Choices (or “so average to be transparent”)

Before reading, please watch this (10 minutes 48 seconds):

Nice perspective uh? I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “that’s what I have been saying for a long time, my corporate should do this and this, they should realize we have a potential, they shouldn’t treat us this way…” and so on with the usual stuff that keeps frustrating you every single day.

Why don’t we find our way to boost the cognitive skills to be used?

I listen to time&material consultants complaining about the fact they are forgotten, “abandoned”, nobody knows about their potential, and clients simply don’t care about giving some “emotional” reward, just “do the task assigned”. Clients seem not caring about the fact they could do their tasks better, they care about having simply more tasks accomplished.

Guys, that’s normal, because maybe your client’s employees are being treated the same way.

You are not supposed to think, considering thinking as doing a minimal effort with you brain.

You are requested to complete the assigned task sooner, because working faster is costing less. And cheaper ousourced work is where big players measure the score of the big market game.

Just “do what they ask for”, then. Engineers from India and China seem to perfectly obey. You can complain they are working fine, or that they are not as fast as it seems. But guys, they are cheaper, and working days and nights and weekends give them the time to make the distance.

If you try to compete at this “race to the bottom” game, you not only lose, you get frustrated other than being smashed with several slaps on your face.

But maybe (maybe) the common way corporates treat people like you (a bank account to flush some money in every month) could be a great advantage. Think about it: I heard people saying that white collars today are factory workers 30 years ago.

But there is a difference: you don’t need the factory, nor materials, cause a laptop and a internet connection is what you need to work. This is a key point, because that laptop and the internet can also give you billions of possibilities to create, connect, share, and shift your activity.

In this sense, the network really gives us freedom, and opportunities.

Of course, if you are so used to slavery, you can keep your brain in freeze mode and stuck on facebook, web shops and so on. But the opportunity for a complete different way to spend your time is just few clicks away.

I am a fan of Gladiator movie; Maximus asks is servant Cicero if he finds it hard to do his duty.

Cicero replies: “Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to“.

Well, if you are really smart and your corporate is not interested on that, just change your perspective. You can “do sometimes what you have to do, and the rest of the time do what you want to!“.

Is your daily routine plane, “easy” and boring? Good for you, hurry up on what you have to do, block your browser so that you are prevented to lose time on posting useless stuff on facebook and spend your time working on your dream!

If you are so sure your corporate has forgotten you, then you will not be spotted.

Or better, they maybe will notice that their bored and angry employee is still producing his daily bunch of work, but he is also far more happy, satisfied and not frustrated at all.

Stop asking them to notice you. Stop wondering why they keep forgetting you while you are so good with your daily list of task accomplished. They don’t notice you because you are simply doing what they expect you to do. But look, you are free to drive the change.

You are free to give the best part of you on leading a community, building a concept of a revolutionary product, creating a great software for business analysis, and so on.

You are free, you just need to recognize this, being honest, and stop complaining on what happened to the old rule they thought you at school “do what they ask you and you’ll be rewarded”.

It doesn’t work this way. No more.

Why? Simply because other thousands of colleagues of you, are doing the same plane, usual, damned daily list of tasks.

Be different, be what you want to be, be what you pretend your company recognizes you are, but misses to.