Let's talk about expectations in a romantic relationship. We have all been down the dating road of trying to find our person to share a life with. It can get mighty confusing trying to differentiate feelings of infatuation and excitement AKA dopamine and oxytocin when meeting new people to date. We have been taught, mainly by big cinema, to expect relationships to be a massive mountain of love, good feelings, great times, and never ending smiles. So many relationships end after 1-2 years because that is when our brain chemicals begin to switch to what I call “long term mode” and we begin to realize our deeper emotions that derive from our needs. One to two years into a relationship we realize if our needs are being met or not by how comfortable or uncomfortable we feel everyday and this is our nervous system communicating to us. When we are comfortable that means our nervous system is regulated and we make choices aligned with our needs and within our lane. When we are uncomfortable, that means we ignored the physical, mental, emotional, and value-based warning signs of another person. We accepted someone below our standards and outside of our boundaries.

That unmanned aerial vehicles re-entered the arsenal of the U.S. military is to a large part due to the ingenuity of an unlikely arms manufacturer: British actor Reginald Denny, one of the stars of Hollywood’s silent era. With a pencil mustache, a wide grin, and an angular physique, he appeared in light comedies, typecast as a jolly but slightly dimwitted Brit. A former member of the World War I Royal Flying Corps, Denny was an airplane enthusiast who became intensely interested in toy airplanes. His interest in these toys developed, as he later told the story, from a chance encounter with a boy trying to get his toy plane airborne. Offering to help, Denny accidentally crashed and wrecked it. Shopping around for a suitable replacement for the boy, the actor became hooked on flying model aircraft.

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When we experience prolonged stress or trauma during adolescence, we tend to grow into anxious or depressed adults with low esteem and lacking self belief. Our nervous system learns to live within dysregulation because we are always in fight or flight mode with high cortisol stress hormone levels. Having a dysregulated nervous system very likely causes issues in adults such as hair loss, chronic nausea or fatigue, lack of motivation and drive, mental health issues and diagnoses.

Other areas of life I can beam as an example of high standards is how I carry my Self in public and that standards I very much expect humans to uphold in public. I have high expectations as well as high standards for other adult humans. I show the behaviors to present as to receive respect rather than inconsideration or sexism. My strong values are reflected in how I act, and that sets the bar for how others perceive me as a human being. My values also create expectations, or possibly lack of, for what others are going to do in my realm of reality. Remember- what people think, they perceive and what people perceive, they feel and then they act on. What we act on AKA do everyday creates our habitual behaviors. We have to be careful with our thoughts and if we are developing standards, because these standards, or lack of, ultimately determine who we are as a person because our habits are who we are.

Why is it that even with high standards we can have not-good things happen in our life? It is likely because we expected too much, gave too much, or did not communicate enough. Listen, you aren't going to get life perfect. But, if at least 80% of everything you do works out the way it needs to, you should be content and even proud with how you are doing in life. If you feel constantly walked all over or like you are surrounded by people that aren’t actually good for you, then this means you need to get to know your Self better and raise your standards as well as likely contract better boundaries, too.

It doesn't matter if you have high aspirations and big goals, because living with a low set of standards will prevent each one of us from ever reaching them. When we don’t stay in our lane, we can expect accidents and negative consequences to happen. Our lane is where we stay if we want to be guaranteed a better life filled with better feelings and better people. Our lane is held together by our boundaries and standards, and when we stay in our lane we are honoring our boundaries and maintaining our standards. Last week we talked about everything on boundaries in personal life and at work. This week we are deeply exploring what it means to have standards, what standards are, the difference between personal and career standards, high vs low standards, and what happens in our life when we do not maintain our standards and step out of our lane whether on purpose or on accident. We are also going to talk about why we might accidentally step all over our own boundaries and forget about our standards in pursuit of trying to feel better in life.

As the tests proceeded, the Air Force realized that its engineers lacked a solution to the problems that had stymied the development of the aerial torpedo. During a demonstration, Kettering’s team escaped a catastrophe when the bug spun out of control and narrowly missed the reviewing stands. After fixing the problems that had destabilized the prototypes, the engineers finally felt confident enough to ship out a batch of drones to the front line. Kettering sent one of his best men, Henry “Hap” Arnold, to Europe to convince leaders of the use of the bug. But Arnold had barely embarked on his trip before catching the Spanish Flu, which incapacitated him for a month. Just after his late arrival at the Western Front, the armistice went into effect. The Kettering Bug never flew a single mission.

