How to Raise Your Standards in Life, and Why It Should Hurt

On September 5th, the power goes out in my apartment at ten in the morning. My phone sits at twelve percent, and I hold it sideways so I can see at least a few faces in the group chat. I'm talking in the dark to a room of people who joined their first session an hour ago. I tell them: what you're starting right now is called an expedition, and that's not a mood metaphor. To reach the summit you need first aid, rope knots, how to pitch camp, how to swing an ice axe. Becoming a different version of yourself works the same way. Then I say the line that makes the chat go quiet: people's output has dropped, on average, ninefold.

I haven't run a scientific study. This is a personal read, built on thirteen thousand-plus hours on stage and more than two thousand deep interviews with people who pay for transformation. Most people in that room used to carry a $100,000 target in their head. Now $1,000 feels fine. A trip around the world became one vacation to Egypt. The best car and the best clothes became just any new car. Oxford or Harvard for the kids became just getting them into daycare. The gap between what you wanted at twenty and what satisfies you now, that's your personal ninefold drop.

A standard is not a goal. A goal is a point on the horizon: make a million, lose fifteen pounds, ship the project. A standard is the floor you physically won't let yourself fall below in what you do every day. Tony Robbins, who's spent thirty years teaching people to change their lives, puts it this way: "the only thing that changes people's lives long term is raising your standards." With goals, you can fail one and pick up the next. With standards, either you have something to be proud of every night or you don't, and you know which one it is without waiting for a quarterly report.

Standards Aren't Goals, and Confusing Them Is Expensive

The difference is simple, but nobody says it out loud. You can postpone a goal. You wanted to earn a hundred thousand this year, it didn't happen, you push it to next year, nothing terrible happened, you're still the same person. You can't postpone a standard, because a standard isn't something you're moving toward. It's who you agree to be right now.

Robbins writes in Awaken the Giant Within that changing your standards is the moment "should" turns into "must": as long as something stays merely desirable, you'll keep putting it off, and change only starts once you stop letting yourself off the hook. The problem is that standards never announce their own decline out loud. Nobody wakes up and consciously decides to aim lower from today on. Each swap looks like maturity and realism on its own, and a falling standard is just as quiet as losing your discipline before you even notice it's gone.

Why Standards Drop Without Your Permission

A falling standard isn't a character flaw. There's a mechanism behind it, and it isn't laziness: it's what thirty years of parenting culture fed you.

Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck of Stanford, in their classic 1998 study, showed that praising kids for being smart, instead of for effort, actually damages them. After a first failure, those kids are less persistent, enjoy the task less, and perform worse the next time, because praise for ability teaches you to see yourself as a fixed quantity that's too scary to test. The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and has been replicated by dozens of similar experiments since.

I call this the American style of parenting, where every kid gets praised, where everyone's a little bit of a champion and a little bit of a winner, but it adds up to one thing: if the approval bar was set low from childhood, you grow up with a habit of collecting a gold star for what used to be plain normal. Real confidence has nothing to do with it.

Which brings me to the detail I jokingly call the Freeman Standard: an adult praising themselves before bed for not missing the toilet today. It's funny right up until you realize that's literally how a lowered standard works: you feel proud of the absence of failure in a place where you'd once have been ashamed to feel proud at all. The bar rests not on "I did it" but on "at least I didn't screw it up," and from that low a bar, it's hard to even notice it's there. It's become its own test in our community since: ask yourself if you have your own personal Freeman Standard, a failure you quietly wear like an achievement.

The One-Day Test: How to Tell You're Settling for Less

On September 5th, that same evening, I played soccer. Played at full intensity. And that night, going to bed, I repeated the rule I repeat to myself after every day that mattered: who cares how everyone else played, if you have no question marks about your own effort, did you leave everything on the field today? And then the real question, the one I've asked myself every night since after anything that mattered: was this the best day I was capable of today, or just another story I'm telling myself about a good day?

That's the test that replaces every theory. It's not about whether I'm satisfied with myself, you can be satisfied out of pure inertia. It's about something else: did I give an inch anywhere, did I quit, did I give up before I actually ran out of gas. You can't fake the answer to that question in front of yourself for more than a couple of days in a row. Your body and memory remember the difference between "I was tired and stopped" and "I had more in me, but found an excuse" with uncomfortable precision.

Run this test honestly for a week and you'll see your real bar without a single conversation with a therapist: it's either right where you picture it, or a full notch lower.

Why Discomfort Moves Standards Forward

Behind every lowered standard sits the same belief: pain is bad, so it must be avoided. We've demonized discomfort to the point where we live in an era where people can't stand filming thirty identical videos in a row, regularly lose the fight against the fridge, and are afraid to pitch their own ideas just to dodge a moment of awkwardness. That's the same avoidance wiring behind the misdiagnosis of "laziness," when what's really happening is you don't want to feel the discomfort of a goal that was never yours to begin with. Muscle physically grows under load, not during rest. Character works the same way, just on a longer clock.

Endocrinologist Hans Selye, who coined the word "stress" itself, drew a distinction back in the 1970s between distress and eustress: stress that depletes you, and stress that strengthens you. He insisted the body needs a challenge, that without one it degrades just as reliably as it does from constant overload. The difference isn't whether there's load, it's the dose, and whether you recover from it. What consistently kills isn't the load itself, it's its chronic absence: a brain with nothing to solve degrades as reliably as a muscle that never moves, even though solving problems is what it likes best.

I've been going on category-three mountain expeditions since university: sixteen expeditions and counting, more than twenty summits. And every single one follows the same rule: a task that's too heavy either breaks you or hands you a new bar for what "heavy" even means. Once you've hauled a pack over a pass in bad weather, a hard conversation with a client stops registering as an event at all. A bar raised once in one area quietly raises the bar everywhere else, simply because you now know what to measure yourself against, and it's the same principle that keeps people in the game when they're used to quitting one step before the result: without a ceiling you've hit once, you have no gauge for what "hard" even means.

The Technology: How to Raise Your Standards Without Burning Out

Raising your standards in one big push, across every area at once, is a reliable way to last a week and slide back with a guilt hangover. The working sequence looks different, and I keep this exact list in my own notes.

1. Find your own Freeman Standard. Spend one evening writing down three things you've quietly praised yourself for lately, even though you basically just didn't screw up. Those are exactly the spots where the bar is sitting at zero.
2. Name a specific line out loud that you no longer let yourself cross. Not an abstract goal like "I want to lose weight," a specific rule like "I don't eat after ten." Two or three lines to start is enough.
3. Install the evening one-day test. Every night, answer with a fact, not a mood: did you give an inch anywhere, did you quit, did you give up early, yes or no, no excuses in parentheses.
4. Raise the bar one notch, not straight to perfect. The job is simple: be one unit better than yesterday in one specific area, not a perfect ten everywhere at once. That way you'll have something to measure against in a month, and the growth will feel real instead of scary.
5. Once a quarter, take on one deliberately oversized task. Purely to find out where your real ceiling sits right now, not for a line on a resume: a ceiling only moves once you actually run into it.
6. Track it, don't justify it. Count the honest "yes" answers from step three over a week. Three out of seven nights is a normal starting point, not a failure.

On September 5th, when the power went out in my apartment and my phone sat at twelve percent, I had an iron-clad excuse to reschedule: bad connection, I can barely see you, sorry, let's do this another time. Nobody would have argued. The Freeman Standard is exactly this: I sat through the whole session on what charge I had left instead, because rescheduling would have been one more story I tell myself about a good excuse. A standard isn't what you promise yourself you'll do. It's what you actually do when you have an iron-clad excuse not to.