Sure, you could ask a hard-working person – but the lazy person will without fail come up with the simplest, easiest, laziest option. Most of the great inventions of our time were a boon for the lazy: the car was ideal for people too lazy to walk. The telephone is ideal for people too lazy to write letters. Google is perfect for people too lazy to bother remembering things, and so on.
Which brings us to entrepreneur Fred Gratzon, who points out:
It certainly does not make sense financially to work. If we were to graph the relationship between hard work and money we would see that the harder and more demanding the jobs, the less they pay. As effort decreases, success (as measured by money) increases. If people were remunerated based on the amount of hard work necessary to accomplish a job, physical laborers would be the richest people in society. Obviously they are not.
…we must use our brains to work less and ideally to avoid work altogether. Otherwise we condemn ourselves to working and the more we must work the less we get paid – a double whammy.
Gratzon’s book, The Lazy Way To Success, is full of this stuff. Or at least it appears to be: I can’t be bothered buying it, reading it and writing a review of it. You can get the gist from the sample chapter linked above.
[via LifeHacker – I couldn’t even be bothered finding the link on my own]
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0 responses to “If you want something done, ask a lazy person”
He does have a point. When I audited banks during accountancy training we were amazed to see that the star traders earned many times more than the CEO- and went home at five when the markets closed, without a laptop or even a briefcase…
Definitely. Although I’m being a bit sarky in the post, he’s absolutely right: laziness – as opposed to doing absolutely nothing – can be a real asset. A lazy person tends to ask “do I really have to go through this all the time?” and looks for ways around it, so for example a lazy person will use templates and autotext in Word to automate dull tasks, or will spend a bit of time getting to grips with Mac apps such as Quicksilver to save future faffing around.
The best example of applied laziness I can think of is a journo I’m familiar with – I know him from an email list. Rather than knock his pan in each month, he writes two or three shortish stories and then sells them again and again and again. Naturally he’s now loaded.