When did being lazy become a bad thing? Seriously, people call me lazy expecting me to get offended. All I can say is “uh … ok thanks” and then they give me that look that says “you have done nothing to contribute to society, you are a good for nothing.” A look that says “I know your worth from a glance.” And all this is because I’m lazy. So what? I like to take the easy way more often than not.
I mean, just look outside. You’re bound to see someone driving a car. When you see someone driving, do we think they are lazy for not walking? No, we think this is something too common to be lazy, but wait — choosing to take the easy way out or being unwilling to exert energy is just what being lazy is. My mission is to correct the misguided interpretation of laziness.
And I don’t stand alone. A common urban legend is that Bill Gates, the richest person in the world, once said, “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it."
As I said earlier, the use of a car is an act of laziness, as are most inventions. Look at the phone and how it has evolved. At first, we were too lazy to meet someone in person to tell them something. Then we became too lazy to move to our telephone, so we made the mobile phone. This evolution brought on by laziness still continues today.
Alexander Graham Bell, one of the primary inventors of the telephone, once said, “When one door closes, another door opens, but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.”
I believe this shows how people often put too much energy in the wrong place only to find they could have used half as much if they looked elsewhere.
I find this same waste of energy in the methods of Thomas Edison, especially in his quote: “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
While I don’t discredit hard work’s effect toward success, I also don’t believe any one end of the spectrum from laziness to hard work has any given advantage over the other, because too much of any habit can be a bad thing.
In the end, who wants to go out of their way to do something they don’t have to? I, for one, try to only do what has to be done when it must be done.
Why not just avoid the pain of hard work and instead look for an easier way? From some of the earliest times, people have done the same.
Consider this: “People started growing crops because going hunting without knowing if you'd catch anything was a pain. People dug wells because going all the way to the river was a pain. Laziness is the mother of human progress.”
I couldn’t have said it better than Ikta Solork of Bokuto Uno’s "Alderamin on the Sky." Frankly, I didn’t want to put in the effort. Either way, the next time you talk to someone on the phone or the next time you ride in a car, remember the contributions of lazy people allowed you to do so.