Beyond Expectations | Original
While it is good to keep your promise, it is better to go beyond expectations.
In corporate life, or in personal life, doing things beyond expectations gives people pleasant surprises.
In corporate life, going beyond expectations means you deliver faster or better than what your colleagues expect. It means not only does your work meet the requirements set by the company, but the quality of your work exceeds what is supposed to be.
In personal life, going beyond expectations means that you can help others in unexpected ways. Think of 7 billion people—how many people can help you? While they do their best work, you buying their services or products is the way they help you a lot.
Also, my teacher Yin Wang is exceptionally good at this. He always teaches me beyond my expectations. I can never reach that level of intelligence. I often reread his essays; however, no matter how many times I read them, I still find something very useful.
For corporate life, you do what you are assigned to do. That is probably a basic requirement, and it should be. But how can you do something beyond the requirement?
The answer is to use AI tools effectively. Companies may provide AI chatbots for people to use. However, in my view, it is not just intelligent chatbots, but AI agents, prompt engineering, and context engineering.
Their usefulness just sits there waiting for you to discover. Because AI models are trained on billions of tokens—most of human existing knowledge—AI chatbots are just a way to compress and decompress this knowledge.
Let’s return to our topic. When we want to work better and get good feedback, we need to hold some secrets. We don’t show all the work or all the ideas we have. Instead, we hide some to let employers or team leads be surprised.
One popular idea on social media is that you shouldn’t share too much or be too needy. That’s good advice.
It is not just for working as an employee, but for users too. Airbnb is good at doing things beyond expectations.
There are already a lot of workers, products, and services. But things that are beyond expectations are always few.
ChatGPT is beyond expectation. DeepSeek is beyond expectation.
Having results that are beyond expectation means that they are good, and somehow exceptionally good.