When we experience negligence, lack of care, or constant disapproval during adolescence, we have a tendency to grow into people-pleasers and yes-sayers as adults typically lacking the ability to put them Self first. Most often codependency is an issue in all types of relationships from friends to romantic to even possibly work when we are neglected or disregarded as a child.

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After more than a dozen attacks on the site, the Allies had suffered such heavy losses that they decided to deploy a revolutionary new weapon. Project Anvil promised to accomplish something seemingly impossible: kamikaze attacks on the enemy without the loss of a pilot. The concept involved gutting battle-fatigued PB4Y-1 Liberator and Fortress bombers and furnishing them with a system of pulleys and motors that allowed a crew flying in an accompanying plane to pilot them remotely with a radio linkup. The most innovative element of these drones, though, was a television camera that relayed live images from the nose cone to operators in the chaser plane. Television was a new invention, not yet widely available in the consumer market. Cameras in Project Anvil were used to guide the way to enemy targets where the behemoths were made to crash, causing tons of Torpex, a high explosive stacked in their bellies, to detonate. Despite their lethal potential, the unmanned flying machines had one drawback: they could not take off on their own. Pilots were required inside the crafts to get them airborne and on course. Once they had been pointed in the direction of their target, the pilots would activate the remote steering system and bail out by parachute. In the case of the bombing of Mimoyecques, the U.S. Navy selected a man who was uniquely suited for this task. Born in 1915, Joseph “Joe” Kennedy was the older brother of John F. Kennedy. He volunteered for hazardous missions in Britain, helping to clear the North Sea of German submarines. Though he qualified for leave, he volunteered to take part in the drone attack on the Nazi supergun site. On August 12, 1944, Kennedy and experienced weapons officer Wilford John Willy boarded a liberator drone and taxied the aircraft out on the runway. The hold was loaded with a deadly cargo of 10.6 tons of Torpex. As they took off, eight airplanes joined them: four were armed Mustangs, a security detail, two Mosquitos carrying observers, and a further two Venturas, each fitted with a set of remote controls to pilot the drone in case one of the devices failed. As they approached the British coast, lieutenant Willy started arming the charges. He also activated the “block,” the code name for the television camera. Once he had completed his round, both pilots readied themselves to bail out. Kennedy pulled up the drone to an altitude of 600 meters. When the plane had reached its prescribed altitude, he radioed “zoot suit,” code that all was ready. Two minutes later the drone exploded. The blast was so powerful that the debris was scattered across an area spanning more than two miles. Most parts rained down on New Delight Wood, a dense English forest that immediately caught fire. The flames caused damage to 147 properties. Kennedy and his copilot were killed instantly. The most likely reason for the crash, experts concluded, was that an electronic pulse from the TV camera unit triggered the fuse of one of the charges. Whatever the cause, Project Anvil was suspended.

Despite the futuristic concept of robotic air warfare, drone technology goes back a hundred years. The technological groundwork was first established by genius inventor Nikola Tesla, who introduced radio-control technology at Madison Square Garden in 1898. Tesla immediately realized his invention’s military potential, noting that the technology would allow man to build devastating remote weapons that would be a deterrent so inhuman and destructive that, in his imagination, they would “lead to permanent peace between the nations.”

The people with whom we surround our Self are, in fact, extensions of our Self. This is pretty heavy stuff, which becomes even more wild once you realize you do the same for the people you surround. Meaning, you are an extension of the beliefs and behaviors your friends have and this goes vice versa. In other words, birds of a feather flock together. And this is exactly why it is important to maintain your standards and stay in your life lane.

Before driving forward with standards, I want to clear up what exactly our lane is, how we create our lane, and the best ways to stay in our lane to guarantee a better life everyday. When you are aware of the things, people, emotions, and financial situations you will absolutely not accept, that is a hard boundary. Hard boundaries are non negotiable terms and needs in your life that you absolutely can not and will not compromise on. Compromise happens with soft boundaries, but not with our hard boundaries. When we step over our boundaries or let someone else step over our boundaries then we are creating conflict not only in our external world of reality, but we are also creating issues and conflict within our internal world that is our mental health AKA nervous system. To be clear we can step over our own boundaries by saying yes when we really mean no or constantly people-pleasing. We allow others to step over our boundaries, for example, when we tell someone we do not accept verbal abuse, but they engage in those behaviors anyway and we still spend time with them. On the other side of our lane are our standards. Our standards of living are very much determined by, well, our standards we implement in our life. Our standards derive from the same place our boundaries come from, which is our self belief and the narrative we carry each day. Experiences such as childhood trauma and negative relationships can deeply impact what we think, feel, and believe about our Self and therefore affect how our life plays out each day.

