The Day I Stopped Being Lazy by W
When I was in third grade, my teacher got so frustrated with me that she wrote the word tamad (Filipino word for lazy) in big bold letters across a double page spread on my notebook. This teacher, like many others at my school at that time, would write voluminous notes on the chalkboard and expect her students to copy it word for word. I thought I could avoid this work by only copying content from the first board and then jumping straight to the last board. (Yes, there were multiple boards full of notes to copy.) I’m sure she won’t notice, I told myself. Clearly, I was wrong.
This reluctance to do work was my M.O. throughout my childhood. By the time I got to college, that had reversed completely. Laziness disappeared and in its place emerged a puritan work ethic so strong that I would feel anxious if I didn’t feel like I was delivering more than what was asked for and more than what anyone else was delivering in everything I did. The younger me was certainly more relaxed, but this older me got more sh*t done and was, in the eyes of many, more successful. What caused the transformation?
The Wakeup Call
It was eight o’clock in the morning early in my junior year in high school when my father gave me a call on the phone. He and my mother had been separated for many years. Outside of a few emails every year, we didn’t keep in close contact. This call was a surprise.
“W, I’m not going to be able to pay for your college,” he said after a brief and awkward introduction. I was the youngest of three brothers, both of whom were already in college at that time. In spite of his lack of consistent gainful employment, somehow my father was able to support my two older brothers’ college expenses. Looks like the well has run dry, and I’m getting cut off.
That phone call wasn’t enough to jolt me out of my lethargy, however. Not knowing my father well, I never really put my faith in him. And, while I had always assumed I would end up going to the same prestigious school my brothers went to, I didn’t know how much I cared about that anyway. It was an assumption, a given, and not a personal goal.
Second Chances
I applied for several colleges the year later and also applied for their scholarship programs. My older brothers did not receive scholarships entering college and their high school academic performance was significantly better than mine. So, while I applied, I wasn’t confident I’d be successful.
One school responded to me, requesting that I fly in for an interview. The school was De La Salle University, not the school my brothers attended but an equally prestigious one and one that both my parents had attended (and dropped out of) years earlier. It was an hour away by plane, and I could not afford the plane ticket. I wrote the school with my regrets and assumed that was the end of it.
A few months later, I received a letter from De La Salle letting me know that I had been awarded a full academic scholarship, renewable every year starting the following year. I was shocked. Clearly, someone somewhere had taken a flyer on me. I was woefully undeserving: good but not outstanding grades, no extracurriculars, and didn’t even make it to the interview. I couldn’t explain what had happened (there must have been a glitch in the matrix). I certainly was not going to let it go to waste.
That was the day I crossed the bridge from lethargy to uncompromising, relentless hard work. I burned the bridge behind me and never looked back.
Burning the Bridge
In 1949, Joseph Campbell, a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, published a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces where he describes the surprising similarities shared by the stories of heroes around the world. One of the things that most resonates with me in Campbell’s description of the hero’s journey is the hero’s initial refusal of the call to adventure. For example, Frodo resists Gandalf’s request to become the ringbearer in The Fellowship of the Ring, and Luke Skywalker refuses to act on Princess Leia’s call for help until his aunt and uncle are murdered in Star Wars: A New Hope. Doing great things is hard f*cking work, and becoming a leader is a chore. Why do people choose it? Well, perhaps they don’t. Perhaps they feel like they’ve been chosen, and there’s no way out.
Similarly, in 207 BC, Xiang Yu, a Chinese general led his troops in a decisive victory against the Qin in the Battle of Julu, beating all odds, by quietly burning down the bridge behind them after crossing the river into enemy territory. In 334 BC, Alexander the Great did something similar when he burned his ships upon arriving in Persia, facing an enemy with several thousand more troops than his. When asked how they intend to get home, he responded, “We’ll use their ships”. There’s nothing that inspires great action more than the lack of choice.
In 1979, Jon Elster, a Norwegian social and political theorist, published Ulysses and the Sirens where he talks about the use of pre-commitment devices to overcome weaknesses in human rationality and will power. The title of the book provides us with a poignant example of this: the great Greek hero Ulysses has himself tied to the mast of his ship to prevent him from taking action in response to the temptations of the sirens. His goal was not to avoid temptation; he knew that would be inevitable. Rather, his goal was to prevent foolish action as a result of the temptation. In this, he was successful.
So what does this mean for you?
I often reflect on what it takes to get started with something new. What can I do to inspire myself to get through the painful climb of the first part of that learning curve? What can I do to inspire myself to push forward in spite of the uncertainty of results and its accompanying rewards? Reflecting on my own life to date, I’ve relied less on sheer power of will but on external pressures that make achieving that goal, learning that new skill, working those long hours inevitable.
What can you do to burn down the bridges behind you? These are perhaps extreme examples, but I’ll share them nonetheless. If you want to become an entrepreneur, should you quit your day job rather than trying to bootstrap your new business on the side? If you want to become financially independent more quickly, should you sell your 2,000+ sqft house and move into a 500 sqft tiny home? If you want to transform your health and fitness, should you prepay your gym membership for a year or sign a contract with an accountability partner, pledging you’ll pay him/her $1,000 every week you fail to meet your pre-committed gym-going goals? None of these actions are things you can’t undo once done. But doing so would be hard (or expensive) enough to make it unlikely.
So what goals do you want to accomplish? Ready to burn down some bridges?
