Try Being Ambitiously Lazy
Ambitiously lazy is a way of going through the world. It is going where you want to go. It is focusing where you want to focus. Being ambitiously lazy lets you do the things you want to do.
Ambitiously lazy is a goal, but not a reality. It is a state of mind, but not an excuse for laziness. It is a way of thinking, but not a way of avoiding thought.
Have you heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder”? That basically sums up the concept of being ambitiously lazy, but we won’t stop there.
What does ambitiously lazy mean to me?
Freedom. It’s the ability to decide what to do and how long to do it. I enjoy my free time. I enjoy not having to stick with a task forever and ever. My goal is to automate tasks that have to happen over and over again. Eliminate tasks that have no business being tasks. Focus on tasks that are enjoyable and provide value. Give myself freedom to pick the things I want to do. Be around the people I want to be around. That’s what I think of when I think of being ambitiously lazy.
Steps to Being Ambitiously Lazy (Optimization)
- Identify recurring tasks
- Note which tasks are necessary
- Highlight the tasks that provide value
- Note which tasks are fun
- Eliminate the unnecessary tasks
- Do your best to automate the tasks that are necessary
- Save time for the tasks that provide value
- Maximize your ability to have fun
My Career Path (Shortened for Reading Purposes)
My whole life has been spent working on being as efficient as possible. As a young boy, I was much more apt to overdo it with effort. That worked, but there was quite a bit of waste built into that system. This waste was fine, but there was only so much effort that was required to be sufficient with respect to results. It pains me to say this, but it doesn’t take much to keep up with the pack. I am sure most of you find this to be true as well. So that is when I had to make a decision. Where did I want to stand out and where was good enough, well, good enough?
Studying for a career, and then my career itself, are what ultimately brought me to a place of applied ambition. I wanted to be someone who was a hard charger. My goal was to enter the workforce, learn what I needed to know, and then move on to starting and running my own company. That’s ultimately what I did (see Go Local Interactive). While in college (undergrad at KSU, MBA at WSU), I got a job most college students overlooked. I poured my time into books, the systems I was maintaining, and left K-State with some great experience.
After leaving K-State, I went to work for a large company called Koch Industries. I could have decided to hang with the crowd, but I was too ambitious. Thankfully, I worked with some other people who were in the same boat. They took the opportunity to leverage the ambitiously lazy concept and gave me the job of looking for efficiency and automation opportunities within the business. I was put to work as a Business Systems Analyst.
My Time as a B.S. Analyst (Not a typo)
The Business System Analyst role is a good one for someone like myself. I got to spread this concept of working smarter, not harder. It was my job to seek out opportunities. I looked for efficiency in everything we did. People and systems were brought together. Data was pulled and processes were automated. It was great and I was happy. The IT group I was fortunate to be a part of, did some good work and the business benefited as a result.
The Next Conquest
I left Koch Industries and went to work as a consultant. In the new role, I was responsible for adding value to many different companies and my job was to make each one of them better. Again, the focus was around information technology. We built websites, web applications, system interfaces, and anything else that was determined to make a difference. The scale was much larger and the benefits were more profound. Optimization was turning into a career.
Enter the Job with Optimization in the Title
Consulting was great, but there was more ground to cover. I was approached by an advertising agency based out of New York City to handle their SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This was a nice change of scenery. It was my first time applying the concept of “ambitiously lazy” (remember, we now call this optimization) to the marketing efforts of other companies. My day was spent optimizing their web presence to bring them qualified traffic. That traffic needed to be of good quality. It was also my job to generate as much traffic as possible. This intersection of technology and marketing provided the perfect place for applying the concepts I had been working so hard to develop.
It was glorious. Like I mentioned in the above checklist on optimization, it was my job to decide which tasks provided the best value for our clients. This, of course, was based on a clear understanding of the goals of each client. My focus was on completing the most valuable tasks first and then moving down the list. It was also important to put only the amount of effort that would move the needle the most. Anything more would be wasted. Remaining time was then applied to the next task that was deemed to be the next most valuable. It’s a simple system and one that has worked for years. I owe my exposure to the concept to my dear friends at Franklin Covey.
Fast Forward to Today
Now here I am with my own agency and we are essentially doing the same thing. We are optimizing websites. Our people are strategically determining which tasks are most valuable and then completing them first. We are having conversations with our clients to better understand their definition of success and then modifying our solutions to meet those needs. The campaigns are optimized to provide our clients with the highest value possible based on the information we have at hand. The cycle continues and we are all better for it.
So to Finish
I will agree that ambitiously lazy sounds a bit negative. It’s the inclusion of the term lazy that causes the problem. Here’s the deal though, being lazy isn’t all that bad if you have all of your bases covered. Doing things just to be busy is senseless. I know several people who build their whole worth around their “buzy quotient”. Don’t be one of those people. Do the things you need to do to have the biggest impact on your day, then move on to the things you enjoy (if they aren’t already the same).
Life is short, so be sure to live it. It’s time to be a little ambitiously lazy yourself.
