How to Be Successful If You're Lazy
Adebayo Adebisi9 July 202616 min readI made being lazy harder than doing the work.
Everyone who works with me thinks I am one of the hardest working people they have ever met. The truth is I am one of the laziest people I know. I do not get more done because I have more discipline than anyone. I get more done because I have made being lazy harder than doing the work.
Before I show you how, let me introduce you to the person all my systems exist to manage. Me, with everything stripped away.
If you took my systems away tomorrow, every one of them, here is what would actually happen. I would wake up whenever my body felt like it. I would reach for my phone before I was properly awake and lose the first two hours of the day to other people's messages or to doom scrolling, telling myself I was just being a good friend and a good family member, or just trying to decompress. I would answer everyone and jump on every call, and feel busy from morning to night without moving my own business forward an inch. I would eat whatever was quickest and skip the gym, so by the afternoon I would be too tired to think straight. I would work hard the week money got tight, then coast the moment it came back in. My income would be inconsistent, swinging up one month and dropping the next.
That is the real me. Left alone, that is exactly who I am. Everything you might call my work ethic or my discipline is really just a set of systems I built to keep that person away from my business. I choose to live my life actively, not passively.
Lazy by nature, productive by design
That gap, between the lazy person I just described and the hardworking one people think they see, is the whole point. I am lazy by nature and productive by design. Both are true at once, and the productive side of me only exists because I stopped fighting my default state of laziness.
For years I thought the solution was to become more disciplined. Wake up earlier by sheer force of will, and guilt myself into wanting to do the work I did not want to do. It was never sustainable, simply because you cannot out-discipline who you actually are forever. So I gave up trying to change myself and changed the setup around me instead. I took it as a given that if I am left to my own choices I will always reach for the easy option, and then I went and found a way to make the right option the easy one instead.
So when someone calls me hardworking now, they are looking at the output. They see the deep work that gets done before most people are awake, and the content and the follow-ups that go out whether I feel like doing them or not. What they cannot see is that none of it depends on willpower. It runs on systems I built, on purpose, so the lazy version of me never gets what it wants. The work ethic people credit me with belongs to those systems.
You are lazy because your brain is built that way
So why are you lazy? Why am I lazy? It is simple. Your brain is built to save effort, not to spend it. Given two ways to reach the same result, it will steer you toward the one that costs less energy. This is the standard setting in every human brain, and it is old. It kept our ancestors alive back when burning energy for no reason could get you killed. So when you call yourself lazy, most of the time you are just describing a brain that evolved to protect your energy.
The trouble is that same wiring now runs your business. The task that would really move your business forward is usually the hard one, and the one with no obvious place to start. So when you sit down to face it, your brain feels the discomfort and points you toward something easier. For example, you may answer a few emails and tidy up the CRM instead. It feels like work, and it is work, but it is the easy work you are using to get away from the hard thing.
The research on procrastination keeps landing on the same finding: it is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management one. You are not avoiding the task because you cannot fit it into the day. You are avoiding it because it makes you feel something uncomfortable, and putting it off makes that feeling go away for a while. Sending a cold email often feels fine, because it is easy to do. Making a cold call, where someone can reject you on the spot, is the part your brain fights hardest to avoid.
One more thing worth understanding. The motivation you keep waiting for before you start any hard thing in your business is mostly down to dopamine. It pulls you toward whatever is quick and easy to do, like doom scrolling on your phone and calling it research, or buying another book you do not need because you have told yourself it will help the business. The slower, uncomfortable work that actually pays does not give you that same hit, because the reward is not instant. So if you sit around waiting to feel ready to do the important things, you will be waiting a really long time.
Why discipline will not save you
So if your brain is wired to dodge the hard work, the obvious answer is to use willpower. You can grit your teeth and push through. We are often told to become the kind of person who does the hard thing whether they feel like it or not. I tried that for years, and it does not work. Now we actually know why.
For a long time the science said willpower was like a muscle that gets tired when you use it all day, so by the evening you have less of it left. This was used to explain why it is easier to order takeaway and skip the gym at night. The hypothesis made sense and appeared to be true. Then researchers went back and tried to reproduce the original studies at a much bigger scale, and the effect basically vanished. The idea that willpower is a tank that drains through the day does not hold up the way we were told.
So the real problem was never that you lack discipline, or that your discipline runs out. Discipline just is not something you can count on in the first place. Some mornings you wake up ready to run through walls, and other mornings you do not, and you cannot predict which one you are going to get, whatever your bedtime routine looks like. Building a business that leans only on discipline is like building a house on a shaky foundation. It is only a matter of time before it collapses.
