Life is just a big game of expectation management.

If you're fundraising, you could be packaging your idea so well and exaggerating the TAM so much that your team would be having difficulties producing the results.

If you're doing sales, you could be promising clients a perfectly tailored solution but the product/service you're delivering couldn't deliver.

You get the idea.

Even when you're not that high-intention of a person, work pressure will guide you to say "yes" to almost everything and never say no – whether it is to your boss, to your colleagues, or even to clients.

That is a bad idea.

You will be scrambling to meet those unrealistic expectations and consistently stressing yourself out because of what you overcommitted to.

Instead, what you should do is to manage those expectations from the beginning.

1. Set a hard to achieve goal. A goal that is rooted in reason and has a logical basis and not one that you randomly came up with because it sound great.
2. Explicitly communicate this goal to all the stakeholders involved. Set up something more formal, a meeting or something communicated in an email – you want to be able to reference it later on.
3. Get all stakeholders aligned to the goal, written (better) or verbally.

If you're not the one setting the goal but instead was assigned the goal, try your best to take a step back and ask for the basis of that goal. Manage expectations by communication. In the scenarios above:

1. For fundraising, what are other startups of the same industry/TAM doing when they're in your stage? Prepare data to convince potential investors you're saturating every possible channel and growing as much as you can at your current stage. Align them along with aligning your team.
2. For sales, what is your client currently doing without your product/service? How can your solution help or improve on what they're currently doing? Have potential clients understand that no system will 100% solve their problems and your tool is merely there to help.

If you're really doing your job, you should be able to get alignment for those goals.

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars." You say?

That's for another day.