On Exceeding Expectations

2023.10.01

Lindy Expectancy: 28 Weeks

I’m grateful to be writing this during a week in Lisbon–it’s a lovely city with lovely people, food, espresso, wine, architecture, and weather. It is safer than most major US cities; you can easily walk or take public transport everywhere and everything is cheap… why do I rent in the states, again?

Lisbon exceeded my expectations by a lot; this post, however, is about how exceeding expectations by even just a little can go a long way.

Lisboa

Before we talk about expectations, a bit about the city: it’s downright gorgeous. Here was the view of the sunrise from the apartment we stayed in:

Right in the heart of Bairro Alto, I fell asleep with open windows, allowing the gentle sounds of debauchery drift up and lull me to sleep… as I said, the weather was phenomenal, between 65 and 90ish the whole time, so we let the breeze run through the apartment at all hours.

The food in the area was great and inexpensive–I enjoyed too many €2 double shots of espresso and some €5 breakfasts. While we splurged a bit on a few of the dinners, that overstates it compared to the US: two meals at Michelin Star restaurants each came out to about €50 a person each.

If we extended our 8 day stay out to a month, the “rent” per person would have still been significantly less than what anyone who I know in Manhattan is paying. The median rent in Manhattan right now is over $4k a month; I couldn’t find the median for Lisbon, but the average for a one bed in the city center is around €850.

For someone who can largely work remotely, these are pretty attractive numbers… I do promise that the rest of this note, though, is not just me talking myself into moving to Portugal.

Obrigad(o/a)

It may come as a surprise to some of you, but I’m not Portuguese. I also don’t speak Portuguese, and have never been the best at picking up languages. However, something that I’m coming to understand as really important is making a good faith effort at learning the language of any country you’re visiting.

This feels pretty obvious, and I think it is. If you’re in the US and attempting to speak with someone who doesn’t know English, if you don’t exercise patience and empathy, it’s not hard to see how you might get frustrated. While you should always exercise patience and empathy, you can’t necessarily expect that everyone else will, too.

The question becomes, how much of another language is it enough to learn?

In Portugal, adding ‘olá’ (hello) & ‘obrigado’ (thank you, obrigada for the feminine form) are the low hanging fruits–they're relatively easy to remember and add just a little bit of color to your English. Adding them to your lexicon is a great start.

I’d argue that going just one step above this, throwing in something like ‘Todo bom,’ which is the equivalent of ‘everything good?’ can go incredibly far.

Signal vs Noise

Queue the part where we get more technical than we need to: a concept from information theory is the difference between signal and noise. Signal is meaningful information; it is something that you don’t already know, it is additive. Noise, on the other hand, is effectively not information–it is random variation in some stream of data.

An important distinction, though, is that something that might at first be signal can become noise.

Let’s say you’re going on a hike. Take the following strings of 1’s and 0’s. A 1 means you hear a waterfall, and a 0 means you don’t.

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 

Obviously, the one’s stick out pretty plainly here. Based on the series, it looks like you were walking and passed a waterfall. The sound of water falling tells you that the waterfall is there; it’s signal.

Now, keep the same definition, 1’s as hearing a waterfall, 0’s as not hearing a waterfall. Now you’re at the end of a hike, however, and you’ve decided to stand by a waterfall.

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Having a string 1’s is no longer surprising; it is no longer signal. Of course the water is still falling! At some point, it effectively becomes background noise. We could just as easily rewrite this series as the inverse:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 

The signal, the relevant information, would be something that required you to update your understanding of reality, such as if the water stopped falling… after all, what would cause that? Likely something that would warrant your attention. So, we’ll make that the 1; we’ll make that the signal.

Signal is conditional on what expectations are.

Exceeding Expectations

A great sentiment that I am going to attribute to my dad, because I heard it from him first and the most frequently:

As a foreigner in Lisbon, the implicit promise is that I don’t speak the language but can maybe say thank you. For me, someone who never hears anyone speak Portuguese, if I start my sentence with olá and intersperse an obrigado maybe in the middle of the sentence and another one at the end, each of those Portuguese words certainly registers as signal:

1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1

However, from the perspective of a Lisbon local, this may not be the case. If the average foreigner picks up on obrigado and olá, those words stop containing as much information value. From their perspective, that interaction may look more like this:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

While it’s still nice to throw in obrigadoa and olá, they become the expectation, the baseline. A useful definition of signal:

Signal is variance from expectation.

If my very existence as a foreigner implies that I’ll learn hello and thanks, that’s the expectation. What I might think is signal may be noise.

In a waterfall of foreigners, obrigado and olá are more drops of water.

Over Deliver

The whole point of this is that it’s not terribly difficult to go one step above whatever everyone else is doing; you can do just a little that can really help raise the bar and make someone smile.

One of the baristas at the coffee shop I went to multiple times a day (yes, my caffeine addiction is a problem) taught me a few phrases that seriously made all the difference: just by saying ‘Todo bom,’ roughly equivalent to the English “all good?”, the tone in conversations was quite different.

The string of 0’s changes more than just by the additional phrase… I’d argue that it makes the other couple of words feel less obligatory and turns them back into signal:

1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1

One of the guys in my group also would ask for the bill with ‘conta.’ Again, that always put a smile on the waiter or waitresses face.

It’s not a whole lot of work, and it is a little scary… what if you look like a foreign dumbass for saying the words wrong? But, empirically, I can tell you that saying the words wrong to learn how to say them correctly is far better than not saying them at all.

If you know what people have come to expect of you, every time you deliver just a little more, they’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Why even worry about pleasantly surprising other people? In a case like this, it just feels like a nice thing to do.

If you’re enjoying someone’s country & culture, I think it’s a nice token of appreciation to show that you’ll do a little bit of work to express your gratitude for being able to visit.

Obrigado,