If your work or home environment is messy and disorganized, then that reflects the standards you uphold in this area of your life. Choosing to be messy reflects your personal standard and expectations, which we talk about in a minute, are low in regards to cleanliness. This also means you likely do not have or find much value in living a clean life. People with the same lower standards and values will find you most attractive to spend time with as there will be little pressure to perform in higher standards as well as no expectation to do so.

With the advent of long-range bombers and ballistic missiles, military planners lost interest in armed drones. While the military’s appetite for drones was waning, popular culture was flooded with killer machines. In the 1953 film Robot Monster, an android attempts to annihilate the last living family on earth.

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A popular question I saw on Google that is asked frequently causes great concern, if you ask me, for humanity if we were to adopt this approach to life, which if you look around, a lot of us already do. The question is: “Should I lower my standards to get a boyfriend?”

A continent away, another inventor was also working to keep unpiloted aircraft safely airborne. Once described as “the epitome of the Yankee inventor,” Elmer Sperry had widespread interests that ranged from recycling tin from scrap metal to developing searchlights for the U.S. Navy. Fascinated by the idea of remotely steered and even fully autonomous planes, he realized the need for an effective stabilizing mechanism. Supported by the navy, Sperry started experimenting with gyroscopes. First tests showed promise in 1915, and Sperry joined forces with engineer Peter Cooper Hewitt to develop an “aerial torpedo,” a small pilot­less aircraft filled with explosives. Less than a year later they were ready to demonstrate a proto­type to T.S. Wilkinson of the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance. The machine consisted of a winged frame that was launched by catapult. Aided by a precision barometer, it climbed to a prescribed height. Once it had reached its final altitude, a mechanical counter calculated how far the aerial torpedo had to fly to reach its target. The device could then be set to drop a bomb or crash and explode on impact. While the advantages of not putting pilots’ lives at risk during missions must have been apparent, the navy was not impressed with the accuracy of Sperry’s invention. But as the U.S. was about to join World War I, Sperry was able to convince the U.S. government to sink several thousand dollars into developing a system that could fly by autopilot or be steered by radio control. The navy saw its potential in assaults on heavily guarded submarine bases like the German base at Helgoland Island. Sperry set up camp at a flying field in Copiague, New York, but his project to build drones soon ran into significant trouble. One problem was the launching device. Catapults and railroad tracks were used, but both proved to be problematic. Difficulties with getting the machines airborne obscured another complication: the aero­dynamic quality of the airframe was inadequate. After several botched launches, Sperry realized he had to pay more attention to the plane’s design. He had a prototype based on the hydroplane Curtiss N-9H fitted with a pilot’s seat and a stick control. In a dangerous act of brinkmanship, the inventor’s son tested the configuration. During the first takeoff, Lawrence Sperry flipped the airframe and wrecked it. Miraculously, he survived the crash unhurt and volunteered for a second attempt. He managed to get a substitute frame airborne, but when he switched to autopilot it banked and flipped twice. He managed to wrest back the controls from the machine, leveling it out and landing without injury. Yet despite Sperry’s mixture of ingenuity and derring-do, his project mainly ended up swallowing sizable amounts of money. There was, however, one moment of triumph. On March 6, 1918, one of Sperry’s drones flew as programmed exactly three thousand feet, and neatly descended into the water. It was the first autopiloted flight on record, though attempts to replicate the successful test failed.

Sacks full of Stasi files in the former Ministry for State Security headquarters, Berlin, 1996. © SZ Photo / Joker / David Ausserhofer / Bridgeman Images.

Driven by the same fin-de-siècle enthusiasm, Archibald Montgomery Low, a British engineer, recognized the potential of marrying airplanes with wireless transmission. At the beginning of World War I, he won a commission to build a remotely piloted weapon to destroy German Zeppelins. He experimented with numerous designs but had little success, crashing various prototypes. While Low was able to demonstrate that planes could be steered with Tesla’s radio waves, his anti-airship weapon never got close to production. Since the devices were designed to self-destruct, the concept was in most ways closer to modern rockets or cruise missiles. Nevertheless, Low’s machines can be seen as the earliest precursors of combat drones.

