Ouch. How does that feel? Am I talking about you? Or did you say to yourself ‘not me!!’?

I was struck by this comment last night after having dinner at home with a friend of mine and his family. My friend is a general practitioner, well educated, an excellent friend, and cares deeply about his friends, family, and the community. And yet there’s a small idea that has been planted in his head, a small idea that is repeated all too often in the world of science, academia, politics, and business: people are lazy by nature. Unless you force someone to work, they will always take the easy way out and do as little work as possible.
It’s a fascinating idea that runs deep in western culture, and it is based on a few very simple and catchy ideas:

• All creatures use as little energy as possible to gain as much as possible. This simple equation is the foundation of modern physics, and has bubbled up via Darwinian evolutionary theory and the rest of the scientific world to apply not only to particles and atoms, but to people as well.
• Easy is wrong. This isn’t a modern scientific principle, but rather an old religious idea that life is about hard work, suffering, and doing absolutely only what is necessary to get by and gain God’s (or your employer’s) approval. It’s an idea that, in Calvinistic Holland where I live, is deeply rooted, subconscious, and ever present in all aspects of public and private life.

Regardless of what you believe in terms of the science and moral aspects of these arguments, I think it’s good to stop and think sometimes about what we are telling ourselves and others with our thoughts, our feelings, and our subconscious: you’re lazy, and unless I force you, you’re not going to get off your lazy ass unless your life is in imminent danger.

This internal line of reasoning raises a few very important questions:

• For the person who believes they need to force someone else to do something: why is your reason to ‘do something’ more important than the other person’s reason for ‘not doing something’?
• Why are you wasting your evolutionary energy trying to force someone who doesn’t want to, to do what you want?

For the business owner or manager, the answer is usually money and the desire to make their business run exactly the way they want it to. The common attitude towards employees that ‘don’t do as they are told’, or complain that they ‘don’t like the way the business is run’ is: “if you don’t like it, go get another job. You’re responsible for your own life and happiness!” Again, simple and catchy logic if it weren’t for the bigger picture within which we all live: In our modern world we are reliant on money for survival. Not water, food, and shelter – but money.
I can’t just go out and find an empty patch of land, plant some food, dig a well, and put up a nice shack to live in. Land has been grabbed and is no longer free to be used. It is owned, traded, and exploited. From the ground up our economy, and the people in it are in the same situation: we are owned, traded, and exploited. In the absence of an ideal world where we live in communities that share land, resources, food, water, warmth, and love, we need to stop and realize that there is far more at stake in the employer / employee relationship than simply profit, success, and employment.

If you are a business owner or employer reading this article, ask yourself if you feel that you are truly lazy by nature. Who’s forcing you? No one. Hopefully you’re doing what you do every day because you love it, because that’s what I believe is the true motivation of our species. It’s not about living out our lives towards entropic bliss and energetic equilibrium, it’s not about maximizing profits and efficiency, and it’s definitely not about finding the ultimate balance between supply and demand. It’s about experience, joy, growth, happiness, and sharing that with others. Sharing – the ultimate multiplier in the realm of success.

And so it takes us back to the seemingly simple idea that people are lazy and need to be forced to work. This is an idea propagated by civil servants, government ministers, business owners, and those that control the resources in our world. They demand that we do as we’re told so that their idea of what is ‘right’ works for them. And yet it is a grand illusion that we pull over our days, nights, and years. Why is it that so many people don’t want to ‘work’? It’s because we’ve corrupted ‘work’. Because of the societies that we’ve created we are forced to ‘work’ to survive. We are alone, disconnected, and played as chess pieces in a grand economic zero-sum game. Without the fear of imminent starvation, freezing to death, and even worse: being alone in our big big world, there is no one that wouldn’t want to ‘work’. Work in its most basic form is simply using energy. It is being. It is experience. Anything else that we project on to it is our choice on how we want to create our world.

And so we are left with an important choice. I leave this as a challenge to all business owners and employers: What kind of world do you want to create? Do you want to create a world where it is everyone for themselves? Survival of the fittest? Let the rest die if there isn’t enough? Or do you want to create a world based on sharing? Not just a sharing of resources, but a sharing of opportunity. Where we all have the opportunity to create the ideal world for ourselves. Not a world that we project on to others, but our own personal world that involves our work, our friends, our community, and our family.

If you want to build a business that goes beyond yourself, be honest with yourself and others. If you believe that people are lazy by nature and need to be forced to work, make sure you say it in the first job interview. If you believe you are smarter than the person you are hiring, say it in the first interview. If you believe that you can do it all yourself, and the only reason you are hiring the person is because you don’t have 48 hours in your day, say it in the first interview. If you don’t, all you’re doing is hiding the most important choices you make every day and the result will be nothing but a bewildering stream of resistance, business challenges, money issues, and strained employee relations that will leave you feeling more alone than when you started your business as employee number one.

Are you still feeling lazy?