It is often credited that bill gates said: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” Well, that might be true that lazy people can find creative ways to make something easy and simple; there are more benefits to laziness than that. Laziness is not a quality limited to a few. Infect all of us are lazy. We chose to do the easiest thing at any given moment. And believe it or not we can use this quality to our advantage. Before diving into how, let's consider a few things.
Firstly, how someone gets good at something to which we say, he has an innate talent or he is natural or something. It’s true that genetics and natural physiques play an important role in one’s ability to do something. The way more important factor is the amount of time one puts in practicing the task. Take for example, an elite footballer would have spent a lot more time on the ground than others, a great public speaker would have spent a lot of time on stage, a great surgeon would have performed a lot more surgeries than an average one and so on. The thing is that once we do a lot of something we get good at it. When we get good at doing something, we like to do it more. When we do more of something, we get even better at it. And the cycle of greatness continues.
Secondly, laziness is not about doing less. Laziness is related to doing the easiest task at hand. Doing nothing, in fact is one of the hardest things. It’s so hard that in many countries it is considered a punishment too strict to give to criminals [solitary confinement]. Laziness causes us to do the easiest task. Easiness or hardness is also not limited to physical effort needed. Sometimes apparently hard tasks are easy for us because we like to do them. Sometimes hard tasks seem easy in comparison. Consider a kid, waking up and going to school may be a hard task for him but convincing his parents to just let him sleep seem harder so he ends up in class. So, the same task can be made easier, and that would be a key.
I believe that stories are the best ways to learn so let me show my point using a story:
The story of Polgar sisters
There was this crazy man in 20th century Hungary. He believed that innate talent is bs and if you practice something enough you would get great at it. So, he decided to prove that by an experiment. Subjects of his experiment were his own three daughters. He decided to teach them chess and not only that their life would revolve around chess from day one. He home schooled his daughters and taught them chess full time. There were chess boards in every corner of the house. The easiest thing they could do in that house was playing chess. There were chess magazines and posters of famous chess players to spark curiosity. His hope was that by doing all that his daughters would be good at chess and he would be able to prove his point.
So, what actually happened? The Oldest sister Suzan won her first tournament in Budapest at 4. And later became a grand master [highest title in chess]. Second sister Sofia become the youngest female chess grandmaster and the Youngest Judit reigned as world champion for 26 years and is widely regarded as the greatest female chess player of all time. All that because the easiest thing they could do was to play chess so they did and got good at it.
The betterment plan
None of it matters if we can’t use it to our advantage. So, let's discuss how to do just that. I’ll tell you four simple steps to turn your laziness into your weapon.
Firstly, you must clearly know what you want? Before optimizing your life, you should know what you are optimizing for. You need to set effective goals. A simple framework I use is to envision what the ideal version of myself would look like. What would I need to be to say I got everything I wanted. And then extend this filter to different sections of life like health, wealth, relationships, fame, daily routine responsibilities or whatever else you might care about. This helps with two things. Firstly, it helps create goals that are intrinsic rather than extrinsic. The goals that tell what I want to be, not what I want to have or what I want for someone to think about me. Secondly, in these goals I alone have the responsibility and accountability. I can't blame my failure on something or someone else.
Next, you need to observe your environment. I would define environment for this purpose as:
“Everything that influences your decisions is your environment”
Environment would be the this key in this situation. It is what decides the easiest thing. And this is the factor that we would change to achieve our desired goals. We need to see what factors are responsible for our current behavior. Just observe what you do every day and understand the rationale behind all actions.
The next step would be to find out the actions that would lead you to being your ideal self. Believe me, it is way simpler than it sounds. Let's say you want to stay healthy. What would you need to do. You need to eat healthy, get good sleep, get some exercise, drink more water, and most importantly do all this consistently. And as you can predict, consistency is usually the problem. Or maybe you would like to be an amazing hockey player. What would you need to do then. Well, play a lot of hockey, duh! But again, consistency becomes an issue. Never think you don't know what to do to achieve your goals. You always do, but we try to avoid it anyway because we are lazy.
Finally, start changing your environment. Make small changes that push you in your desired direction. Change your environment in such a way that it makes you do what you listed in the last step. You can do it in two ways. First, try to make doing the actions you just listed easy. Let's get to the health example. To drink more water, you can keep a water bottle with you. To eat healthy, you can keep healthy food/ingredients at home, so when you want to eat that is the easiest option. To get exercise you can set alarms or ask a friend to hold you accountable. To get better sleep, fix time, don’t plan anything else at that time, and go to bed at the said time. Just like that, you can find little adjustments to your environment that lead to vastly better outcomes. Secondly you can make ways to make things that don’t contribute to your goals or worse yet take you away from them, difficult. You can make practicing complex math problems [if you are into that] only so much easy. What would take you farther than that is making everything else difficult. To do that, you can make a list of things you spend most of your time on. Then try to eliminate each of them. If you spend a lot of time on a certain social media app, delete it. If you spend a lot of time talking nonsense in a group of friends, try leaving that group. If you spend your time doing something important and that task must be done, try outsourcing if possible. You might not like these changes, but there is a price to be paid for greatness.
I have tried everything that I mentioned, and it has helped me personally. I would request you to also give it a try. Maybe, maybe it won't ork for you but what do you have to lose. See you next time with some new thoughts.