The half of “high standards” we usually ignore
We obsess over how high the bar is. The thing that actually holds it up gets ignored.
Matt Bodnar
June 23, 2026
Hi ,
I’ve always thought of myself as someone with high standards – for the businesses I’m involved in, for the people I work with, for myself. And like a lot of people who care about execution, my instinct when something falls short has been to hold the line, or raise it.
A simple matrix from Sahil Bloom made me question that instinct this week.
His point is that standards have two dimensions, not one. There’s expectations – how high you set the bar. And there’s support – how much you’re actually in someone’s corner while they try to clear it. Most of us obsess over the first and barely think about the second.
When you map them together, the trap becomes obvious. High expectations with no support produces short-term effort and long-term resentment – the manager who demands more but never shows up for you. It looks like high performance right up until your best people quietly leave. Plenty of support with low expectations is the opposite failure: people feel good and slowly stall.
What you actually want is both. High expectations and high support – someone who tells you the truth about who you could become, and then does the work alongside you.
The reason it stuck with me is that I’d always treated underperformance as a sign my standards weren’t being respected. This reframed it as a question I should ask myself first: have I paired the expectation with enough support to make it reachable? Often the bar is fine. The thing missing is me standing underneath it.
Thought some of you might find it as useful as I did. Full credit to Sahil Bloom for the framing.
-Matt