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The Myth of Laziness
And How It Keeps Us From Being Great at Sales, Leadership, Parenting, and Pretty Much Everything Else
One of the things that we as humans are not so good at dealing with is when things don’t go the way we’d like them to. Buddhists have a word for the feeling we get when that happens: dukkha. It’s a shorthand for the nagging dissatisfaction and unease that follows the various disappointments of everyday life— and learning to cope with it is essentially the basis for the entire religion.
But this isn’t an essay about religion or spirituality. It’s an essay about something very different: the concept of laziness. It’s a concept that I’ve struggled with for a long time — partly because I’ve been accused of being lazy on more than one occasion, and partly because I have found myself believing that I was, in fact, lazy. But the more years I live, and the more I attempt and fail to finish various projects, the more I am becoming convinced of a simple hypothesis: there is no such thing as laziness.
A more conservative thesis would be this: calling someone lazy has no good practical application, and is itself a lazy thing to do. And moreover, the concept of laziness is actually an intellectual and interpersonal crutch. We use it when we can’t do the hard work of really communicating and attempting…
