So what I saw and what I remember for the most part is just a CEO of a big IT company with no name, no face. I guess all my dreams either have an effect of prosopagnosia or my imagination does not like to shape details. Either way, it turns out that some of the modes of my brain are turned off when I dream, making the scene of my dreams look all abstract and full of mystery.
Seriously, I do not know if he works as CEO or just being a crazy nut unemployed saying random rants. I just generalized him to be an IT CEO based on his form and content of speech. What he is and what he works though is irrelevant to the main message of this dream. What matters is just the content of the speech.
For the scene, I can only talk about the inside of the building as I did not look outside. It was a double digit story building with windows that take place all over the wall and the floors being full of thin carpet. The rooms in the buildings were huge like entire halls and many tables made out of wood in the center. Many people sit on those tables problem solving stuff. The environment was quiet and each worker was focused on their tasks. Some would talk to their other worker that is on the other side of the same table quietly to discuss some of their problem solving ideas.
Most of the dream was focused about a guy giving a speech of wisdom. I generalized him to be a CEO of an IT industry. In the full length of the dream, I did not said anything out of my mouth. I was just an observer and always followed him listening to his speech.
I do not remember most of the content of the speech. I remember the most that struck me though through the end of the dream. Imagine the guy talking to me in the scene I described standing in front of me. Imagine this guy sitting in the end on a carpet floor with his back sitting on a wall, his papers lying on the floor on the side of him (I presume he was holding those papers on his hand when he was standing in front of me, but I never saw them as I was looking at him face to face), and the tables with workers being near him. And imagine he said these through the conversation I am just going to paraphrase (some of his talking was when he was standing and some was when he sat on the floor carpet at the end):
<While standing>
This work is very rewarding and challenging at the same time. But not all people can work on this type of job. Some people excel at what they do while some other do adequately fine. Some people are Thursdays, some people are Fridays. Either way, they are both useful, but its what Friday people make the most value at our company.
<When sitting down>
But you see, what does it need to take to become a Friday person or even a Thursday person to some degree? Well, you have a lot of other papers like these lying around: Your relatives, your other revolutionary ideas, meetings, and other stuff that seem important to you but at the sacrifice of your work performance. Well these papers
<Tears those papers>
Are a big distraction for becoming a Friday Person. Maybe not so much for a Thursday person, but definitely for a Friday Person.
<End of Dream>
Seriously, you do not need to have a dream like this to find an insight like this. Some people just do the minimum requirements of the job. Others just focus on bringing results to the table. While others devote most of their time on the work to bring faster results and become better at what they are. We all have a variation of those 3 at some point of our life, but most of us will usually have a tendency to stay more in one of those three points.
You can tell what path you are right now. You are already making a path to yourself right now with your actions today. However, a decision whether to stay this path or change this path is very hard to do. Notice, that if you do not change path, you will still contemplate yourself whether this path you currently are is the best out of you. For most of us, you will most likely be in a borderline path if you didn't plan from the scratch what path you want to be in. A borderline path is a path where you are somewhere in between two of the three points mentioned above. For your workforce, it will always look like you are on a transition going on the next ladder, but for you, you may also be thinking of going backwards too.
Like when making a decision for a project plan, you have to sacrifice something in the expense of another component: money, resources, time. For life, it can be applied the same: Job And Personal. How do Friday people exist then? They definitely place the personal part in their job. Does it work? Yes it works. But does it represents individuality? That is the problem, a main challenge working your whole dedication to a company is losing your individuality to some extent. If you are a Thursday person, then it is more easier to attain individuality. But for a Friday person, it is more harder.
Let me explain. If you do not want to read about individuality, you can skip this paragraph. The main objective of a job is satisfying customers. Your clients, the whole world on what it needs and wants come to attention and you have to solve them. If your responsibility is big and you are at stake of thousand people rendering the service at you, you cannot say this X is more important than Y because I like X more. Instead, you will always have to follow Y when people want Y more and X when people want X more. In other words, your individuality has been replaced to the external wants and needs of society. Acting upon the external wants and needs of society makes you a person of them subconsciously as you enact the same acts of their needs and wants repeatedly over and over again. I am more of a believer of what you do is what you are than what you think is what you are because an act has a more strong presence that your body will have hard time to deny. It is okay to share your own body to be an external part of society, but is the ultimate goal to not have an individuality to ourselves and be instead a part of the whole society? I can be sure that Friday people will have some individuality, but some of it will definitely be sacrificed at the expense of the job. So is really the choices Job and Personal? Or is it Job or Individuality? I think the latter makes more sense. You can always make your job personal, but only though personal external objective ways, but not to your personal internal feeling ways as most job cultures and stakeholders visions do not work that way. If you work less, you have more individuality, but less of value to society? If you work more, you have more value to society, but less individuality? I cannot think of anything else, there must be a sacrifice, the same way when you plan a project. Is there time component like when you plan a project? Our time is usually finite so we cannot expand it or shrink it so that is why it is out of our calculations. However, you can still use it if you want to think for a smaller scope of your life. You can say "for the next 5 years, I want to accomplish this and this and this, how much should I dedicate to my individuality and how much on my job". In any case, those papers on the dream are part of your individuality. It may be papers of what you really want to do which does not take place in the vision of most society will accept these days, it may be people that really want to contact you and have some personal experiences without any strings attached to business partnerships, business plans, sales. It is the individuality of you that makes unique that only few people will know and most society will not notice. But like my dream I saw, we place more emphasis to be part of a whole society than having our own individuality. The creativity today we have is not driven by our own personal desires, but always filtered and limited to the upbringing of society to a better place. It is a fact that if we did not have put so much attention to such creativity, we would never have achieved the society that we are now. We would have been stuck today at the pace where only light bulbs exist and televisions have not come yet. Ideas right now are more of a "What if I invent X where I can make $X amount of money" or "What if I invent X where I can help/save X amount of people". This is nothing terrible wrong, it is in fact, a personal success to our species to evolve our thinking in such way. However, although we bring a better place for our current generation and next generation, what do we feel for ourselves in the first place? Is it possible for humans to suppress those feelings we lived in childhood where we thought our whole world was just me and explore the world with a childhood erased? We spend so much of our time doing objective stuff than the subjective stuff. Subjective processing has a different language than the language objective processing has. When you do not speak a language for very long, you start to forget how to talk with it. And when you forget how to talk to it, you become dysfunctional communicating with it and you either talk on that language very little or nothing to it. Once we suppress our individuality for long, there will be no need to suppress it anymore. At that point, our individuality, even if it wants to talk, it won't express it correctly or will not know what it wants for itself. It will be a laughing stock. At that point, our individuality at its own will suppress itself from embarrassment. Of course, you can learn your individuality again the same way you learn a new language. But that needs time and environment where individuality is emphasized. In this world environment, that is almost impossible to find and the only times you can develop your individuality is through your childhood and early stages of your life.