Your personal standards are reflected in how you treat yourself and in how you treat others. What’s more, they are also reflected in how you expect to be treated by other people. When we expect people to act a certain way, that means we have set standards about how people should act. Our standards are to help us in life. Having standards in life helps us move forward consistently, maintain finances, get what we need from our relationships, and improve our quality of life. Your personal standards are also reflected in the promises you keep, in the way you dress and manage your life, health, finances, and environment.

It is possible to have high standards and low expectations. Raising standards is not the same as raising expectations. It may be best for mental health and overall life satisfaction to not have expectations of people meeting your standards. This being said, the people closest to us must be in our lane or else we are asking for discomfort and ultimately a dysregulated nervous system. We can give our Self anxiety and exacerbate depression by not staying in our lane and having standards lower than our fundamental needs.

Rudolph Herzog is a writer and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of A Short History of Nuclear Folly and Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany.

Sacks full of Stasi files in the former Ministry for State Security headquarters, Berlin, 1996. © SZ Photo / Joker / David Ausserhofer / Bridgeman Images.

A great and solid example is relationship standards which are minimum requirements accepted in any relationship whether friendship or romantic. Relationship standards are when a person knows certain qualities must be present. The same goes for qualities and characteristics that are not to be present, in the case of unwanted behaviors or values, and failing to meet these requirements results in a “deal breaker.” On an emotional level, these types of relationship standards are inflexible and, if overstepped, can be considered a hard boundary of behavior never acceptable.

The following example is being conveyed from my standpoint of being heterosexually focused when I date for a life partner. Please put the pronoun or descriptor that works best for you as I will be using the word boyfriend and talking about a male human being. Imagine this: You start dating someone new and exciting. You basically expect the best boyfriend ever. Your emotions are so heightened that even the most rational person usually gets lost in new relationship feelings for just a bit. Thankfully, you get the boyfriend you need because he also cruises in your lane of standards and boundaries. When a person shares our lane, is quite aligned in life, and respects your boundaries and meets your standards this human very likely also shares many of the same values. Shared values are the backbone to any and all long lasting relationships whether friend-based, romantic, or life partner. Intense feelings, expectations, and a heightened state of love is simply not enough to maintain and continue a healthy long term relationship with another person. Standards and values are an excellent foundation.

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Before we get into the meat and fat and juice that is high and low standards, let's ask our Self the following: What type of standards do you live by, high or low? Have people ever told you that they think you have high or low standards?

A rival U.S. program in the Pacific proved to be more successful. The navy commissioned the Interstate Aircraft and Engineering Corporation plant to build a line of assault drones under the condition that they be manufactured with almost no war-critical components. Instead of metal, the fuselage and wings of these devices were crafted out of wood hardened and bent by experts at the Wurlitzer Musical Instrument Company. While the materials used made the Torpedo Drone TDR-1 appear rather quaint, its inner workings were state of the art, including radio control, a TV camera, and a radar-tracking device. “The main thing that was impressed on all of us,” one of the operators later recalled, “was that this was top secret. We were not allowed to discuss it, even among ourselves.” Posted in the Russell Islands, the unit soon began attacks on Japanese anti­aircraft sites. Launched by a ground crew, the TDR-1s were turned over to a control pilot with a joystick who crouched under a blanket in a TBM chaser plane, staring at the sickly green images relayed to him by the drone’s camera. This operator would then guide the armed, unmanned aircraft into the target while the TBM hovered at a safe distance from the enemy’s flak. The task force soon scored hits against grounded ships on the water that served as outposts for Japanese anti­aircraft guns. Objects like these that were clearly silhouetted against the sky proved to be the best targets. Finding camouflaged targets against the backdrop of the jungle on a monochrome TV screen, however, was a different matter. Despite these challenges, TDR-1’s wartime record proved to be satisfactory, with the unit making twenty-one direct hits on targets. More important, no American was killed during these raids, underscoring the potential of the weapon.

After the war, development on Sperry’s aerial torpedo continued for some time, then eventually petered out. Film footage documents the manifold challenges that hampered its progress. Only one of the dozen or so launches was successful, with the grainy footage showing the drone bobbing through the air, kept in precarious equilibrium. Ultimately, the technology had proved too ambitious for its era.

