Selfish, Scared and Stupid: Stop Fighting Human Nature And Increase Your Performance, Engagement And Influence

CHAPTER 11 Make it easy (lazy)

I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because they will always find an easy way to do it.

Bill Gates

As you travel around the world, you find that in addition to extraordinary sculpture, evocative paintings, inspiring architecture and an exquisite variety of performing arts, the world is also filled with monuments to human laziness.

Human beings are notoriously lazy

Anyone who has visited a major airport in the past decade will likely have encountered the moving walkway. It is exactly as it sounds, a long section of floor that moves you towards your destination at a comfortable pace, removing the need for unnecessary walking or other forms of self-propulsion.

Now, before the more energetic of you feel horribly impugned and point out that you only use the travelator to increase the speed of your gait and that you do in fact continue to utilise your bipedal appendages, we’d like to draw your attention to the sign that always accompanies these moving walkways. It always conveys an admonition for the majority of us to keep to the right or left (depending on the part of the world you are in), on the off chance that one of you energetic types would like to pass by unhindered. In other words, while they clearly expect most of us to let the floor do the work for us, they don’t want us to become human cholesterol and clog up our gloomily decorated arteries.

But this is not just a feature of the digital age. Back in the 1970s, as we ...