times) about why Generation Y Yuppies are unhappy.

Maybe I stretched that fisherman analogy too far. I digress.

According to the blog post: Happiness = Expectations – Reality.  The author states that much of Generation Y has an inflated ego that leads to unreachable expectations (with unhappiness soon to follow). So the answer to happiness is getting over ourselves and lowering our expectations?

If this were true, I would’ve already traded my dress shirts for sweats, and tailored my goals around Candy Crush domination.

If you’re expectations are being dwarfed by your reality then you’re experiencing failure.

Steady yourself. Take a breath. Join the masses.

Failure is going to happen to us all. The problem occurs when we morph failure into rejection.

I am sure Thomas Edison had high expectations, that is probably why he was quoted, “I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Edison failed at times. However, he understood that an optimistic viewpoint on failure was worth more than accepting rejection’s poison.

Why would you lower your expectations in the pursuit of a water-downed happiness? You have the opportunity to (successfully!) find another way that doesn’t work in the mean time.

Happiness isn’t an equation.

Failure isn’t the larva of rejection.

Shoot for the moon. He’ll still smile at you when you miss.

Photo credit: Wikipedia