The Lazy Person

In over a thousand sessions, I've never met a lazy person.

I've met plenty who were certain they were one. A founder sits down — someone running a company, raising two children, teaching himself something new at midnight and tells me, with a straight face, that he's lazy.

Then we look at where the laziness actually lives. It's nowhere near his client work - he'll go until two in the morning on a deadline that isn't even his. It's not on the urgent, the technical, the asked-for. It shows up in exactly one place: his own project. The one with his name on it.

That's not how laziness works. A lazy person is lazy about everything. This avoids one thing, in one place and has done for years.

And the one place tells you everything. His own project is the only work where failing would be his alone, - no client to share it with, no brief to hide behind. Somewhere along the way, his mind learned that kind of exposure isn't safe. So it steers him away from it. Not from work - from that work.

Lazy is the label. Protection is what's actually there.

And the label isn't harmless. He's spent years attacking his own character — a character that was never the problem. That's what a wrong name costs: years of fighting something that isn't there.

A thousand sessions on, I still haven't met a lazy person. Protected ones - every week.