My lazy life - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

My lazy life - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Some books get you thinking and Fred Gratzons The lazy Way to Success definitely did that to me. Damn you, Fred! I have seen the light. I now realize that my ingrained laziness has not only been one of the major forces shaping my life, its been a boost to almost every important area of my life. Me, doing what I do best: Nothing. Here are some random thoughts on how laziness has helped me in my university studies, in my work in IT, in leadership and in entrepreneurship. The lazy student When I started studying at the University of Southern Denmark (I graduated with a masters in computer science in 1994), I was always envious of the over-achievers. You know them theyre the people who are always prepared for todays lecture, have done their homework and never need to do any last-minute, aaaaargh-exams-are-only-two-weeks-away studying. Like I did. Every. single. semester. I used to beat myself up for not being like them, but in the end I accepted, that Im just not that person. The final realization came to me while I was writing my masters thesis (on virtual sensors for robots, if anyone wants to know), and I discovered that some days I cant write. I literally cant put two words together and have anything meaningful come out. I can frustrate myself nearly to death trying, but I wont get anywhere. And other days, writing is totally effortless and both the quantity and the quality of the output is high. I am in fact having one of those days today, I cant seem to stop writing. What I realized was that this is me. Its the way I work, and I have go with that. So I adopted the lazy approach to writing, which is that I write whenever I feel like it. And my output on a writing day easily outweighs the x days where I didnt get any writing done. Incidentally, the thesis still got done on time and it got me an A. So there! The lazy developer Masters degree in hand I went on to become an IT consultant and developer, and I quickly learned this: If Im programming something and it feels like work, I havent found the right solution yet. When the right solution presents itself, the task becomes fun and easy. I also get to admire the beauty of an efficient, simple solution. Good code is a pleasure to maintain, tweak and refactor. Bad code is hard work. Also laziness means only doing things once, instead of repeating yourself all over the place another hallmark of good code. The lazy leader After my IT days I went on to leadership and learned this: If leading people feels like hard work, youre most definitely not doing it right. The lazy leader adapts his leadership style to the people around him to the point where it feels like hes doing almost no work and people are leading themselves. I refer you to this classic Lao Tzu quote as proof that this notion is more than 2500 years old. When I spoke at the Turkish Management Centers HR conference in Turkey, one of the other speakers was Semcos CEO Ricardo Semler. He said in his presentation that Semco recently celebrated the 10th. anniversary of Ricardo not deciding anything in the company. It started when he took 18 months out to travel the world, and discovered that the company ran just fine without him. If that aint laziness on a very high plane, I dont know what is and you can read all about it in Ricardos excellent book The Seven-Day Weekend. The lazy entrepreneur As an entreprenur, my approach has been this: Start a lot of small projects and see which ones grab me. Rather than try to analyze my way to an answer to which opportunity is the best/will make me the most money/will be the most fun, I float a lot of ideas in a lot of places. Some happen, most dont. The ones that happen are by definition the right ones, and they are always fun to work on. Always. Conclusion Its common to think that success only comes with hard work, but Ive found the opposite to be true for me. In my case, success has come from NOT working hard, and my laziness has definitely done me a lot of good. The only difficult part has been to let go of the traditional work ethic and accept my laziness. To work with it instead of against it. Will the lazy approach work for you? Maybe not. Maybe you get more success from working long and hard, from putting your nose to the grindstone and applying yourself. But if youve never tried the lazy approach, how can you know that that doesnt work even better? Give it a shot, you might like it! If you enjoyed this post, youll probably also like these: The cult of overwork Dont fight stress, promote peace Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related