In a world where people are usually classified by their intelligence and how much they can work, we have ended up with basically 4 stereotypes.
The stupid and lazy, the stupid and hardworking, the intelligent and hardworking, the intelligent and lazy.
Our concern right now is with the Intelligent but lazy people. How do they get jobs and why would anybody want to employ them? The general assumption is that an intelligent person will automatically be hardworking and industrious but this is does not apply in most cases. A lot of intelligent people don’t actually like to work 24/7, yet, they are very unique in their own way? Why?
An under-appreciated aspect of today’s workforce that the German commanders of world war 2 saw fit to lead are the intelligent and lazy. Because they possess the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. These people can be challenging to work with. They delegate and trust people to do their jobs. They don’t micromanage, they question. They avoid unproductive things (think meetings, paper shuffling, busy work). They don’t seek consensus because that often means more work, not less. They focus on a few key priorities. They don’t run around with solutions looking for problems. Often, they have no desire to ‘move up’ in an organization. This gives them the freedom to be different.
Smart and lazy employees or managers tend to apply their intelligence to finding easier and more efficient ways to get the same work done. However, you will actually have to do more to prove yourself at the onset that you can get superior solutions to problems.
In a world where work related stress has rocketed, could the most intelligent option be simply to find the least-taxing, most lucrative job on offer? Could the smartest choice for a future career be the path that requires the least amount of effort? And what’s so wrong with applying yourself to seeking out a low stress option anyway? Some professionals actually gave their own suggestions as to jobs that demand intelligence but support laziness. I will highlight just three.
English: Teaching English especially at the senior secondary level and post-secondary level tutorials could actually be not so exhilarating because of the flexible work hours. This applies more in non-English speaking countries where the only requirement to being a English teacher is to have lived in an English-Speaking country and have good command of the language. You end up making more or less as much as those who slave it out 50 hours a week in offices.
Also, if you are disinclined to venture far from your home office, some will suggest a job as a computer programmer. It is a continuous learning process and you really don’t have to work that hard and gradually you learn that many of the challenges are repetitive. Even the nature of the job itself lends itself to doing less. Good programmers write as few lines of code as possible, an d it is one of those professions which pays well, whole at the same time encouraging laziness. At the same time , you get to work with other reasonably intelligent, technical people, while the investors throw money at you for their next great idea. But take note, all of these apply if and only if you are really intelligent.
My own personal opinion is that the best possible job for someone who is intelligent but lazy would be to be a professional ‘expert’ at something. To get paid to just share your thoughts and opinions about things with people who will do the heavy lifting. That way , you can set yourself up as a consultant and once people see you can deliver stunning results, they will keep coming.
The best advice for the idle is to identify the activities you don’t consider work and find a career that will pay you for those. Chances are, the things you consider fun and easy are things someone else finds so hard that they are willing to pay you to do them. nAside from that, you could always work at Microsoft. Surprised? As It happens, taking laid back approach to tackling projects might not be so bad after all according to Microsoft founder Bill gates “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an easy way to do it.”
In conclusion, finding a good job can certainly be difficult for anyone who would rather not be working in the first place. However, since everyone has to make a living somehow, it makes sense to figure out why you don’t like to work. If it’s not simple laziness, you might just need to find a better career. If you want to work as little as possible no matter what the job, you can work smarter or live simpler. So, if you actually want to do as little work as possible and have as much free time as possible, the only way to achieve this goal is to live simply and with few expenses.
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