I love one-liners, they are easy to memorize, repeatable, and sound wise sometimes. One phrase echoed inside me for years is “be friendly serious”. Learned that from one of the ambassador trainings in college I enjoyed. Be friendly serious. Just the way it sounds like.
Yesterday I talked with two persons whom I met at a volunteer party in a boat center. I guess a dream to become a pirate was pretty good self-introduction. (I’m learning fencing and going to learn sailing). They genuinely showed interests and then started sharing about their goals. One of them is spending every weekend at the boat center, he is seriously planning to buy a livable boat and checking all the sources (craigslist, hanging out at various boat places and having conversations with boat owners for hours to talk about price and maintenance) Meanwhile he’s taking as many courses as possible for learning about boat engine, sailing and navigation, also mentioned captain certification. On the other hand, the other person is plotting a cruise trip to caribbean from Seattle in three years. When he was asked about financing, fuel, time, crews, food, recreation for that trip, he responded precisely and confidently. Then they turned to me asking, have you watched those TV shows, movies, documentaries about pirates; Oh maybe you should go to the pirate fare.. I realized there might be a big gap there. I may talk about my dream like a joke, but someone treat theirs seriously. If you got joke, you got joke it seriously.
Building up consistency for a dream seems cliche, but stories just keep reminding people of its occurrence. One coworker will leave the job at April Fool day and join Apple. His dream job is to be a designer for Apple. While his upcoming title is still software engineer, but after talking about his dream with the team, he will have opportunities to become a designer. Process sounds simple: he self-taught all advanced javascript skills and built blocks. Another talented iOS developer I know started his development career when he was a salesman who was selling first-generation of iPhone. Recently I heard about a principal technical project manager in my team started her job as customer service representative level i, then level ii, then level iii, then customer service lead, then on and on: a 19-year story. I asked my mentor why he chose to become a software engineer, he said he always wanted to do programming since he was a kid, not many opportunities at that time, so he was changing jobs/companies as IT, support engineer then eventually software engineer.
There’s no judgement at all for any dreams, big or small, related to anything, but the key part is how are you serious about it while you’re going to joke about it. I can say I want to be a linguist because I’m fluent in two languages and have taken classes in Spanish and Japanese, also knowing how to say hello in Korean, French, German, Thai, and Mongolian. But anyone can do a quick google search for greetings in different languages after seeing this sentence. I can’t say I’m a fencer because I haven’t even been fencing for six months and still skipping some trainings. Do I want to play piano/harmonica for long or just a few months? There was really stressful time for me just to figure out which hobby I like more. But in a different perspective, just try to answer how serious you are when you’re going to talk about it. Next week when I’m fencing and get stabbed, I will not just say good point with smile (under the mask), I’ll need to seriously get a point back.
I was really hoping the phrase that I memorized for years was not “be seriously friendly”, that could be another whole thought about it.