How Lazy Makes Perfect

Published in

Broadsight Magazine

3 min readMar 24, 2015

By Wonji Kim

The deceptive saying “practice makes perfect” has reared its ugly head throughout the generations. Businesses obviously prefer to hire employees proficient in restlessly working over those who lounge about and save up strength. It is easy to label the first group as efficient and bash the latter. This is wrong. The stigma that comes with laziness should be eradicated and seen in a new light.

The truth about laziness shocks me in the university setting. I see two types of academically successful students who project antithetical auras — the advancers and the procrastinators. The advancers finish their studies quickly and relax during the exams. As a general rule, they rarely pull all-nighters by sacrificing the majority of their semester in the library. The procrastinators simply cram. Many of them are expert partiers when there are no exams, but when deadlines come crashing down, they live in the library and borrow notes from those prepared, including the advancers. This results in comparable grades but the procrastinators having used less net energy. Lazy wins.

A slightly different twist of this phenomenon is the movie The Social Network. The fictional adaptation portrays Mark Zuckerberg as a cheater and a manipulator. He uses a smart friend to create an algorithm that would later add to his idea of Facebook. This idea is arguably also obtained (stolen) partially from two other college peers. Zuckerberg, at least in the film, acquires a taste for taking other people’s exceptional ideas and capabilities and making them his own. Facebook is not an ingenious idea that only Zuckerberg pours his brains out on. He searches for lazy success and seizes it, even by sacrificing his Harvard degree. The hard workers are either grabbing for leftovers or becoming his employees. The intellectual property legally becomes his. Diligence loses.

A historical figure who influenced the perception of laziness was the former German general Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord. He divided his officers into four classes — clever, diligent, stupid and lazy.

He claimed that of these classes, each individual had two traits. Interestingly enough, he elevated his lazy and clever officers to higher positions instead of his industrious and clever ones. Albeit laziness shines more in intelligent people according to his theory, but even among the stupid ones, laziness is better, as the industrious and stupid people pose a threat rather than stay still.

It is naïve to believe that success comes with hard work. Did those who contributed to Facebook’s success fail to work hard? Only Zuckerberg’s name shines at the end of the day. Studiousness does not imply efficiency, and the words laziness and efficiency are not mutually exclusive.

As the late esteemed writer Robert A. Heinlein put it, “Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”

To achieve perfection, perhaps the first step to take is to reverse the mindset that actions achieve more than thoughts and instead, lazily ponder on, like me. ☺

Published on 24th March, 2015

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