I'm sure I was the source of much frustration for my parents. Beyond being a total spazzoid, I was an extremely lazy child. I would try to do as little as possible, and probably wasn't a very helpful kid.
I remember when I was in 7th or 8th grade I had to mow the lawn each week. Our backyard had two wide beds with narrow strips of grass behind them. I was so lazy that I realized I could skip mowing the grass behind the beds and no one would notice. Of course eventually my dad did notice, and he wasn't happy with how I had half-assed my job, and warned me about half-assing life. But whenever I mowed the lawn I was always thinking about how to make that unenjoyable chore a bit easier or faster. I'd be listening to my walkman and thinking about the optimal mowing pattern to reduce the time lost to turns.
In many ways that sort of thinking is what led me to become an industrial engineer, where I could work to make processes more efficient reduce waste. Industrial engineering is really engineering for lazy people. It taught me that if the objective is to look out of your house on a nicely trimmed yard, that mowing behind those beds wasn't value added, but rather was waste that could be removed from the process.
My laziness has followed me into adulthood, but I noticed - especially once I started having things I cared about - that there is a certain pride of going the extra mile or doing the little things that only I would ever notice and I do them in spite of my laziness.
Now this laziness does come with a few downsides. First, being lazy takes a tremendous amount of effort. Having to spend 10 minutes contemplating which route would be most efficient to run my errands far outweighs the time savings. Second, it's hard to achieve greatness in this life without putting in hard work. But what is greatness, and what makes it so great? The more I see of it, having a powerful career, or a bunch of money isn't always as great as it seems.
I'd like to think I've stumbled on a system of optimized laziness. I've learned to pick the things that I really care about like being a good dad and building chicken coops and give my best effort on those. But when it comes to wrapping gifts, I'm as lazy as they come, and I will half-ass that job every Christmas Eve. Before having kids, my career was a bigger part of my identity. But I've come to realize that having a bigger job just comes with more stress and more work that's not always worth the ego boost or additional pay. I've found my way into a job that optimizes my effort:pay ratio. I could work twice as hard to make 20% more money, but that's not optimized laziness.
Laziness has been a big driver in my life, but honestly, it's turned out pretty good. I might never be on the cover of a magazine, but I'm happy to float through life taking the easy route wherever possible. It's not a terrible way to live.
