You Aren’t Lazy, You’re Disinterested

The self-help gurus in white with their angel wings don’t tell you what I’m going to explain.

Photo by Evan Link on Unsplash

I’m a polar bear when it comes to doing laundry.

I’ll lounge around for hours and not do it, while wrapped in a furry white blanket of comfort that lives on my couch by the tv remote with the taboo word “Netflix” on it. I don’t have Netflix, though. My remote control still has the word printed on it in the hope I’ll cave and take up couch life. But I have better things to do. Unavoidable things that suck me into their vortex.

My partner thinks my disgust for laundry makes me lazy at times. On the surface, I believed this to be true. The other day I was scrolling through LinkedIn, and a Gary-Freaking-Vee quote of all things left me speechless.

You aren’t lazy, you’re disinterested.
You’re not lazy, you just don’t love what you do.

These words exploded in my brain. I feel like this advice from Gary explains laziness perfectly.

It’s incredibly hard to do something you hate.

Laziness is the perfect distraction. It’s easier to sit on your butt and do nothing than it is to go and do something you’re disinterested in.

Do you know the biggest source of disinterest? Everyday jobs.

There are so many people who freaking hate their job. Sometimes you wonder whether a person would rather be dead than continue doing their job. They have a pulse, but their job sucked the life out of them years ago. Now they resort to sending emails to create change, and even that burns them out.

They struggle with Monday Motivation because they’re disinterested in their job. That’s no way to live. Doing work you literally hate is a pain in the backside. And guess what? This is a message to myself just as much as it is a message for you. I don’t pretend to be some mythical productivity guru.

What I’ve accidentally been doing without realizing it, is tipping the scales towards interest, and away from disinterest.

Let me give you a practical example. This week a man messaged me. He’s based in Afghanistan. He started telling me his…