The Lazy Winner: escaping the comfort zone

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 | By Peter Taylor

It is important to understand the balance of change if you want to change your ways to those of a ’lazy winner’ - building on the concept of ’productive laziness’, which encourages people to apply more thought before leaping into action and throwing effort at a problem or task.

Without reaching some sort of ’escape velocity’, as in space flight, you will never do anything different. Deciding to be different or to bring about some form of change is most often easier done when you have no choice in the matter, when outside forces give you no option other than to change. But we are talking here about reaching the point of conscious decision to make a personal change.

Look at it this way.

To move anyone towards change there is a balancing act that needs to be performed. There are a number of resistances that stop change taking place, or at least allow you to put up personal arguments against changing (these might be small voices in your head that you hear from time to time):

• Cost. Everything has a perceived cost whether this is actual money that would need to be invested or just your time and effort (and distraction from other matters).
• Risk. A concern over what such change would bring about should it in some way fail and require recovery, the work to be redone or loss of face. Concern about the risk of failure an what that would mean to you and others.
• Pain. Recognition that change usually means some form of pain that needs to be endured, the negative aspects of the process of change itself.
• Hidden. It is often possible to uncover the first three points but there will often remain ’hidden’ reasons that someone is resistant to such change. If this is yourself then it is a matter of being honest with yourself, if this is you looking to assess the desire for change in others then this is harder to understand.

This makes it hard to assess the ’balance’ of resistance since while it may be possible to quantify and address the ’cost’, ’risk’ and ’pain’ elements the ’hidden’ ones remain hidden and therefore unquantifiable.
On the other side of the balancing scales are the reasons for change:

• Needs. The definable drivers for adopting a process of change, the need of the person to make a change.
• Problems. What is it that is causing some issue or concern in the status quo that offers the desire to make some form of change?
• Benefits. What are the desirable benefits of such change, the expected beneficial outcomes of adopting something new?
• Implications. If no change is initiated then what will the impact be, what will the consequences be? The implication being that something must be encouraging the need for change in the first place.

Therefore, you need to make sure that the scales fall more heavily on the side of ’for change’ in order to stand a chance of making such change a reality.

Peter Taylor is the author of The lazy winner: how to do more with less effort and succeed in your work and personal life without rushing around like a headless chicken or putting in 100-hour weeks. Published by Infinite Ideas, www.infideas.com