No B.S Friday: Laziness isn’t a sin, but it definitely isn’t a virtue either.
Don’t be afraid of the expansion that life is asking of you.
I’ll be honest with you. I don’t have a lot of patience for people who don’t want to push themselves.
And look, I can kind of get it. We have a hard-wired drive for comfort.
We’re like housecats. We don’t like to be pushed. We like to be comfortable. We like to laze around.
And they’re all beautiful things.
But there’s a sub-routine running in your mind that says, unless we’re being chased by a tiger or trying to engage with a potential mate, our chemical impulses should try and get this animal to slow down and conserve energy.
Brilliant design. It’s carried down through the evolutionary ages and brought us to the pinnacle of the food chain.
Brilliant.
So I don’t buy into this whole idea that laziness and sloth are a sin – just an aberrant thought that the devil somehow managed to slip into our brains while we were checking out the cute girl at church.
No. It’s evolutionary design. And brilliant design at that.
That animal that wastes energy doesn’t survive long.
But that was then and this is now. We’re not running from tigers. And after a brief and intense period in our twenties, we’re probably not trying to chase down a mate either.
So what are you saving your energy for?
And the truly miraculous thing about humas is just how malleable they are.
Most of us can’t run 10kms. Our bodies just can’t do it.
But almost anyone can, with the right amount of training, run 10kms. Some people run marathons. Some people run marathons at a sprint!
We are malleable. We adapt. As we push ourselves, we expand. We grow. We evolve.
This is the human’s super-power. Not teeth. Not scales, but the ability to adapt. The ability to consciously expand in the directions we want to.
And this is the great battle at the heart of being human – between an evolutionary impulse to be lazy, and a consciously created super-power to evolve.
And this is the great secret that your laziness doesn’t want you to know: what starts out as difficult and challenging quickly becomes comfortable.
I remember my first property deal. Looking back at it now it was incredibly basic. Real beginner level stuff.
But at the time I was really on my edge. I was really challenged. I was really out of my comfort zone.
These days, I could do one of those deals without taking my slippers off.
And so if you want comfort – and we all do and it’s a beautiful thing – if you want comfort, don’t seek out comfort through contracting and retreating and doing as little as possible.
Push at your edges until the things that were once challenging become comfortable for you.
Forge and create your very own comfort zones.
And choose the being that you want to be.
JG.