So instead of trying to win that fight every morning, you take the fight away. If the important work only happens on the days you feel disciplined, your business only grows on those days too. What you want is a setup where the work gets done to a high standard on your worst days as well as your best, even when you are tired and completely uninspired, without you having to summon willpower or anything else.
Make the lazy path the hard one
So how do you get the work done without willpower, without motivation, or discipline? You use the one thing that is actually running the show. Laziness always takes the path of least resistance. It finds the easiest option, the one that makes you feel good, and chooses it every single time. It is easy to treat laziness as the enemy, because we blame it for our lack of results. But notice the pattern even there: blaming laziness is itself the easy option, because it is easier than facing the truth. I treat my laziness as an instruction instead, because I have accepted it as my default state. If I am always going to take the easy path, then my job is to make the easy path the right one, and to make the lazy option the hard one. I do not fight the pull. I simply point it where I want it to go.
The phone sits on the desk. The work needs setting up. The easy path runs straight through the distractions.
least resistance leads away from the work
The phone sits in another room. The work was laid out the night before. The easiest thing within reach is the work itself.
least resistance leads into the work
There is a well known example of how powerful the default is, and it has nothing to do with business. When a country wants more people to become organ donors, the single biggest thing that moves the numbers is not a campaign or a clever emotional advert. It is which option is already the default. When people are signed up by default and have to opt out, well over 90 percent stay donors. When people have to actively opt in and tick the box themselves, often under 25 percent become donors. Same kind of people, same good intentions. The only thing that changed was which option was the easy one.
So here is how I put that to work in my own life, starting with the most important thing of all: when I actually do the work.
Do the work before the world wakes up. My biggest weakness is other people needing help. Left alone, I will start the day answering messages and taking calls, telling myself I am being a good friend or a good son, or that helping people who cannot pay me is somehow good business. The truth is that helping other people for free is easier than doing the hard work of bringing real money into my own, so I hide in it. I cannot trust myself to resist that once the day is moving. So I do not try. I get up at 3:50am and do my four or five hours of real work before anyone else, or any business, is awake. This is the strongest move there is. I am not making the distraction harder to reach, I am choosing the one time of day when it does not exist at all. By the time everyone else starts their day and people begin pulling at me, my important work is already done and I am in full flow.
Put the distractions out of reach. Left to myself, I will pick up my phone to check one thing and lose hours to scrolling, usually telling myself I am doing research for the business. So during my work hours my phone is not on my desk or in my pocket. It is in another room. To waste those hours now, I would have to get up, walk to the other room and go and get it, and the lazy part of me usually cannot be bothered. I did the same with my laptop; the only applications I let myself open are the ones tied directly to the task in front of me. I also set everything up the night before, my clothes, a clean desk, my water already poured, because if I sit down and the space is a mess, I will use tidying it as a reason to put off starting. Every little gap is a door the lazy version of me walks through, so I close the doors the night before.
Take the small decisions off the table. Every decision you leave open is another chance to default to the lazy option, and every one you can remove is one less door for it to walk through. I eat more or less the same meals every day, because the moment I leave it to how I feel, I will grab something quick and sugary that leaves me tired by the afternoon. When the meals are decided in advance, my energy holds steady and I can work longer without burning out. What looks sad and punishing to you is my edge. I go to sleep at the same time every night, so getting up at 3:50am stops being a fight I have to win and just becomes the thing that happens. None of that is me being disciplined. It is me making sure I never need to be.
None of these turned me into someone with superhuman self-control. I just built a setup where doing the wrong thing takes more effort than doing the right one. The laziness is still there. I just gave it nowhere easy to go.
Make avoiding the hard things cost you
Making the right thing easy is only half of it. Some work will always be hard to choose, no matter what tactics you employ, and that needs a different approach. You need it to cost you something real when you skip it.
The same way the easy things give you an immediate result, you have to make the hard things cost you something immediately too. For me, every single month I put a serious amount of my own money on the line. It is set up to be given away automatically, to various people and good causes. If I hit my activity targets for the month, I get it back. If I miss them, it is gone. It is big enough that losing it hurts me more than the discomfort of doing the work I am trying to avoid.
The reason this works comes down to how we are wired. We feel a loss far more sharply than we feel a win. Losing £1,000 hurts about twice as much as the good feeling of finding £1,000. So promising yourself a treat for hitting your targets barely incentivises you, but the thought of losing money you already have will get you out of your chair every time, no matter what mood you are in.
