Tag Archive for '68'

Meet the enemy: Laziness

The epitome of lazinessTime and again I realize that laziness is every man’s greatest enemy. Especially when you start setting higher goals for yourself, that require regular sustained activity/effort, laziness will be the little voice in your head telling you that you can postpone things - “I can do this later…”

Obviously the more motivated you are towards your goals, the smaller the chance of such thoughts popping up in your head :) I do think though that even the most motivated people encounter laziness at least once on their path to their goals.

Have you ever promised yourself to start going to the gym regularly? Perhaps to run 10km a day? Learn a new language, lose weight, prepare for an exam, write something in your blog(!), you name it! Sooner or later there will always be that little voice telling you “I will do this tomorrow”, “I’m too tired now, perhaps later”. The question is, did you listen to it? Ok, we all know the answer to that one. The real question is “how many times did you listen to it?”. Everybody has their moments of weakness - it’s only human. To keep giving in though - is not. So I guess the only right answer here is “less and less times as I went”.

There’s always a threshold. If you pass it, you’re set. No more lazy thoughts from there on.

I find that for me the best example is running on the treadmill at the gym. About half way through, I feel like I’m not going to make it. I think “OK, maybe just this time I’ll stop here and go relax in the jacuzzi”. The way I get past that moment is to beat the lazy thoughts with motivating thoughts. Find them right there and then, or you’re done. “What if I was running to save the life of my brother/wife/mother/<insert-beloved-person-of-choice-here>?” usually works for me :D
With writing in the blog, it’s a whole different story. As with other things though, if you manage to get past that pesky little threshold, it will become second nature.

Life is a journey.

I am a passenger.
This is my journal.

This was going to be it. My first post - done. But as I wrote the words, spinning red alarms started in my head. I thought a bit. Looked up “passenger¹” in the dictionary. Then wrote the following.

I often thought about the meaning of the saying “Life is a journey, not a destination”…
It somehow feels true, and self-comforting in rough times. It can be very misleading though: I mean, surely, life is a journey you start when you’re born. There are several milestones, and then the destination is pretty much the same for all people. Obviously, life cannot be a destination.

The question is whether you control the journey, or does the journey control you? If the destination is the same for all, what matters is the path each takes. And I think this is the essence of the problem: are you in control of the path of the journey, or are you just relaxing in the back seat? Are you the driver, or just a passenger?

Starting from scratch then:

Life is a journey.

I have the ambition to be the driver.

This is my journal.

¹ - The definition from Wikipedia says: “A passenger is a term broadly used to describe any person who travels in a vehicle, but bears little or no responsibility for the tasks required for that vehicle to arrive at its destination”