Low expectations is a helpful part of living a peaceful life. Everything nice that happens is a bonus, but I’d recommend not staking your happiness on what others do and don’t do.
There is no need to try and take explicit credit when you get implicit credit simply from the visibility of leading the project.
Having spoken to a lot of low level leaders I'd disagree. It does create unhappiness because in the end they are no less human. That unhappiness may be worth it for the other benefits and the happiness they gain from them but saying they don't experience unhappiness is dismissing their very human emotions. But often the unhappiness dominates, they burn out and then get replaced by some narcissist/sociopath. That person is fully happy and rises up the ranks.
Of course if you happen to do IC work as well it makes sense to take credit for that, but I think that mixing leadership and IC work tends to result in burnout.
The project maintainer surely would have not felt bad giving credit to someone ? Exhibiting this kind of leadership usually makes me feel great !
On the contrary, as we see from the article, the lack of credit really did create unhappiness from thin air…
the secret of a happy life is trying to be happy, whatever that means to you, and making it, the secret of a sad life is trying to be happy and failing at it.
regardless of the expectations.
So no, it isn't always the opposite. For many of us, our pessimistic attitude has been extremely damaging.
Someone else here said
> You have control over the inputs but not the outcomes :)
I can't speak for others, but for me personally, having low expectations has caused me to become lackadaisical or even destructive with my inputs. What is the point if it will just go wrong?
EDIT: I can't reply because /u/dang has blocked my account again
> That... isn't what I mean by low expectations? For me, it means to be grateful for what you've got, to question feelings of envy and to not feel that you deserve something.
That's called "gratitude", not "low expectations"
"Low expectations" means you expect low, i.e. bad. It's pessimism.
Regardless of all that I hope you work out your depression, it sucks.
No thanks.