Having high standards can mean that we expect so much from the world that we end up darn near hating the world because it is not living up to our expectations. You will survive if the world does not live up to your expectations, but you will struggle to survive if you do not live up to your own standards. Living with low expectations and high standards is one hell of a strong lifestyle success tool that surely amplifies your day to day life. Seriously, the best approach to standards is having high standards and low expectations. Try it ;)

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In Target Earth (1954) robots from Venus invade planet Earth, and in Kronos (1957) aliens send a gigantic robot to earth to suck dry its energy supply. At the same time moviegoers indulged in these apocalyptic fantasies, one man was putting serious thought into the question of what would happen if the rise of the machines ever became reality. The science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who coined the terms robotics and posi­tronic in 1942 published a short story that contained Three Laws of Robotics, which can be read as the first reflection on the ethics of robotic weapons. Asimov’s first law is that a robot may never injure a human; the second, that it must obey humans unless this interferes with the first law; the third, that a robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the other laws. Asimov’s laws for robots are still referenced today. While some argue that latter-day drones are not robots since they are remotely piloted and can neither think nor act autonomously, developments in drone technology are taking place so rapidly that Asimov’s laws may soon be of practical use.

While the public is grappling with the ethical implications of remotely piloted drone campaigns, new challenges loom on the horizon. As the technology advances, drones will likely become increasingly autonomous. Even the decision to kill may be delegated to robots, something recently condemned as “death by algorithm” by a UN Special Rapporteur. As nations aside from the U.S. acquire and deploy drones, there is also the possibility of aerial combat between fighter drones flying at incredible speeds, requiring maneuvers at such speed that a human pilot is simply too slow to respond.

Our standards are personal and are reflected in the quality of your work, values, and communication. Values will be discussed in a minute. Everything we do and say provides others with insight into the personal standards we keep. We are a walking projection of our beliefs which manifest as standards in life. The following are some great examples of personal standards in life:

Rudolph Herzog is a writer and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of A Short History of Nuclear Folly and Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany.

In the 1930s toy planes were made from balsa wood and commonly powered by rubber bands, and they didn’t fly particularly far. Denny started tinkering and became intrigued by the technology, which was shared by fellow actors Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda. Denny even set up his outfit, the Denny Radioplane Company. From a shop on Hollywood Boulevard he sold models that looked like scaled-down planes. More upmarket models were powered by a miniature engine, designed by engineer Walter Righter, from whom Denny had acquired patent rights. Eventually, the actor hit upon the idea of manufacturing radio-controlled model aircraft that could be used as targets to train anti­aircraft gunners. He proposed the idea to the U.S. military but received a lukewarm response. Yet with the start of World War II, he was asked to mass-produce these drones. In the following years, Denny’s company morphed into a million-dollar business, turning out thousands of flying targets. Launched by a catapult, these drones were remote-controlled by an operator who steered them into the range of anti­aircraft guns. They had one feature that was completely new: since they were rigged to a parachute, they were reusable. For this reason, the Denny radio­plane OQ 2 was the first mass-produced unmanned aerial vehicle in the sense that we know it today. All other similar devices, until then, were built to self-destruct. As the radioplane company blossomed, it hired more staff. Since men were being drafted to fight, women were hired to work on the production line. In 1944 Norma Jean Dougherty, the future Marilyn Monroe, started doing shifts at the Denny site near the Burbank airport. As it happened, a photographer for the Army magazine Yank was sent to the radio-plane factory, dispatched by his commanding officer, Ronald Reagan. The photographer spotted Dougherty and asked her to pose with the propeller of a drone. He soon persuaded her to model for more photographs, the first stop to her career as an actress.

Low standards are where we can let in a lot of mess into our life. If you feel or experience any of the following, it is likely you live with low standards. Here are ways to identify if you have low standards:

When we set a standard we are inviting only things into our life that we need. Accept no less than your standards every day. Your habits, cycles, and patterns form because you allow them alongside your set standards. Expecting that every human is going to meet your standards is setting your Self up for constant disappointment and resentment towards other humans and quite possibly the world. You are who you are because you choose to be. Never expect another person to love the life you exactly are. How boring that would be, anyways, if we were all exactly the same. This being said we are all vastly different and on varying levels of how to do life. Low level humans usually flock with other lower level humans. Higher level humans usually live life alongside others that have high standards as well.

