People not machines

Have you ever been in a class or a job in which the teacher or boss pictures you and your classmates/ coworkers like machines? it's like that for that person your solely purpose in life is to study for that class or to work for (in some cases) nonstop during the day. I have been in a similar situation and all i could think of was on how unprepared the person was to be in a position of leadership or mentor-ship. 

Only one teacher in all my college life told us that he was aware that we as humans could be having good or bad days and also that his class was not the only thing that we had in our lives, and that knowing this he would try to be as reasonable as possible with us during the course and also that he would expect for us to reciprocate.

It is alarming that during 5 years in college, taking classes with highly capable professionals and extremely smart engineers, just one teacher had this way of thinking and openly told us so. I could say that 90% of the teachers i had treated their course as if it was the only course we were taking, assigning us ridiculous amounts of work.

Don't get me wrong i'm no expert in human resources or psychology but i think that it doesn't take to be an expert to realize that if you want productivity from people, exploitation is not the answer. 

In our modern world there seems to be a fascination towards self exploitation, i've heard countless times people proudly talking about how they worked for ten plus hours, or that they had to work at their house during the weekend. don't get me wrong, i'm not against hard work, and i understand that there are sometimes that we need to put those extra miles to achieve the goals, all i'm saying is that we need balance and also we need to realize that resting is essential for productivity. 

It is also important to give our time the value it deserves, i'm an avid thinker that at the end of our lives we are going to regret the time we've lost to be with our loved ones rather than the extra money we didn't earned.

All this is not a new subject of study, Abraham Maslow created a philosophical model called "the Maslow's pyramid", in which he represents the levels we as human need to satisfy to achieve self-actualization (desire to become the most that one can be), the theory says that when we reach the last level we'll experience a drive to become our best version and this obviously affects our productivity.

The pyramid consist of five levels: physical needs, safety needs, love and belongings, esteem and lastly self-actualization; we can see that the base of the pyramid basically consist in people having a house, food, water, etc. If we have those first two levels then we can look at more sentimental aspects like friendship, family, intimacy, self-steem, etc. and if we have those four levels satisfied then we can thrive and try en become our best version.

And basically with Maslow's pyramid i can show all the argument i'm trying to make, we can't be asked to be extra productive or our best version if we haven't fulfilled the bottom levels, and in a class or job in which we are required to sacrifice a big part of our time with loved ones or even just time for ourselves we can't be expected to perform at our best. In my opinion job managers should be familiarized with this and they should plan accordingly, that way they could get the best out of their employees and overall achieve a better working environment. 

As a student it took a lot for me to realize all this and since then i try to apply it in my life, i hope this helps you in your job or class and makes you reach the top level of the pyramid and thrive towards being the best version of yourself.