Lazy

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The other evening, my son reminded me of the idea that lazy people work the hardest. It’s an interesting concept. It was the motto of his primary school’s long-serving, beloved outdoor education teacher. An example included taking the time and making the effort to pack up all your belongings before heading out for the day while camping; otherwise, you could return to a windswept campsite with your things scattered everywhere. Can you dig deep to do something well? And do so repetitively and consistently? I love to use the example of compound interest: hard decisions in the short term make for great decisions over the long term.

Numerous artists have adopted a daily drawing practice. Through that discipline and seeming rigidity, they seek freedom and, of course, significant sources of creative inspiration and production. Rob Pruitt has been making panda drawings and paintings for two decades. The images continue to be creative and productive for the artist. His daily drawings also chronicle the past, record the present, and sometimes predict the future. One from December 2, 2020, was posted on Instagram with the hashtags: #TheseAreTheDaysOfOurLives, #PreemptivePardons, and #UtahMonolith. It was a detail from his work Studio Calendar (2020) from that same year. What do we choose to give our attention to, and where do we think the greatest return on our effort will be? All of this, of course, feeds into the essential question of how much time we have. Our daily decisions aggregate toward exponential impact, and those harder decisions compile toward the most significant long-term results.