Posted by john on September 14th, 2006 — Posted in The Pain of Laziness
Laziness is your mind short circuiting. Here’s why…
Working toward your goals and achieving them brings you long term happiness. But in the short run, the primitive part of our brain that wants to move away from pain and toward pleasure kicks in.
Study after study has shown that activities make us happy. An article from the USA Today titled Psychologists now know what makes people happy, archived here, has this to say:
Life satisfaction occurs most often when people are engaged in absorbing activities that cause them to forget themselves, lose track of time and stop worrying. “Flow” is the term Claremont Graduate University psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheeks-sent-mee-hi) coined to describe this phenomenon.
People in flow may be sewing up a storm, doing brain surgery, playing a musical instrument or working a hard puzzle with their child. The impact is the same: A life of many activities in flow is likely to be a life of great satisfaction, Csikszentmihalyi says. And you don’t have to be a hotshot to get there.
“One of the happiest men I ever met was a 64-year-old Chicago welder with a fourth-grade education,” he says. The man took immense pride in his work, refusing a promotion to foreman that would have kept him from what he loved to do. He spent evenings looking at the rock garden he built, with sprinklers and floodlights set up to create rainbows.
Teenagers experience flow, too, and are the happiest if they consider many activities “both work and play,” Csikszentmihalyi says. Flow stretches someone but pleasurably so, not beyond his capacity. “People feel best when doing what they do best,” he says.
This brings us back, though, to how easy it is to be lazy. Biologically, our brains (like the brains of any other animal) want us to have pleasure and shrink from pain, with the least amount of effort.
So in order to get going — to achieve that satisfying state of flow — it requires an initial burst of special effort to get past that short circuit in your mind. But after that, you’ll feel a deep, long-term bliss.
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Posted by john on September 9th, 2006 — Posted in The Pain of Laziness
I disagree with Fred Gratzon, in his article “Laziness is a Good Thing,” who said, “If someone is lucky enough to be blessed with the gift of laziness, he or she should definitely enjoy it and exploit it. It is a quality to be coddled, nurtured, and developed. If correctly utilized, laziness is a one way ticket to great success.”
Fred’s reasoning is that being lazy gives you incentive to want to find ways of doing things that are faster, easier, cheaper, and more efficient.
However, where his reasoning is incorrect is when it comes to actually implementing these better ways of doing things.
You see, you still have to do something. It is only by taking action that you can reach your goals.
Laziness is a terrible thing for those who suffer from it. When you wake up in the morning with zero motivation and no energy to get anything started, it’s an incredibly depressing feeling.
Just a few minor examples:
- You can’t have a delicious meal because it requires energy to cook the ingredients and follow the recipe.
- You can’t make your bed, wash your clothes, or clean your floors because you lack the motivation (and you feel bad about it). Your house is filthy, and you feel too tired to straighten it up.
- You have less money than all the people you know, since they’re able to work a full day while you can’t.
- If you’ve got a job, you call in sick too often and just generally shirk on the job. People know you as “the lazy guy you can’t depend on.”
- If you’re in school, you can’t do a good job on your homework or maintain your focus to study.
When you’re lazy, you can’t get anything accomplished because you can’t keep your focus, you can’t make yourself care enough about it, and you have trouble paying attention to what you need to.
Imagine a life where you had no energy to do anything.
It’s depressing and miserable.
Nobody enjoys being lazy. People find happiness in working and accomplishing things. University researchers in fact have “found that working hard to reach a target was more fulfilling,” adding, “From our research the people who were most active got the most joy. It may sound tempting to relax on a beach, but if you do it for too long it stops being satisfying.” (See the BBC story “Why hard work makes people happy.”)
By the way, even though I’m not a fan of being lazy, Fred’s blog, The Lazy Way to Success, is highly interesting and informative and I recommend it. You’ll learn such things as entrepreneurship, how to get rich, and how to overcome obstacles.
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Posted by john on September 7th, 2006 — Posted in The Pain of Laziness
I have had trouble for much of my life with laziness, and if you’re reading this site, I bet you’re having that trouble yourself.
The goal of this site is to overcome laziness so that you (and I) can become productive and achieve what we want in life. We’ll examine the pain that being lazy causes, the happiness it prevents us from feeling, and achievements it robs from us.
And then we’ll eradicate the laziness.
In time, as you read and apply what you learn, and then you’re no longer lazy, the sky will be the limit.
“Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.”
- Benjamin Franklin (Source: CoreCharacter: Idleness Is The Beginning Of All Vices)
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