Friday, October 25, 2013

Week 43; dream a little dream of...?


This week we talked about dreams and the possibilities of making them come true. This quite inevitably has -at least to some extent- to do with money, so first we read a newspaper article about a Finnish game developer, Supercell, that has just sold the majority of the shares of the company and as a consequence, the owners, investors and employees of Supercell are now extremely wealthy (read: filthy rich) people. They are now in a position where they have so much money that they can basically buy anything they want and they can fulfil their dreams quite freely. Quite interestingly, the CEO and the creative director of the company say that they are not going to use the money on themselves but instead they intend to use their money to help start-up businesses. The founders of Supercell also said that when they got started and had nothing, they still possessed a naive, almost childlike belief in their dreams and to the notion that almost anything is possible if you work hard and believe in yourself and in your products.

We had a sort of a 'what if' -game meaning that we all tried to think of what we would do if we suddenly became rich. There was discussion about giving money to family members, securing one's own future and even marrying Mick Jagger, but I know what I'd do: I would set up a foundation that would do charity work, and I would buy myself a house from someplace warm! I'm a known winter-hater, so the Finnish winter with its typical features like slippery roads, freezingly cold weather and constant shoveling of snow are definitely not my idea of fun! So, if I were rich, I would gladly cherry pick; spend my summers in Finland and the winters somewhere else!

We also talked about dreams and the fact that they often change in the course of time. Someone said that it's quite natural that young people dream about things they don't have yet (a spouse, children, a nice profession etc.) Once you get older, your dreams may change. I've noticed that once you've achieved some goal or dream, you might be happy and content, or then you might notice that this thing was not worth having at all, in other words, it just wasn't your cup of tea after all. The saying (or warning) "Be careful of what you wish for; you just might get it" probably has great wisdom in it. The grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence, and pursuing something you think might change your life for the better doesn't always turn out to be so. On the other hand, if you always manage to get everything you dream about, what is left? Isn't it the spice of life that you have dreams regardless of whether they are feasible or not.




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