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The Renaissance, Thanksgiving, and Startups

My new article on entrepreneursunpluggd.com . I talk about how businesses can benefit from using a theme to sharpen their focus. Give a read and let me know what you think.

In Praise of Laziness

Before I get punched in the nuts for supporting laziness, try to see this from from a different scope. My definition of laziness is not inclusive of that lad in bed surrounded by an army of beer cans or the dude sitting on a couch wolfing a subway sandwich and finds reaching for the remote excruciating. I’m talking about laziness that leads to creativity. The laziness that sparks innovation. Despite its negative press, it has thrived over the centuries for one reason. We need it. Lazy people tend to ask themselves “how” and “why” so much they come up with solutions that are so obvious the rest of us look past them. They see no reason why an essay should be thousands of words long when a few hundreds can tell the story. They see no reason why you’d have so many buttons when one can do the trick. They see no reason why people have to have to log books around when you can have it in an electronic form factor. They see no reason why you have to disrupt your schedule so they set up a system ship stuff to you.  Laziness encompasses one’s ability to say “NO!”. The ability to make that hard decision of not cramming your products with features that will be used. The ability to help other people reach their goals without clutter. Every form of complication in the world has been brought about by a hard work. Created by someone who thinks there should be a lot more processes to accomplish a simple task.

There were failed attempts at the wonderful things we enjoy now. Laziness stepped in and forced the people who created these things to take a break to ask ” WHY” and “HOW”. Continuous labour would have resulted in more frustrations. Larry Page and Serge Brin didn’t want to spend long hours parsing the internet. They created Google. Email was slow and very painful. Paul Bucheit created Gmail. They wanted nice pictures without all the post editing Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger gave us instagram. Ole Kirk Christiansen wanted toys kids could put together with no fuss, we got LEGO. The easiest things are the hardest to spot. Laziness helps in that regard. Though a lot of creative people will never be seen with laziness in public, their best works have been a fruit of it. Laziness forces reevaluation. Laziness is amazing. Laziness is that flash of inspiration. Laziness is that problem solved.