The one phrase my kids learned never to use around me was “I can’t be bothered”.
So, to my question “Why are you watching the telly indoors, why don’t you go outside and play in the sun?”
The correct answer wasn’t “I can’t be bothered.”
If they wanted to do that, the correct answer was “I’m having a really, really great time relaxing on the sofa right now and watching this amazing programme.”
That’s the correct answer because it’s a choice.
It’s not just lazy.
It doesn’t matter what you do.
Watch telly, smoke dope, go to the gym, get drunk, read, sleep, work. Either way your life is ticking by.
So what matters is that you actively choose to do whatever you do.
So you put energy into whatever you’re doing.
That’s the sort of people I want to be around.
People who are buzzing, interested, engaged with being alive.
I don’t want to be around lazy people in case I get infected by it.
It’s like being in an old folk’s home, whatever age they are.
I have the same response to students.
Most of them are lazy.
Waiting for someone else: the teachers, the college, the advertising industry, to give them a brief, put their book together, find them a job.
So when a student asks me to lecture at their college my response is usually the same: what’s in it for me?
You’re about to go into advertising, what we do is persuade people into doing what we want.
You want me to come and lecture, so do something to persuade me.
But most of them don’t.
Because they can’t be bothered.
It’s too much like hard work because it involves thinking.
The level of response I’ve got so far is as follows.
One lecturer said his students would buy my book.
One student offered me a free coffee.
One student offered me a free beer.
Another student sent me a £20 note.
That’s the level of effort they put into investigating what might persuade me, that’s their level of creativity.
Give him something free.
The first thought.
The first cab off the rank.
And when that doesn’t work they give up, because they can’t be bothered to think any further.
And they expect to be successful in advertising with ‘we can’t be bothered’ level thinking.
That’s why I don’t lecture to students much anymore.
They can’t be bothered, I can’t be bothered.
But there was one ex-student who joined the debate.
He wrote to me on Twitter and quoted me back to myself.
“When you teach others you teach yourself” – Dave Trott.
If he had still been a student you bet I would have gone along to lecture at his college.
Because he demonstrated he cared enough to research his subject.
He persuaded me I could make a difference, to him at least, by showing he was listening to what I was saying.
He was paying attention, showing me I wasn’t wasting my time.
If he’d still been a student that would have persuaded me to go along to his college and lecture.
But he wasn’t a student anymore, because he had a good job at a good agency.
See, unlike most students, he had a job because he was the sort of person who could be bothered.
I am reminded of the time I told my dad to go out in the sun himself if it was so good. Not too disimilar an ending to this anecdote http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfq8stg-BdA
Thanks for a valuable post on professional attitude for students/graduates overall, but also for four particularly incisive lines on the broader issue of simply being happy, I think.
“So what matters is that you actively choose to do whatever you do.
So you put energy into whatever you’re doing.
That’s the sort of people I want to be around.
People who are buzzing, interested, engaged with being alive.”
Wise words.
One further thought, if I may…
Everybody has felt *not bothered* at times, of course, and everybody has been lazy too. I would add another explanation for lack of motivation though, an alternative to laziness.
There are lots of things I often want to do but don’t, or at least haven’t yet done. This isn’t always laziness, this is sometimes through some kind of caution. I’m cautious about doing certain things in case they don’t go as planned; in case I’m somehow worse off than before; but probably most often, simply in case I’ll feel I’ve wasted the effort.
Certain activities, like going out and playing in the sun, require gambling a certain amount of effort on a yield which isn’t guaranteed or immediately apparent. If I’m watching telly indoors right now instead, however, well then I know how much effort that is taking and how much pleasure it provides me in return. Perhaps I’ll play it safe, I might think.
“I can’t be bothered” can sometimes be substituted for “I’m not sure it will be worth the effort”. The latter is no less of a meager excuse for life, but it is still different. Convincing someone that things are worth the effort then requires an alternative course of rhetoric.
Hi Dom,
“I can’t be bothered” can sometimes be substituted for “I’m not sure it will be worth the effort”.
This is effectively the same for me.
Either way I don’t go to the their college to lecture.
Either way they’re not going to have much of a career in advertising.
Because, either way, the effect on the consumer is the same.
A definite choice not to do it is more useful to everyone than not making a choice at all IMHO.
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
– Bill Gates, billionaire
Paul,
I think Bill Gates and I have a different definition of lazy.
The people I’m talking about he wouldn’t even employ.
The people he’s talking about I’d call smart.
As in “Don’t work hard, work smart”
Hear, hear, Dave. In fact ‘not being bothered’ is so prevelent that I notice a company called ‘Simply Health’ have made their endline ‘We can be bothered.’ ( I believe the ‘can’ is underlined for handy emphasis.) As an example of an endline someone couldn’t be bothered about, that really bothers me.
They need to be terrorised Dave.
Recently I found a few sheets of paper drifting around an office
with some important information staff need to see.
because they -“The Mysterons” couldn’t be bothered to place
the information into the Communications Book.
Everyone knows their hand writing
but they couldn’t even be bothered to sign their comments.
So I deliberately embarrass them into action.
I place their scrappy notes into the book and add my own audacious note.
“Attached to communication book by means of staples”.
“Attached to communication book by means of the invention of sellotape”.
It really pisses them off-and guess what…
they start entering information the way they should.
There is no accountability for laziness.