We often think standards are about performance. About discipline. About holding the line.
They are not.
Standards are about trust.
When someone makes a promise, especially someone with authority, that promise becomes a small piece of structure in the other person’s world. It tells them how seriously to take words. It tells them whether anticipation is safe. It tells them what kind of universe they’re living in.
When I was a young boy growing up in the ghetto, I asked my father for one thing for Christmas. A TCR race track (Total Control Racing). It was the only thing I asked for. He promised.
Christmas came. It went. The race track never arrived. Neither did he.
Years followed where I barely saw my father at all. And when he eventually passed, what stayed with me wasn’t the toy. It was the knowledge that the moment for repair had closed forever. There would never be an apology. Never a simple sentence that could have changed everything: Son, I broke my promise.
That sentence wouldn’t have been about a race track. It would have been about restoring order. About telling a child that the world could still be trusted, even when mistakes were made.
Without that repair, the message is different.
The message becomes: don’t lean too hard on hope. Don’t trust words too much. Don’t expect follow-through.
I carried that message for years. Into anxiety. Into nervous breakdowns. Into a body that learned to brace instead of relax. Not because I was fragile, but because my system learned early that certainty could disappear without warning.
This is the hidden cost of low standards.
Not disappointment.
Disorientation.
Low standards don’t just lower outcomes. They shape how people relate to authority, to promises, to the future. When a promise is broken and never named, the cost doesn’t vanish. It transfers.
Standards aren’t about perfection. They’re about repair. About having a rule that says, my word matters enough to be acknowledged when I fail.
When we lower that standard, especially with people who depend on us, we ask them to carry a burden they didn’t choose.
And some of them carry it for decades.
That’s why standards matter. Not because they make us look disciplined. But because they protect trust. And once trust is broken, the cost is rarely paid by the person who broke it.
