Exactly how can laziness help innovation?
Well I plan to prove with this post how laziness can be in fact, one of the biggest propeller of humanity’s innovation.
The trick here is to understand who’s just passive or conformist or vague in their lives. Notice I don’t mean laziness in the sense of not working and not being productive, I just mean people that want things in the easiest way possible.
To understand where I am going with this, let’s look at our shopping malls.
What are their greatest attraction? Well, the more obvious one is that we can find every product we need in just one place. But the curious thing is this: generally you can find those same products with cheaper prices in stores outside of a shopping mall, but that doesn’t stop us from going to the shopping mall and buy in its stores. Why? Because it’s more convenient, because of laziness.
People simply prefer to go to just one place and buy everything in there than going around the city looking for the best deal, even if this ends up costing more money (which ironically, for some people this could mean even more work in the future, but the world is moved through perceptions, not realities).
But what is the innovation here?
Well the concept of a shopping mall itself! Someone at some moment realized the innate laziness of the human being, and from that realization an innovation took place. The concept of a “shopping mall”.
It’s precisely because of this laziness, leading companies look for ways to perpetuate it with new innovative products. Amazon is an excellent example, and a natural evolution of the shopping mall, and of today, it’s founder Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world while Amazon is one of the most innovative companies.
Another common example are operative systems like MacOS or Windows and their graphic interface, they were a way to save time to people because before, the only way of interacting with a computer was writing weird command lines. Developing graphic interfaces was a way of satisfying our wish of doing the less work possible and achieved the highest productivity.
In other words, increasing the efficiency of something is the same as doing something with the less effort involved while having the best results. This is why laziness rules our lives!
And this is also related to a psychological factor with certain philosophical roots, in which the majority of the people tend to “go with the flow” and not against it, because this way is easier, more comfortable, and requires less work. I mean, people generally play along out of laziness, because not doing so implies more work, effort and dedication.
This is also a reason that explains why there are so few leaders and so many followers. Leaders are people with a lot of initiative, and aren’t afraid of not going with the flow and thinking differently which allows them to resolve problems in an unique way.
We can see this interaction as some sort of symbiosis, in which followers impose tendencies because of their laziness, and leaders have the challenge to keep innovating new ways of making life even more sendentary than it already is.
Look around you and you will see the best products and services are those that can increase our laziness without us realizing it.
What do you think? Are we just lazy or perhaps smart and practical?
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