UPOD (Under Promise, Over Deliver) is a common piece of advice within the context of managing your career: by always setting low expectations, you set yourself up to frequently exceed expectations in the eyes of your co-workers and manager, which sets you up for career progression.  However, in the linked reddit post, the author makes the valid case that such a strategy can enhance your personal life as well.  Within the context of your family and friends, you can set yourself up for impressing and improving the happiness of those around you and in turn yourself.  Finally, UPOD is a good strategy within the context of self love.  Instead of making high expectations of yourself that you statistically would rarely achieve, set lower expectations but keep your goals high.  Thus, you will more likely meet expectations, which will give you the sense of achievement that will boost your mood and energy and motivation to persist on and exceed your expectation and meet your goals.

Within the context of what makes UPOD work are two concepts: Setting expectations and celebrating small victories.  Setting expectations is key to a happy and successful life.  When your expectations roughly match the outcome in reality, you feel connected to reality because you understand it enough to accurately predict it, and this is empowering.  When you set expectations that are met or very close to being met, you also feel good because then you can see and measure yourself in that situation, unlike if the outcome far differed from your expectation you’re just left in confusion and feel powerless.  Celebrating small victories is important to refreshing the limited resource of willpower and motivation and energy that we all have. This resource gets used up as we work towards our goals, and if we do not celebrate often and refresh this energy, then we cannot reach as far, we cannot achieve as great a goal as we could have.  It’s the difference between running for 3 days without food and water, and running for 3 days with food and water. Feed yourself.  Celebrate small victories!

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