High Standards Low Expectations

Decoupling the bar from the outcome

Offered as her answer to handling hardship, Deel co-founder Shuo Wang describes a personal operating principle: set a high bar, expect little.¹ In her own words: "I have very high standard, but I have low expectations, because I understand there are many uncertainties in life and things are very unpredictable. Lower expectation can help you to be less unhappy when things don't go well." The principle is a working belief she uses to stay durable, offered alongside the company she and Alex Bouaziz built.

The move separates two things people usually fuse. Standards are the quality bar a person sets and controls, and Wang keeps these high, expecting the company to emulate them. Expectations are the outcomes a person anticipates from an uncertain world, and these she keeps low. The claim is that the standard never drops; only the anticipation of a smooth path does.

The payoff Wang names

The stated benefit is emotional durability under volatility. Wang, who plays poker and calls every founder "kind of a gambler," frames a setback as something that "resets your cards so you can play the next hand" rather than as evidence of failure. A high standard paired with high expectations, in this reading, breaks on the first bad quarter; a high standard paired with low expectations survives COVID, litigation, and personal loss without lowering the bar. She grounds the principle in her own history of country-to-country dislocation, outsider status, and her mother's death during Deel's hypergrowth, drawing the lesson in her own words: "do not overcomplicate it; things will go wrong; focus at that moment and solve what you can solve."¹

Where it sits among adjacent ideas

The principle handles the personal, psychological half of operating at a high bar. It pairs naturally with standards over rules, Eric Glyman's organizational mechanism for the high-standards half, which governs a scaling company by an internalized bar rather than by explicit rules. Wang's contribution is the personal complement that makes living at a high standard sustainable: the low-expectations posture that keeps the bar from becoming a source of chronic disappointment.

It is also adjacent to worst-case-scenario-first thinking, but distinct from it. Worst-case-first is about planning for the downside; Wang's version is about expecting the downside emotionally, so that when it arrives it does not destabilize judgment. The two are compatible: prepare for the bad case, and also anticipate it in temperament rather than assume the good case.

The unresolved edge

The principle is a first-person coping stance rather than a transferable procedure, and Wang presents it that way. It does not specify how high the standard should be, how to tell a low expectation from a resigned one, or how a leader broadcasts modest expectations of outcomes without dampening a team's belief that it can win. Wang's own framing leans on temperament and lived experience, which is where its force comes from and also why it resists being turned into an instruction. As stated, it is a report of what has kept one founder steady through a decade of volatility, not a claim about what will steady anyone else.