Name: Terrence Brown
Title: Centre Director, Course Director, Professor of Industrial management with specialization in technology-based entrepreneurship, KTH

Laziness is easily misconceived. The hustle culture is quick to label anyone as lazy if they are caught slacking even for a brief second. However, laziness can be a superpower – it can help us cut down on dead time while enhancing the quality of our output. Terrence Brown, researcher, entrepreneur, and lecturer on creating value, walks us through his new book to show us once and for all that laziness is an art and the lazy person, an artist.

Introduce us to your new book, The Art of Laziness: How to Achieve More with Less Effort?
I hope to accomplish two main goals with this book. The first is to make people feel better about themselves for not working 12 hours a day. More specifically, I hope to make them see that success is not tied to overworking themselves. Secondly, I aim to help the readers shift their focus to maximising their efficiency and productivity. Creativity and innovation – key players in success – can come to you naturally when you’re on a walk or spending quality time with friends and family. You don’t need to be at the office to have a eureka moment.

Why laziness?
Because laziness is my superpower.

It’s interesting that you say that, because we looked up the term “laziness” on Urban Dictionary and it offered different definitions. It described laziness as “the overwhelming ambition to live a quiet life.” The second definition was “a movement promoting the conservation of energy in order to postpone entropy.” And finally, “motivation to do nothing or do very little.” So I’m curious to know why you believe it to be a superpower.
I would say my reasoning is closest to the second one – minus the part about entropy, of course. The idea behind the book is to encourage people to embrace the term “laziness”, especially nowadays that we find ourselves face to face with a “hustle” culture telling you that you need to get up at four o’clock and the harder you work, the more success you’re going to get. This attitude is causing a lot of stress, which I think to be the silent killer as it is a gateway to many other diseases. Moreover, if you look at the so-called 1%, you might wonder, “I’m also getting up. I’m also hustling. Are they magically working more than 24 hours a day?” Of course that’s impossible. So what is it? It can’t be working harder. It has to be working smarter.

Then can laziness be regarded as an umbrella term? After all, it is used both to refer to traditionally lazy people and also those who maximise results by minimising efforts.
Yes, absolutely. However, the traditionally lazy folks are not my target market. I made that clear by having a book as a medium. From here on out, whenever I use the term lazy, I use it to refer to people who are looking for ways to increase productivity by eliminating unnecessary effort.

Most generations have struggled with the stigma that if you’re lazy, you’ll never amount to anything. However, Bill Gates — a member of the 1% club — has been quoted as saying “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” What’s pertinent is that many of the remaining 99% have started to catch up with the negativity of this hustle culture and are actively calling it out. Would you agree?
Yes, I would say people are truly catching up. Only a couple of weeks ago, the English Prime Minister’s father-in-law – a billionaire himself – accused people of being lazy and not working hard enough. His statements angered quite a few people who can see through the veil of hustle culture.

Did you create your own narrative around the topic of laziness or did you rely more on evidence and empirical experience?
A little bit of both. I start the book by talking about myself because when you look at my multiple degrees, laziness might not be the first word that pops in your head. But I remind my readers that my days also consist of 24 hours and that I am not essentially working more than them. Later, I focus more particularly on entrepreneurs and point out that they too rely on laziness by leveraging other people’s money, ideas, and work instead of doing everything themselves. At the end of the day, the goal of the book is to lend tools and techniques to readers so they can leverage their limited time and resources in a way that pumps up their success while minimising their effort.

Do you think that academia is partially responsible for the stigma around laziness?
Yes, the education system can be held accountable to an extent. In fact, Rockefeller, who created the system in the US and later internationalised it, steadfastly believed in creating a nation of workers, not thinkers. So when students are criticised for “not being able to think”, we have to consider that they are not trained to think. They are fed the same rhetoric that thinking cannot replace working. However, that is not true at all because you can only work so hard and so long – but there are no limits to how much you can leverage your mental potential.

What do you think entrepreneurs can leverage other than people’s money and their own time?
My rough definition of entrepreneurship is coordinating resources to exploit opportunities that exist in the environment in an attempt to create value. A successful entrepreneur should be able to identify the resources that they need, and then figure out a way to access and manage them. Nowadays entrepreneurs don’t need offices, phone lines, or even an idea – all they need is a partner who has one. So it boils down to managing resources, not owning them.

What about money and funds? Don’t entrepreneurs need those?
What they need is a good idea, because money follows good ideas and investors are always greedy for more money. Basically, if an entrepreneur can successfully sell their idea and, more importantly, their abilities to make that idea a reality, they can have high hopes of receiving funding.

How do you stimulate this spirit in people you work with?
I sometimes tell people, “Look, if you can eliminate your job, you’ll get a promotion.” If every CEO followed this example, I can confidently say that a majority of employees would be able to figure out a way to do it. The employees might have even already thought of a way but they don’t bring it up for fear of losing their job. However, such entrepreneurial spirit should be rewarded because that is exactly the kind of attitude you want to have in a firm.

You mentioned that entrepreneurs need to coordinate and manage resources. What does that exactly entail?
Resourcefulness means the successful identification of necessary resources by leveraging creativity, determination, and optimism. To showcase how these elements can actually be realised, I’d like to give an example of a workshop I used to do at SSES. I would give the students a list of things to get and half an hour to get them. The list included anything from a pencil to a pickup truck and office spaces. Virtually all teams of students had acquired the resources or at least access to them within the time limit. As another example, you could look at escape rooms: you need to fit your creativity into the frames of teamwork and the time pressure in order to escape. I believe these practices are exactly what shape a successful entrepreneur.