Intelligent Lazy

Derek Sivers – talks about his 15-mile bike riding loop. He says ‘I go full-on, 100 percent, head-down, red-faced sprinting.” And most always he’d clock 43 minutes

But then after a few months, he says: “I noticed I was getting less enthusiastic about this bike ride. I think I had mentally linked it with being completely exhausted.”

He then decided to switch this, relax and just ride, and really slow down.

He goes on to say ” I saw two dolphins in the water. A pelican flew right over me in Marina del Rey…I had to laugh at the novelty of it.”

He completes his story: “I’m usually so damn driven, always doing everything as intensely as I can. It was so nice to take it easy for once. I felt I could do this forever, without any exhaustion.

When I finished, I looked at the time: forty-five minutes.

Wait — what?!? How could that be? Yep. I double-checked: forty-five minutes, as compared to my usual forty-three.”

You can read the unmurdered version of his story @ https://sive.rs/relax or you can read his book “Hell Yeah or No”

Club this with Richard Koch – a British management consultant, venture capital investor, and author of the 80: 20 Principle, someone who took his of $ 5 million in 1990 to $750 million in 2020.

He created a 4x4 matrix in which he extolled the ‘Clever and Lazy’ quadrant. And this has been ascribed to several German generals, e.g., Helmuth von Moltke, Erich von Manstein, Carl von Clausewitz, and Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

In 1942 Viscount Swinton (Philip Lloyd-Greame) spoke in the House of Lords in London, and he described the four classes of officers and credited an unnamed German General:

“I do not know whether your Lordships are familiar with the saying of a German General that there are four types of officers but I think that it is relevant to what we are discussing.

He said that there are four types of officers: the clever and lazy, the clever and industrious, the stupid and lazy, and the stupid and industrious.

The clever and lazy you make Chief of Staff, because he will not try to do everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think.

The clever and industrious you make his deputy. The stupid and lazy you put into a line battalion and kick him into doing a job of work.

The stupid and industrious you must get rid of at once because he is a national danger.

[source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/]

A lot of us plan our work by looking at the work at hand and figuring out how many hours it will take to finish.

What if we turned that around?

What if we slowed down like Derek Sivers, what if we also turned the work-time relationship on its head – putting a time constraint on how long you want to work – this time instead of stretching the hours, cut back by 25% or even 50% of the time you think you’re going to take –

3 things might happen:

1.     You might surprise yourself by how much you can do in how little time.

2.     If you continue this practice, you’re really training the mind to accomplish more with less

3.     The minutes or hours that you’d manage to steal could be relegated to deep-work and more reflection time making where you’re headed clearer and your accomplishments more fulfilling