Laziness has got to be the biggest problem holding back intelligent people. It seems to me, the smarter a person is, the bigger a problem they have with laziness.

I’ve had the problem since high school, where I found out the importance of laziness when programming. Bad programmers rush to start implementing solutions to a problem without thinking their solutions through. It’s the lazy programmers who sat around all class, goofing off and letting their subconscious “digest” the problem before tackling it that did the best work. And so I assumed that life worked the same way, the people who ran at problems right away did more work, enjoyed themselves less, and ultimately got a worse end result than the people who took the time to let the right solution come to them.

After a few years implementing this mindset in life, and now I see just how incomplete of an approach it was.

See, I started with the assumtion that life is a closed system. You gathered data (knowledge), and interpreted it to find an ultimate solution that led to becoming happy and successful. The process of taking data in and converting it into a meaningful solution is what everybody else misses, and what I figured I had on the guy who just followed whatever society told him to do.

But life is not a closed system. It’s an open one. There is no ultimate solution that is going to bring us ultimate happiness and success. That’s something that can only be approached, by consistent testing and implementing. Being lazy means we don’t get to the implementing part of life, and waste all of our intelligence on the theoretical, and ultimately not real.

Being alive is a constant stream of information coming in, getting processed, and then going back out. The closest thing to a real solution (in life) is changing the processing part so that the information that comes from the world leaves changed for the better. This creates a better world for others, and ultimately, us. (Yes, a positive feedback loop)

But that’s only possible if we’re constantly implementing our ideas. And staying lazy is the surest way to make sure your ideas never get seen. So how do we eliminate laziness, without losing the benefit of letting the solutions come naturally?

First figure out exactly what you’ve been putting off. Make a list of everything you know needs getting done. Been meaning to get out of debt? Make a financial turnaround. Imagine what will happen if you don’t get each one of them finished, ever. Eliminate the trivial, and prioritize the important. Motivated yet? Good. Then do the hardest one, as soon as you’ve finished writing the list.

Because getting the most difficult things done first is the most important tool for anybody with a problem with laziness. By getting the most difficult thing done, you set yourself up for things to be easier and easier. There’s no big looming idea of how much needs to get done over your head. The worst is already over.

So what are you waiting for? Get started on that thing you’ve been meaning to do. Today, before another year goes by.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 4:49 pm and is filed under (Online) Business, Social Commentary, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.