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The difference between an expectation and a standard is that the standard is the bar set in everyday life and the expectation is our belief about whether other people will ever reach our set bar. Most people expect their standards to be met, regardless if they ever communicated their needs. Sound familiar? It happens often between two people that an expectation is not being met simply because it was never communicated in the first place. Expectations are not the same as standards, and in a bit we are also going to clarify the difference alongside our values, too.

When you have low standards, you will often fall prey to other people’s influence. This happens because you fail to stand up for yourself — you fail to stand up for your principles and beliefs. You fail to stand up for your self because you were unconsciously taught to be fearful of putting your Self first. Your personal standards are intertwined with your level of self-esteem and self belief. Therefore, to raise your self-esteem requires first raising your personal standards and maintaining them. Feel the benefits from having standards that serve you everyday.

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When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, there were only a handful of aerial drones in its invasion force. By 2010 the Pentagon had nearly 7,500 drones in its arsenal. Today almost one in three U.S. military aircraft does not have a pilot. This technological revolution has been driven by the use of weaponized American drones, especially the Predator and Reaper. To illustrate the impact of these new weapons: drone campaigns in Pakistan, a country not at war with the U.S., have killed more people than died in the entire NATO-led war on Yugoslavia in 1999.

It's amazing the amount of shit storms I have still let ensue in my life, for many years, regardless of said high standards. My codependency would get the best of me quite a few times throughout my twenties. We live, we learn. I’m here to hopefully stop you in whatever tracks are not working for you in life by sharing my life alongside psychology & neuroscience to help steer you back into your lane.

Thirty years later drones have become ubiquitous. This is due to advancements made by Israeli engineer Abraham Karem, who invented the durable airframe that was to become the feared Predator. His updated drones met an emerging, insatiable demand. Proponents of drone technology, especially the U.S. and Israel, see themselves under threat of “asymmetric” incursions, especially terrorist attacks. In such conflicts, gathering intelligence in real time is considered just as crucial as the military might of tanks and cannons. Meanwhile global positioning systems, developed as a military technology in the 1970s, have made drones considerably more accurate. With a network of satellite relay stations like the U.S. base in Ramstein, Germany, drones can be piloted from bases halfway across the globe. High-resolution video cameras and new signals-intelligence technology have also increased drone capabilities, with drones able to track and target individual cell phones even after they have been turned off and the battery removed. Today, military drones both eavesdrop on everything from phone conversations to emails and perform “hunter-killer” missions.

Really quickly let's clear the air about the difference of values and standards. Values are individual beliefs that motivate us to act one way or another. Values serve as a guide for our human behavior. Values range from integrity to privacy to empathy to friendship. Generally, people are predisposed to adopt the values that they are raised with. Furthermore, how we are made to feel as children determines our beliefs that then create our values. When we are raised to believe and feel like we are worthless or unlovable, then those beliefs manifest as our own as adults and we can adopt heightened values due to lost values as a child. People that have experienced trauma as a child may very well have a strong value towards freedom as an adult. Those with PTSD may also over appreciate freedom and the ability to control their environment. Another example is, clarity and security may be of heightened importance as an adult because when things were unclear or ambiguous in the past as a child that meant something bad was about to happen to you. This may manifest as asking too many questions for clarification, needing a play by play detail before going somewhere, or not wanting to go places in fear of the unknown. This type of reaction to not move forward is better known as anxiety.

I have already started mentioning the powerful impact of how standards shape and can change our daily reality and overall life. It’s hard to not seriously talk about standards in life without very much touching on how the values and expectations we carry everyday directly determine what we choose to accept in our lane. Our past experiences shape us into who we are today. To be clear, our past does not control or wholly define us. It was our starting block, and for some of us, our first building blocks were not set with care by those that mattered to us most. In turn, what we believe about the world is affected and impacted; some would say infected, but I always argue against such sticky useless language. It is important as adults for us to work on increasing our self awareness everyday as to get more clarity on who we are, what we need, and what is not acceptable in our life.

When dating, high standards are crucial to guaranteeing you aren't going to wake up next to someone in 3 months wondering why the f* you ever chose them in the first place. Emotions can be super tricky! Infatuation is like a veil of deceit if we let it drive our vessel. You should always choose a partner based on shared values, common ground on boundaries, and they absolutely meet your bare minimum standards and hopefully exceed even just a bit. A person with high standards knows that the human who will be worth their time will understand their worth, and treat them right. A person with high standards is someone who has confidence and ambition, and while at times they may question their own abilities, they never fail to go beyond their insecurities when it truly counts. Going beyond insecurities can feel like the greatest hurdle to overcome in the whole world, but this is exactly what I have been talking about in regards to transcending our past experiences and making better decisions. Making better decisions comes from our higher level mind in our prefrontal cortex where reason, logic, and thought process take solace. When we have lower standards and make poor choices we are acting from our lower level mind and reacting off of emotions, and these emotions can be from decades ago that we unconsciously hold in our core.

