“Engineers are inherently lazy.”
These words spoken by one of my professors at Kansas State University didn’t sit well with me, but I still remember them decades later.
I disagreed with my instructor at the time (I’ll tell how that went in just a moment…), but I now think she was right.
And, now I would even argue that being lazy is actually a good way for you to build your career. Even if you’re not an engineer.
Disagreeing with my professor
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering. And, many, many years ago, I learned a lot of very technical information I can now remember basically nothing about.
But, I do remember a very important lesson from an extremely intelligent professor who was teaching about some shortcut to make highly complex calculations simpler and easier. I now have no clue what that shortcut was or how to apply it.
I do, however, remember the reason she said we would need to know this technique.
She told the class that, “Engineers are inherently lazy.” She and I had a good rapport so I raised my hand and told her I disagreed. I told her we weren’t lazy. We were efficient.
After spending part of my career as a practicing engineer and almost all of it as a business leader, I have reached this conclusion.
We were both right.
Whether you use the term efficient or lazy, doing more work with less effort is an important skill to master if you want to be successful.
But, it can be easy to not recognize behaviors that are actually beneficial because they can appear on the surface to be things an unmotivated slacker might do.
I’ve found if you want to build your career and be more effective as a leader, you need to resist the temptation to view these 7 techniques as lazy.
It might not be easy to change your perspective. But, if you can learn to see these practices as important fundamental career skills instead of acts of laziness, you will have uncommon success to go along with your uncommon viewpoint.
7 techniques to build your career by being lazy
In my experiences these seven behaviors are often viewed by many to be the behaviors of a lazy person who will never be successful.
To be honest, this has been my initial reaction in the past. But, I’ve been wrong.
Now, I continually work to maintain what I consider to be a more informed mindset in each of these areas.
1. Work less
I’ll start by busting a myth that I believe is prevalent.
Myth: Working more hours brings more success.
I think we all fall into the trap at times of believing that consistently putting in extra hours will bring us the promotion or the bonus we are striving to earn. Or, driving ourselves to exhaustion will make our small business achieve the revenue goals we set for ourselves.
That may be true in the short term, but if you want to build your career and not just be successful with one or two projects. Or, if you want to position your business for enduring financial success, you have to take a longer term view.
In the post, “5 Reasons Why It’s Smart To Take Time Off Work” I present the reasons why it’s good for you, your teammates, and your organization for you to use your vacation days. It’s wise to make this invest in your own long term health and performance of your business.
This idea has been taken further by highly successful business leaders such as Michael Hyatt and Amy Porterfield, who have transitioned to 30 hour or four-day work weeks for their teams. Click their names to learn how they’ve implemented these changes in their businesses.
This CNBC article, describes how Iceland ran two large-scale trials between 2015-19, cutting working weeks to between 35 and 36 hours from a 40 hour-week for many, with no reduction in pay.
Analysis of the results demonstrated that “a reduction of working hours actually maintained or increased productivity.”
While this may not be possible for all organizations, it highlights the point that working less isn’t lazy.
If your business can meet it’s goals and objectives by working less than 40 hours a week while giving its employees a healthier workplace and lifestyle, working less is a wise business decision not a demonstration of laziness.
2. Sleep more
While we’re talking about taking time off, let’s push this laziness perception even further.
Many people are raised to believe that sleeping more than a certain number of hours is lazy. Or, maybe sleeping after a certain time in the morning is not being ambitious. And, for some, taking a nap is the ultimate sign of a total sluggard.
But, again, these perspectives aren’t always accurate.
The research shows that “power naps” actually improve performance. College and professional athletes and coaches have known this for years.
And, based on my observations, the world of highly successful athletes and coaches, has no room for lazy people.
So, if you want to build your career, do what they data says will make you more effective.
Sleep more, even if that means you’re called lazy for taking a nap or not getting up super early.
3. Create cheat sheets
Have you ever seen a seasoned veteran berate a new employee for having to look at a piece of paper to know how to do something?
Their argument is often something like this.
You need to be able to do a job without relying on instructions. Only lazy people rely on “cheat sheets”.
But, the reality is that documenting your processes and procedures and creating standards that you or anyone else can follow saves time.
If you avoid wasting the few seconds or typically several minutes it takes to refresh your memory when doing a job you don’t do regularly, you have saved yourself and your business time and money.
So, even though written processes and procedures are often called “cheat sheets”, using them isn’t cheating. And, it isn’t lazy.
Documenting everything you do so you can be more productive and perform your work with a higher level of quality is not the behavior of a lazy person. It’s a proven technique to build your career.
4. Use shortcuts
Like the word “cheat sheet” the term “shortcut” often has negative connotations.
When someone is described as taking a short cut to get to a destination, they are viewed as lazy. They aren’t willing to put in the work to go the long way to arrive at the place they want to be.
This might be true if the extra distance provides value. But, in reality the extra steps of a journey may provide no benefit at all. The long way often isn’t the better way. It’s just the path we and many others have always taken.
If we guard against a perspective of viewing shortcuts as lazy, we often find they are simply the most efficient way to get from one point in our work to another.
You may discover some shortcuts are actually not only the quickest, but also the best method of doing your work.
These mislabeled lazy shortcuts are, in reality, tools to help you perform well in your role and build your career.
I encourage you to look for easier and faster ways to accomplish what you need to get done. Evaluate them objectively, especially when you feel like “it shouldn’t be this easy.”
