For me, being lazy is pretty bad. It’s full of self-centredness and disrespect for others. Lazy people rarely want to deal with the results of their laziness. No, they want the best out of life too – they just want others to deliver it to and for them.
One very positive thing about market downturns is that laziness gets weeded out in a very Darwinian way.

But where does one get motivation if it’s not been drilled into you from breath five as it was in my case and my family?

Well, actually think of it as a game – a mind game. Whenever I’m confronted with something I don’t want to do, I trick myself into thinking it is precisely what I want to do. I tell myself it’s an opportunity to prove to myself that I can do something that I hadn’t already done, or to shine in some situation. The trick is to want to do what you have to do. If you can master that, you’ll be a lot happier. Like most things in life, achievement or lack thereof, starts as an attitude.

Malcolm Gladwell in his new book, “Outliers”, suggests that you need to put in 10,000 hours of work into your chosen arena to outperform. If you work 60 hours a week for 48 weeks a year, that’s 2800. So if you worked non-stop on what you want to excel at for four solid years, you could become an expert according to Gladwell.

For Sara Murray, it’s just called doing her personal best.

Murray, the CEO of Buddi, one of the cleverest companies I’ve come across for a while, and I were having lunch with a leading venture capitalist in London the other day. Buddi turns your mobile phone into a panic alarm. It’s going to go mass market this year. Sara is a serial entrepreneur and has backed a number of other entrepreneurs. When this investor said to her, “you’re so beautiful, you could have just been someone’s wife, but you’ve turned into this amazing business person – why?”, she turned to him and said, “it wouldn’t have been my personal best.”

Give the world your PB – your Personal Best. It won’t necessarily turn you into a Sara Murray or save you from the recession’s ravages. But you’ll go through life proud of what you do, and I guarantee you that you’ll never utter the phrase, “but I’m fundamentally lazy” again, if you ever did.