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Here is some profound social psychology about standards that should not be ignored. When a person senses that we live by a low set of standards, then they will modify their behavior and judge us accordingly. On the other hand, if they sense that we hold high standards, then we are more likely to win their respect and admiration. High and low standards will be laid out later on. Because our personal standards are reflected in so many areas of your life, they are, therefore, always “on show” for the public, right?

I know for a fact I have reset the bar of standards for so many friends. Through the choices I make and the lane I maintain, I show my friends the type of romantic partner to accept, for example. When we accept below our standards we can watch in real time the negative impact on our life. Think about the sh*tty low level human you or someone you know has decided to date regardless of the red flags, warning signs, lack of shared values, and immensely heightened state of infatuation. At the end of the day, I can also remind my friends about the abusive relationship I chose to be in because I walked away from my self belief and threw away my standards.

A separate World War II–era drone program was driven by grave threats emerging from Nazi Germany. As early as mid-1940, Nazi engineers had started developing long-range artillery weapons so novel and secret that they were only referred to as Vergeltungswaffen, or reprisal weapons. The sites where these munitions were built were heavily guarded and assaulting them with bombers came at a deadly risk. Sometime in September 1943, aerial photographs reached Allied High Command showing the Nazis had begun building an elaborate structure near the hamlet of Mimoyecques in the Pas-de-Calais. More than one thousand workers, many of them prisoners, were involved in excavating a labyrinthine system of tunnels. Above ground, military trucks arrived, delivering mysterious pipes and metal rails. Allied analysts concluded that the site was designated as a launching site for the V1 rocket. In fact, the device was something even more devastating. Code-named Fleissiges Lieschen, or Busy Lizzie, it was to be the world’s most powerful supergun, designed to shell London with an incessant barrage of explosives. Instead of sending bombers to the British capital, Hitler planned to pummel the city with hundreds of rounds per hour.

You might be wondering what childhood and our past experiences have to do with our standards as adults. Our experiences have everything to do with what we believe to accept as adults. What we think is acceptable in our life directly derives from what we have gone through and how we feel about it all. Mistreatment usually means we have standards that protect us. But, it can also mean we adopted beliefs that than create inappropriate or even maladaptive standards as adults. If you think you aren’t a very worthwhile human, then you are going to have low standards and accept a lot of shitty things and people into your life. In some people's terms, this is what it means to be a low life. Your lower level animal emotionally reactive mind is making quick decisions for your Self because your mind and body AKA nervous system think you need to self protect.

Something interesting about succeeding in life is that having high standards and low expectations means we are already succeeding on our own terms. One of the reasons “success” eludes so many creative people is because they create based on the standards and expectations of other creators (or critics). The most successful people create and stay in their own authentic lane.

Though 1950s technology could not come close to what was being imagined by film­makers and writers of pulp fiction, this changed in the early 1960s, following several shoot-downs of U2 and B-47 spy planes by the Soviets. These events made the U.S. military and the CIA realize its manned reconnaissance missions were increasingly risky. The Soviet Union’s anti­aircraft missile defense had upgraded so substantially that it had become unsafe to breach its airspace. So the United States dramatically accelerated the development of new drones, culminating in the Lightning Bug, a UAV that was fitted to sniff out Soviet nuclear-missile sites. The Vietnam War saw the first large-scale use of drones in combat, with, on average, one mission flown each day. Meanwhile, the navy experimented with a heli­copter drone, the DASH QH-50, which was sent to Vietnam to spot artillery targets and hunt submarines. A configuration was imagined that would have allowed the drone to deliver a tactical nuclear bomb, though deployment was never attempted. During its first few decades of service the drone proved to be a capricious piece of equipment, with 441 of them lost, mostly due to technical failure.

The American Reapers and Predators have proved to be far from the precision weapons they were once made out to be. Civilian deaths in Pakistan and Afghanistan are substantial. According to a recently leaked cache of government files, 90 percent of fatalities in one U.S. operation in Afghanistan over a five-month period in 2012 and 2013 were other than the intended targets. According to the leaked documents, targets are referred to as “objectives” and kills as “jackpots”; people killed other than the designated target are referred to as “EKIA,” enemy killed in action, even if no connection to the target is established.

