Laziness is the key to success

Some of the world's most successful people were lazy. Ronald Regan was successful in only focusing on a few objectives, while the president before him, Jimmy Carter had many objectives, but was not viewed as being nearly as successful. Christopher Columbus was successful on accident, buy yet he was focused on one objective. Winston Churchill, a popular British leader and inspirational speaker for the people also had few objectives. The issue is that if you want to be successful you must focus your energy on those things that you love and enjoy.

The laziness that leads to success is not the laziness you typically encounter from the average person laying on the couch watching Maury in the middle of the day. The laziness that I am referring to here is to be honest to yourself and focus on your interests. It is often difficult to be honest with ourselves. We are told from a young age that to succeed in life, we must sacrifice and do those things that are not enjoyable to us. It is impossible to succeed in doing what we don't enjoy doing, or else our success would be directly correlated to the amount of effort we put into each of our activities. The old adage is that is one thing to work hard, but it is another to work smart. We've all heard of working smart to achieve results faster, but do we really know what it means?

The concept is very simple. To work smart, we have to find what interests us. For some it may be literature, some music, some science and others, sport. The next step is to find what attributes are the strongest in your personality type. Some have are more teamwork oriented, some have a sense for creativity, and there other that have a concern for community. These attributes and interests can be used to focus your efforts on your future objectives.

Once you find those few objectives you can focus you energy on these things that make you happy. The key is then to act on these objectives. If you focus your energy to your immediate surroundings, you can affect them and eventually find that those surroundings will help you to create more of what it is that makes you happy. Laziness is a stigma that we place on those that do not do the activities that make them unhappy. It should be that we see laziness as a sign of a true leader who does not focus on those things that are outside of his realm of control or expertise.

Put a price on your life

Money isn't everything. Many of us, including myself have a tendency to chase the sparkly, shiny things. This has proven time and time again to deter us from what is really important. Why do we chase these things? What's in it for us? The answer is very simple and two-fold. We chase these things because we are Americans and Americans are a country founded upon the very belief that we should all have the best and should accept nothing less. What's in it for us is the thumb to the nose we get in saying that we have the shiny sparkly thing that no one if not few have (don't forget to stick out your tongue).

I come from meager backgrounds. My mother divorced when I was young and for awhile, we were all we had. She worked her butt off, sometimes with 2-3 jobs just to make sure we had new clothes every school year. She was a tough woman and I have no doubt she learned that from her migrant worker mother who saved all her money to send her to America on her own to live a better life than in Jamaica. We never had much, but we didn't need much because we loved each other and did not really know any better.
Flash forward through college and into my first real job. I was a behavioral counselor in a middle school located in an urban area of Philly where the population was 80% Spanish and 19% black. I helped to run a successful pilot program that targeted at risk students and helped them by providing personal on site therapists. Because of the relationships I built with the families in starting the program, I was given the opportunity to help them using my own personal perspective from my past while I managed the daily task of keeping the program in step with the standards and regulations set forth by the Department of Health Services. I learned a lot from these kids, but mostly that they were almost frighteningly similar to me. They loved their family, they didn't have much and all they wanted was a comfortable life where they could succeed without having to look over their shoulder every day that they did succeed.
As the program grew and became more successful, I decided to go my own separate way and looked to take on what I thought would be a completely different set of challenges. Sitting in an office and visiting with families was not what I envisioned myself doing for an extended period of time. Although, life changing, this experience was not doing wonders for my physique and I found it harder and harder to fit into the clothes that I had purchased the previous year. I had to find something that required more activity fast. So I decided to become a personal trainer in 2005.
As a personal trainer I found what I had originally loved about being a counselor. I got a chance to help people, but I was even more hands on because my clients worked directly with me. I found it very easy to get close to these families and found that these families had many of the same aspirations and issues that every other family had in my previous job. My clients told me about problems in their lives and told me of the hopes they had for themselves and their families. I even had the chance to help some of their children in making their respective teams and some even got scholarships.
What I learned was that even though these families had more money and therefore more opportunities than the previous ones, they still wanted the same thing for themselves and others. They all wanted something that money cannot buy. You can try, but you cannot buy a healthy lifestyle or healthy life choices for that matter. All of these families have taught me that the basic element of happiness is not money or even the awesome stuff you can buy with it, but the feeling that comes with knowing that you do not need these things because you are living a happy, healthy lifestyle.