The Benefits of Laziness
8 Mar
A week and a half ago we had the opportunity to listen to a multi-awarded inventor talk about the machines he would make when he was still a child. One of his favorites was the toy crane he made with two halves of a milk can that was controlled by strings to pick up things like tennis balls and the like. He said he built this toy so that he would not need to climb over the neighbor’s fence to pick up the ball that his friends happen to be playing with. It made life easier for him and his playmates and the game did not have to be delayed longer than it should. As a young boy, he was on the lookout for ways to make life easier for him and for other people. He had, by wanting to simplify his life, devised a short cut to retrieving the ball that went over the neighbor’s fence. To some it would seem as an imaginative way to get things done, while others might conclude that it was a lazy boy’s way of getting the ball back into play.
What some of us would consider lazy could well be a development of simplifications over a period of time. Edward De Bono, cited as one of the world’s top thinkers today, said “The lazier a person is, the more likely that person is to seek simpler ways to do things.” This statement, in turn, places a whole new viewpoint on the word “lazy.” Today, one cannot imagine watching television without the remote control in hand. Does that actually mean one is lazy to stand up and change the channel every time there is a need? We are sure some of you still remember being reprimanded by your elders by being too lazy to stand up and change the channel instead of having to use the remote. Well none of those who use to think using the remote was a lazy person’s way of doing things thinks that way now. The remote is, shall we say, standard issue and what is lazy today is the fact that we don’t want to stand and look for the remote when it isn’t in its usual place.
It would be worth our while to observe the “lazy” people so to speak. They spend their lives trying to think of short-cuts, making life easier and simpler. It is very possible that people in the workplace could have developed a less complicated way to get their work done. People who take care of pets have moved on from the tedious and time consuming work of having to fill the drinking bowls on a daily basis to installing drinking bottles that release water on demand just by animals licking at the edge of the metal tube. We are sure that this drinking bottle system was developed by some “lazy” person who just decided one day that life should be made easier.
Supermarket shelves offer shoppers pre-sliced cheese portions. These machine-cut slices are uniform in thickness, size and shape, and fit your sandwiches perfectly. Although we still have cheese slicers operated by hand in our homes, we must admit that having a supply of the machine cut slices offers us an easier way to prepare our food. Could the idea have come from a “lazy” person who just got tired of having to cut the slices from a block of cheese and then hated having to clean the slicer after? The “lazy” person stepped into the challenge of making his life easier and the world is a better place today (or at least sandwiches are undeniably easier to make today) than before the pre-cut era.