Let me posit this: “Should you chop off your legs to better fit in small spaces?” Because, this is basically the same question. You are going to compromise who you fundamentally are which in turn will dysregulate your nervous system and cause illness in a multitude of ways. The onset of depression alone is enough to hopefully compel you to not throw away your needs for another. Lowering your standards won't attract the kind of partner you want, it will attract people who are looking for an easy time and do not have their life in order. You will attract careless people. Think about it, these people have to do nothing and have to put up no effort to attract you. Lastly, your standards should be something you set for yourself out of self-love. The desire to be loved indeed comes from our experiences as a child. Be a strong adult, override your internal feelings of incessant want to be loved by anything, and choose your Self first to truly reap the benefits of healthy choices.

As a developmental specialist, if you ask me, standards are the bare f*ing minimum you are going to accept in life. The bare minimums you accept include all areas of your life; standards are maintained and upheld every single day by how you accept things into your life. The personal standards we keep determine the expectations we set and realize. Our standards determine the quality of our results in all areas of life from work to relationships, and standards determine the overall quality of our lives.

While the aerial torpedo never came close to contributing to the war effort, a rival system almost saw frontline use. The U.S. Air Force, too, had become interested in drone technology. It tapped Charles Kettering to build a winged autonomous vehicle armed with a warhead, what would later be known as the “Kettering Bug.” Early prototypes of the device were made out of a material like papier mâché, later ones out of wood. Like Sperry’s machines, they were stabilized by a gyroscope. The autopilot consisted of flight instruments rigged to cranks and bellows gutted from a player piano. The gadget could cast off its wings to swoop down on a target. The project also recruited engineers Elmer Sperry and Orville Wright.

A study by a Pentagon task force complains that in ongoing U.S. campaigns in Yemen and Somalia, drones, limited by fuel and available bases, sometimes spend half their time in transit to surveillance targets, making the drone war expensive and inefficient. This is summarized by the authors of the report as a cause of the “tyranny of distance” that results from waging war from remote bases. An additional complaint is that though drones can hover above an enemy—capturing electronic communications, tracking the movement of a target—enemies are becoming more elusive. An army with troops on the ground can interrogate captured combatants and collect human intelligence. Pursuing an enemy purely from the air, however, gives commanders little of what is really going on.

Choosing to live a higher life is not spiritual bullshit. Choosing to live a higher life means you understand that you are priority number one, you maintain your lane of standards and boundaries, and you are always striving for more and better within your unique life blueprint. High standards offer a higher life and elevated contentment. Examples of high standards that surely improve life are strong work ethic, solid communication, work-life balance, sociable, and trustworthy. If you ask me, the aforementioned are a bare minimum of standards in my life and I urge you to raise your standards to at least these minimums as well. The only things you have to lose are lower level things and people that likely gunk up your life whether you realize it or not.

Essentially, having low standards means you do not put your Self first. Again, this has everything to do with the narrative and beliefs you carry every single day. Truly go inward and find the voice that is guiding you towards or away from your needs. What are you saying to your Self every day? I was blown away to realize that for at least a decade I was telling myself repeatedly that I am not worthy of love and nobody actually likes me - these negative beliefs and self-talk absolutely come from my terrible childhood experiences and negligent upbringing. When we think we are worthless, then we will accept most anything into our life. Before we know it, we may be looking around at 30, 40, 50 years of making decisions and welcoming people into our life that totally are not good for us. Amplifying self awareness will always better protect you from opting for lower level choices or fast acting solutions that gratify. What truly guarantees you will remain in your lane and live the life you need is by having a solid life blueprint with total clarity on all 5 fundamental components of life which are Life Vision, Self Belief, Grit, Growth Mindset, and Goals.

As the Cold War heated up, spying missions became more ambitious, culminating in the development of supersonic reconnaissance drones. The most enigmatic of these machines was the gargantuan Soviet Tupolev Tu-123, a modified cruise missile bristling with cameras and electronic sniffers. This system was especially expensive since it was not reusable and had to be ditched after every sortie. To this day, it is unknown what scouting missions were conducted with the craft and it is lucky that it was never detected, since the West’s early warning line would almost certainly have interpreted its frame and flight pattern as being that of an inbound Soviet nuclear missile.