Breaking the Expectation Curse

So today I want to share some of my thoughts on expectations. This word has been used and abused a lot by this generation, but also by the way I was raised over the last 20 years as the only son in a very traditional family.

I grew up in a household where expectations were everywhere—how to live, what to believe, and even how to behave. It started with living in a joint family and later in our own home. Everything from religious beliefs to daily habits was defined in a certain way. If I followed them, I was considered a “good son.” If I didn’t, I wasn’t.

That shaped me into a people pleaser. I tried to keep everyone happy—my parents, extended family, and even friends. I avoided conflict at all costs, because I was conditioned to believe that “good people make it big in life” and that if you’re good, good things will always happen to you.

One thing I will always be grateful to my parents for is that they never placed expectations on my education. They gave me the freedom to choose my path. That’s how I ended up in Kota, preparing for IIT-JEE for three years, then getting my engineering degree and later an MBA.

But the real expectations began once I started working. I was supposed to:

• Marry early. (I didn’t.)
• Marry within the same culture and society. (I didn’t.)
• Build a career in the corporate ladder. (I didn’t—I quit after two and a half years to start my own company and never went back.)

Even with religion and belief systems, people expected me to follow traditions, but I developed my own views. Many times, I would deliberately take the opposite stance just to see how my family would react. For the first 25 years of my life, I was on one side of the spectrum—doing everything that was expected. For the last 10 years, I’ve been on the opposite side—consistently breaking expectations, often just because someone told me to do something a certain way.

Some of those rebellions weren’t even necessary, but I kept doing it. Alongside, my professional success began to grow. That changed things. Even though my family wasn’t happy with me not fulfilling their expectations, they started giving me space because success gave me permission to live differently.

At the end of it all, I have a simple goal:

• I want to be a good human being.
• I want to be spiritual.
• I want to help people in any way I can.

But if you put me inside a structure where I must do things in a fixed way, I won’t follow it. That is how I’ve broken the expectation curse in my family. Have you?