This concept is not new. Economists call it a commitment device, and the idea is thousands of years old. In the story of Odysseus, he had to sail past creatures whose song lured sailors to their death, and he knew that in the moment he would not be able to resist. So he had his crew tie him to the mast and told them to ignore him no matter how hard he begged. He took the choice away from his future self, because he knew that his future self could not be trusted. That is exactly what I do with the money. I do not always trust the version of me who shows up on a bad day, so I tie him to the mast in advance.
But money is only one of the ways I make skipping the important work hurt. There are two more. The first is the experience of knowing exactly what it feels like to have nothing, and I am far more scared of going back there than I am of any hard task. So on the days where the easier option is to do nothing, I do not go looking for motivation. I just remember being broke, and that is more than enough. The second is a trusted person. I answer to someone other than myself, because it is far too easy to let yourself off the hook when you are the only one keeping score.
Add those up, and skipping the important work becomes the harder option. Doing it becomes the easy way out.
You can be lazy and busy at the same time
I want you to understand this. Laziness does not stop you from working. Instead, it gets you to do the wrong work, the work that is easy to do. Laziness lets you confuse being busy with being productive.
You always feel productive at the end of the day, because you are exhausted and you got a lot done, usually the easy, non-income-generating activities. Your income eventually suffers, because you keep skipping the important work that would have brought money in.
Laziness in this form is hard to catch, because it does not look like laziness. It looks like hard work, and nobody feels guilty for spending the day working. A whole day of doing pointless tasks well is still a wasted day.
The way I catch this form of laziness now is by listening for the excuse I give myself every time I am about to dodge the hard work. My brain always hands me a reason that sounds noble. For example, I can justify doing important research even though I already know more than enough to start the hard work that is pending. The reason always sounds good, and that is the tell. When I catch myself explaining why the easy thing is actually the important thing, I know my lazy default is chasing the thrill of a quick reward. It does want to work, but it wants the path of least resistance to that reward, so it spins me the lie that this other thing matters more.
I stopped trusting how busy I feel as a measure of my productivity, and I started measuring the things I do that count towards growing my revenue. The work that actually brings money in is weighted the heaviest, and all of it ties back to revenue. So at a glance I can see whether I spent my day on the work that pays or the easy work that just feels good. If I had a busy week but the numbers did not move, the scoreboard tells me straight away. It does not care how tired I am or how many small tasks I ticked off. It only cares whether I did the work that matters. Feelings can lie. Numbers do not.
Being busy is the easiest way there is to feel productive in your business while it goes nowhere near making money.
The bottom line
I am not a hard worker who found some secret level of discipline. I am a lazy person who made being lazy harder than doing the work. Every system here is built for that one purpose.
- 01Do the work before the world wakes up. Get the important work done at the one time of day when the distractions do not exist at all. By the time anyone can start pulling at you, the work that matters is already done.
- 02Put the distractions out of reach. The phone lives in another room, the laptop only opens what the task needs, and the desk is set the night before. Every gap is a door the lazy version of you walks through, so close the doors in advance.
- 03Take the small decisions off the table. Same meals, same sleep, same schedule. Every decision you remove is one less chance to default to the lazy option, and your energy holds steady enough to do the work.
- 04Make skipping cost you something real. Money set up to be given away if you miss your targets, a person you answer to, and the memory of what having nothing felt like. Skipping the important work has to hurt more than doing it.
- 05Trust the numbers, not how busy you felt. Score the work that ties back to revenue, weighted by what actually pays. If the week felt busy but the numbers did not move, the scoreboard catches it straight away.
Once I stopped fighting my laziness and accepted it, it turned into an advantage for my business. I genuinely cannot be bothered to go through the whole process of priming myself, fighting off procrastination and working up the will to start, so I build a system that removes all of that, and most of the work is already done before I even begin. I would rather spend one hard week building something that clears the obstacles out of the way than grind the same task badly every single day. That is still me being lazy, just pointed in the right direction, and it is also exactly how you build a business that grows.
The difference between the laziness that holds people back and the laziness that works for me is not the laziness itself. We are all wired the same way. The difference is that I do not hide from it. Most people simply fail to acknowledge when they are being genuinely lazy, and because they never call it what it is, it ends up running their business and their life. I call mine out. I know exactly what my default is, so I can build around it before it severely affects my bottom line.
So no, you do not need more discipline, and you do not need to become a different person. You need to make the lazy option the hard one, and put a cost on skipping the work that matters. Do that, and your laziness stops being the thing that holds you back and becomes the thing that builds your systems for you.
I am one of the laziest people I know. I am also one of the most productive. Both are true, because I accept who I am. Lazy by nature, productive by design.