Here is the complete transcript of the podcast
This podcast episode is something that I have an absolute mastery in, absolute mastery. Nobody pays me for this but I’m very good at this. Something that I’ve gone through myself something that I take pride in talking about. Interestingly, I haven’t spoken about this as much on this podcast, ever since we started this podcast, the daily podcast, I don’t think I ever talked about this. And this is about laziness. I have a Ph.D. in this or at least that’s what my mom told me. Growing up, I was a lazy kid.
How to use laziness to your advantage is the topic of today’s podcast. I have gotten this question numerous times before, not that anybody asked me recently. But I’ve seen some people talk about this because I subscribed to a lot of RSS feeds. I read a lot of blogs, and somebody was talking about it. I thought I should make a podcast on this because I have my personal experience with this growing up. Growing up, I was a lazy kid and my mother used to struggle with this. My mother was a very active lady in the house. My father was relatively lazier than my mom, but my mother was very active in the house. Hardly would wake up early morning at 4:30 and would not sleep till about 12:30 at the night. And she did that relentlessly for years and years and years. In fact, I had my mother on my radio show in 2014, right after she was diagnosed with cancer. And that she said, I used to work all day, throughout the day, there were 18 members in the family, extended families to cook for them and clean the house. And all that was difficult back in the 1950s.
Back in India, it’s hard for her. So she brings that part of her agenda, and I’m born. And I’m growing up like, why are you Lazy, Lazy, Lazy. That impression she carried for a very long amount of time, I was not lazy. But the programming that I was lazy, is still there in my mind. So every time I’m not able to do something, or I’m not able to do something to a level of perfection, then I question myself, you know, “am I lazy?” Did laziness come in again? All that. So these days, every time I see somebody who is extremely successful, or they’re doing something that is incredible, amazing. I asked myself, am I lazy? Why am I not doing that? Maybe I am. And when I do that, my mind shifts from being a lazy fellow to a motivated individual. So the question is, Am I lazy? Every time I see anybody who’s successful, or anytime I see something that is big, something incredible that is happening, maybe with people maybe outside? And then I asked that question to myself. If they are doing this, they’re successful, then am I lazy? Because I also have the same access to the same stuff, I have access to the same knowledge, same information, and same insights as to why should I not be there where they are not in any negative way. I’m saying that in a positive way, I tell myself in a positive manner. So I asked the question, Am I lazy? Because that’s the programming from my childhood, right? Am I lazy? And I say, No, I’m not. So I need to do what they did. So I go back, I get that motivation, I go back into action. Hopefully, this is helpful, then I have a routine that I work with. And I talked about routines a lot on this podcast, I have a morning routine, I have an afternoon routine, and I don’t keep those routines as tight as possible. I should be, but I don’t. And I keep on losing my cadence. But then I try it as much as I can. When I give my best effort, one of the elements of having a tight routine is a to-do list. And I talked about to-do lists here also. The problem with to-do lists is sometimes you wake up in the morning and you don’t have energy, you know, things don’t fall in place. You’re not mechanical, it’s hard to go through the to-do list and get things done.
Well, when that happens, it happens a lot. I go do the opposite. And I suggested you do the opposite, too. So every time you have something planned, and you some hot feeling, not motivated enough, maybe you’re bordering laziness, procrastination, something like that. Go to the opposite. The opposite for me is cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the garage, shredding papers, all that that’s the opposite. And those things are not there on the to-do list. So my to-do list is usually something where I’m creating something. So this podcast He’s on the to-do list. Going to the gym this morning later is on the to-do list. But what is not on the to-do list is cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the garage, and I wake up in the morning and I don’t want to deal with my gym or the podcast or lazy. And I somehow go do the opposite. And what I’ve done is I’ve gone from a creation mode to a simplification mode. So simplification being, I need to start the papers, I need to clean the garage, I need to clean the kitchen that has to happen. And even though they directly do not have any significant impact on my monetary life or on my other aspects of life, they do contribute towards simplification. So I go from creation to simplification, if I feel lazy, whenever I’m feeling lazy. The next one is I read this somewhere, and I’m not sure where somebody made a point, I think this is on economy.com I believe or maybe entrepreneur.com not sure somebody said that “laziness is a way of structuring life.” And, and I was like, wow, makes sense.
Some people do structure laziness. In fact, all of us do. And I’ll tell you something interesting. And I was thinking about this, and you let me know what you think about this, if my thinking is right or wrong, or correct me on this, which is we do structure laziness, we go once a year on vacation, that is structured laziness. So you say I’m going to go for a week or two weeks on vacation, and I will take my laptop, I’m not going to do anything, I’ll start everything down. That’s structured laziness. Structured laziness is proven to create amazing results, people come back charged, people come back aligned, and people come back with energy as a result of structural laziness. So whether you call it recharging yourself, or recouping yourself, whatever the word that you want to use, the activity is nothing but not doing anything, and you’re not doing anything, to come back to do something. And usually, you do things much more bigger. As a result of that a lot of the time and my mother did this to us from growing up in India, I’ve seen this to where people have used laziness as a synonym for not being productive. So that part is not true anymore. So you could be productive, and still, be lazy. That’s the point. So it’s okay for you to daydream. Do nothing, plan something big, and work on it? When you feel like working on it, I’ve done that. And there are incredible results that have come out of that kind of an approach. So it’s okay to be lazy. That’s the case in point here on today’s podcast, but as long as you are structuring your laziness, as long as you are not being unproductive, as a result of being lazy, laziness is okay. But laziness as a trait is not good. That has to be dealt with.
I was on a call recently, with an individual who said, you know, all my life I wanted somebody to push me to do something. You don’t want to be there. You don’t want anybody to push you. If you are you have to graduate. If not, then you don’t know invisible you’ll fall into some form of laziness, which is hard to get rid of from the system even today. See, back in the day. This is because some elders around me said that I’m lazy. It still continues to be there. Even though even though tonight. I can’t prove it to my mom, because she’s gone. You know, Mom, look, I went all the way to the lazy like, I can’t prove it to her. I can’t but she knew, as years went by days went by I started growing up, I started, I came to America. I started doing businesses, I did whatever I did. The progression she has seen she saw before she passed away. And she did tell me that you are not lazy anymore.
Okay. That’s all for now. Hopefully, today’s podcast episode inspires you and motivates you? Hopefully, it does. And tomorrow, I’ll come back. I have a question. In fact, that just came in today, but I couldn’t get it into the podcast today. But we’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll talk about a question which is very interesting. We’ll talk about that tomorrow. Okay, so that’s all for now. Wherever you are, be safe, and I’ll talk to you. Bye now.