It's Hard Helping People Overcome Laziness

I suppose I will, as is often the case, pretend you asked me what I have been up to lately; and proceed to tell you. Most recently I have been teaching grown people, aspiring to business success by getting an MBA degree; to think critically, to be good members or leaders of teams, and to be creative in their life. Before you try to flatter me by saying, that sounds exciting, or I am sure you are good at teaching those things or at least, I am sure you like teaching those things; let me say this; all three of the subjects boil down to this one bit of advice: stop being lazy. That’s it. That’s all I had to tell them in the end, although of course I made it sound like much more.

Lazy thinking leads to people making claims they cannot support with evidence or if they do have supporting evidence, the lazy thinker makes unwarranted inferences from the evidence. So, yes, stop doing that; I would say. Of course, it’s more complicated than just laziness. Most of us come to think that in certain circles we have graduated to a status giving us the right to make truth claims without making warranted inferences from valid evidence. Instead of approaching each truth claim as independent of the others, requiring us to meet high standards; we rest in the assurance those around us will not ask more of our thinking.

But lazy thinking does not stop there. It makes us too secure even in the face of evidence that we are biased and untrustworthy as thinkers. Most of us enjoy being right and believe we mostly are, so once we know the subject at hand; we recall our prejudice and begin to talk. We might, as William James said, spend a little time rearranging our prejudices and call it thinking.

Lazy thinking also gets us in trouble when we are working as a member of a team or trying to exert leadership over other people. Since we know what we believe and how much better everything would turn out if everyone on our team shared our belief, we seek to convince them and of course, they are doing the same to us. It’s hard work trying to convince others you are right when they are trying just as hard to convince you they are. It’s hard work, and let’s face it; annoying as hell; but it is not as hard as actually working on ourselves so that we are not always confronting others with no room for our own growth or compromise.

So, other people challenge us to either stop thinking lazily or to find a group of people that will not challenge us so much. Imagine living with constant refutation of your ideas or worse – your beliefs. Pretty soon you might stop fighting and let others be right or you might learn to pick your battles and only contest their beliefs or ideas when it is essential.

Any successful team represents ongoing compromise among its members, quite a sophisticated accomplishment and one that requires a lot of hard work. To become really good at being with others as a teammate or leader, we will need to not only be good at compromise episodically, we will need a strategy for being good across episodes.

Everyone needs to be nurtured, catalyzed or inspired, to feel they are progressing and to have confidence that they will be able to make it through future inevitable setbacks. I need these things, you need them and everyone on your team will too.

The successful team member or leader develops a way of being among people that nourishes them, inspires them, makes them feel they are progressing and confident and that they can withstand issues sure to come up in the future. Imagine being on a team full of people who understand this. Imagine being led by someone who gets this. A lazy person will never develop the capacity to be this sort of teammate or leader. It’s hard work, but gosh it feels good when you can look around and see evidence you are doing it! I have at times, although I am by no means a natural or advanced at it.

Ultimately, being this sort of teammate or leader requires creativity and let’s be honest; on some level, creativity is merely a diligent way of contemplating reality. The creative person does not give up on finding novel solutions and novel solutions are almost never the easy ones to see. These solutions require perseverance and good thought habits.

Just as the critical thinker had to overcome her tendency to try to get by with irrelevant evidence and unwarranted inferences from the evidence, and the successful teammate and leader had to overcome the tendency to fight or flee but not develop people strategies; the creative person must learn to move more quickly than others past cliché responses to life’s challenges into the realm of novel solutions.

Lots of evidence from science and just life, suggests that most of us would prefer to remain lazy, tend toward disorganization and basically seek to just get by as easily as possible in all we do. But the world demands more of anyone who will be successful. We will need to work hard at our thinking, at being with others and at coming up with novel solutions to problems.

The three are not separate issues. No doubt, a tough-mindedness with regard to our own thinking is prerequisite to developing a strategy for being a teammate or leader and fashioning a life of seeking and finding novel solutions to life’s problems.

It makes me tired just thinking of how hard it is to be successful, but when you break it down into these three challenge categories, it makes it at least seem like something we can all accomplish; if we start with solid thinking, figure out how to work well with others and to pursue the freshest approach to problem solutions.

It almost makes me want to stop just teaching students how to do these things and start doing them myself; but then, that sounds too much like work. Those who cannot do all this can surely teach others to do it, right? Although, I will say, it is not easy helping other people overcome their laziness.