Okay, so if you did not read that long paragraph about individuality, all you need to know is that those papers represent individuality. For most people, individuality is restricted and limited. For those that have individuality, I expect the people itself make less money, organizations that employ those people make less money, but individuality being retained. It is like that story where you can make an affordable life by having less of what you need (Do you need to be valued in society? Do you need that expensive house or car? Etc.)
Now the people who are Fridays. You have to give up most of your individuality. There is no real straight shortcuts to this. You can still be happy in your job, your personal self will be fulfilled, but that drive is driven by society itself, not by your own self. To be responsible to such position, you have to remove any distractions and devote most of the time to your job.
Why all people do not become Fridays?
- For safety, they like to diversify. If the job fails, at least have a backup plan. For instance, person X can make his hobby a part time job or his happiness can be fulfilled not only by his job, but through family, friends, relationships. So if he loses his job, he will not be depressed so much as that is not the only thing he invested his whole life for.
- They have other responsibilities besides their job. So they may have been a Friday person before. Or they may have been working contract jobs instead of a full time job always learning the new and fascinating. Now you have a family. Now there are children. Now there are health issues being old. Are you going to ignore those for the sake of the job or not? Most will not ignore it and will have to move on in a more easier position.
- Their individuality is important. Those people will never become Fridays. They will only become Fridays when their individuality matches with the society view, but when that match gets aligned off, they will be back being the Thursday person.
- Many other reasons.
So really, what are Thursday and what are Friday?
I tried to google Thursday and Friday and these is what I found
- This I did not know. There is a saying in the urban dictionary of the term "Thirsty Thursday". Usually, in universities, students do not have class on Friday. So the Thursday for them is like the lat day of school. Then they have free time on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You can assume that Thursday people just work until Thursday and party late night. But Friday people work even on Fridays even when there is no school at that time while the Thursday people may be having a hangover on that day or something. It also refers that these people were not just committed after entering the work force, but also before entering the work force, such in the college/university environment.
- In workplace terms, Thursday people may take Thursday to work late at night as that is maybe the maximum peak of an employee after hitting the rubber from Monday to Wednesday. For Thursday people, maybe Friday is just a day to take it easy cause the weekends come soon? For Friday people, they work their best everyday , even on Friday? In any case, I guess you get the point.
What are people that are nothing?
Not all people can do a specific thing. Some talented are this and some talented on that. It is best to know that before it is too late as life is too short. I can't think someone being happy on a job they are treated as nothing. When I mean nothing, not the attitude of your co workers, but the real results of your work. Because as long as you bring some good results on the table, some one at least will be able to appreciate it, that appreciation may just not be in your work environment, but somewhere else there will always be. In any case, if you are nothing on a specific part of a job, it is good to find a job where you can be a Thursday person. In some sense, half of your life contributing to society, and another half to your individuality, will make you less dysfunction on your overall being.
Try to know the consequences of a Friday person. Know that a Friday person may look like you are better than a Thursday person, but in fact reality, only through one perspective side of view. There are so many dimensions to explore in life with that sometimes it is good to look on all of them.
Related to Software Development?
This is very related to software development as our career does a very big impact to the rest of the world. Before placing ourselves to the "who is who that advanced the technology of our world for a better place", know that you also have a life that it lives itself, and make wise decision with no regrets later on what you are going to express more? More to your individuality and less to society, more to society and less to your individuality, or being in equal terms. Note that in this society , especially capitalism and all developed nations have crated a society where each individual goal should strive more on the benefits of society than individuality for the most time hours of your life. Before when people lived in farms, where people had to co-exist with families in order to survive, individuality was more framed at that time. Of course, such focus that existed for a thousand or millions of years had little to no progression of innovation and better practices of lifestyle to the well being of whole society. However, now we are addicted and hyped to what the next big thing we will see in society, that we put ourselves with a lifestyle of depression and in denial of it, some not being able to cope with it and taking anti depressive drugs, divorce rates always high as usual (which did not happen so much in the past), and the list goes on.
I think for any software developer that has a career path ahead of their head and are a very early stage of their life, this is more important to think first before what size of company you will work at and what work culture you want to live in. More or less, these jobs require you to work all day, some of which can take up to 60 hours per week.