If you struggle with shifting your mindset to view faster and easier techniques to be positive not negative, consider how the term “shortcut” has come to be used in our everyday work on computers.
Keyboard shortcuts are highly beneficial and save us immense amounts of time as the savings build with each mouse click we avoid throughout our workdays.
A couple of examples that come to mind are these Windows 10 keyboard shortcuts and this set of shortcuts for Microsoft Excel users. I use many of these regularly, multiple times each day.
I expect you do too. And, we don’t consider these keyboard shortcuts lazy behaviors.
So, I encourage you to remember this example when you find and apply other shortcuts to complete your tasks.
You aren’t showing laziness. You are becoming a more valuable member of your team.
5. Learn from others
Only lazy people rely on others to get their work done.
Have you ever heard that ridiculous statement? I know I have.
Or, it may have been a more subtle version of the same falsehood. In many organizations, it is described as “Not Invented Here Syndrome.”
In other words, we can’t use something that someone else has developed. We have to do everything ourselves. Because, building on the work of others is lazy.
That perspective is just silly.
It is not lazy in any way to learn from others and build upon what talented people have discovered or created.
In fact, one of the most important skills to acquire to build your career is the ability to learn from others and emulate their best practices.
I’ve seen many well-meaning, talented individuals think they had to be just that, individuals. As a result, their careers stalled.
They took the unhealthy perspective that they had to learn everything by doing it themselves without getting input from anyone else.
They thought it was lazy to benefit from the experience of others who had learned lessons before them. Their extreme self-reliance actually caused them to be less effective. They wasted precious time trying methods many others had already proven to be ineffective.
But, they were convinced at the time that doing it on their own was the only way to prove they were hard working, competent team members.
I observed these same people mature over time.
With experience they began to learn that being an interdependent member of a team and learning from each other’s experiences is not an indicator of laziness.
Embracing this type of teamwork demonstrates the humility that makes an outstanding leader and team member.
You can read more on being humble and successful in the post, “Can I be Humble and Successful on a Team?“
6. Generate passive income
What could be more lazy than earning money while you sleep?
While to some the idea of generating passive income is familiar and makes complete sense, many people aren’t familiar with the concept.
Others simply reject the notion altogether. They can’t escape the limiting belief that the only way to earn a living is to trade time for money. You work hard and you get paid. When a person puts in more hours, they bring home more money.
They will tell you that’s just how the world works.
But, that isn’t actually the only way the world works. And, generating passive income is a powerful way to build your career.
Pat Flynn is one of my favorite authorities on legitimate ways to generative passive income. You can learn more from him at his website, www.smartpassiveincome.com.
Jack Butcher is also an expert on this topic and is a good person to follow on Twitter. His term, “Build Once, Sell Twice.” eloquently communicates what passive income is all about.
I’m not suggesting that everyone should leave their W2 day job and become a full-time entrepreneur like Pat Flynn, Jack Butcher, and many others.
I am, however, encouraging you to embrace the mindset that generating passive income and earning money without continually doing work is not a scam. And, it’s not lazy.
In fact, it takes a tremendous amount of effort on the front end. But, by investing once to build a product or service that can be sold over and over again without requiring much, if any, work with each sale, you can continually earn income even while you sleep.
That may sound lazy to those who are unwilling to expand their thinking beyond the traditional ways to bring home a paycheck. But, it’s actually a powerful technique to build your career in a non-traditional way.
It might fit as a side hustle to generate extra spending money. Or, with the right plans in place, it can be a lucrative career path with many fulfilling benefits and rewards.
Check out my podcast conversation with Stephen A. Hart, a marketer, brand strategist, and entrepreneur who calls passive income “sleep money” – money you get while you’re sleeping! Click here to listen to How To Build Your Personal Brand And Make More Money with Stephen A. Hart.
7. Settle for good enough
This last tip will be familiar if you read my blog regularly.
I am a recovering perfectionist. And, part of the mindset I fight against is thinking that delivering any work that is less than perfect is lazy.
My inner critic voice says things like this. By investing a little more time or working harder, what I’ve created could have been better. If I would have been a bit less lazy, the results I delivered would have been perfect.
That, of course, is more silly talk. Ridiculous, untrue stupidity.
No one will ever deliver perfect results. And, to deliver a product that has imperfections is not a behavior of a lazy person. It is exactly what smart, highly successful leaders do.
When you settle for good enough and deliver a result, you are not being lazy.
Seth Godin writes often about the benefits of shipping products that are not perfect. This post in his blog is one of his many examples.
I encourage you to learn early as you build your career that you cannot create anything that is perfect. But, that doesn’t mean you’re incompetent or lazy.
Your imperfect work has value. It will provide benefit to your team as you contribute what you know to the best of your ability.
And, perhaps more importantly, it will provide value to you.
You will get feedback on how you can improve and grow.
Through the process of creating and shipping your products, in whatever form they take, you will demonstrate that you are a courageous contributor. A leader willing to be criticized and learn.
And, in no way lazy.
Lazy or efficient?
So, my professor was probably right when she taught me that engineers are inherently lazy. And, I consider that to be a compliment now when I think about how to reinterpret what many people view as lazy.
I hope these seven techniques give you some practical ideas to build your career by being as lazy as you can be, in the right way of course.
You can call it being efficient or being lazy, but regardless of which term you choose, embracing these strategies and the mindset behind them will serve you well in any field or profession as you build your career and grow as a leader.
Let’s lead with kindness and confidence.
Greg
