If you’re ambitious but lazy… watch this

you are not lazy you're scared scared to admit your dreams might be too much for you scared to fail at what you're pretending to want but don't actually care here's a fun fact there's no such thing as a lazy person babies aren't lazy animals aren't lazy okay well maybe sloths are lazy but you you are not lazy your choices are sometimes lazy but we can also condition ourselves out of making lazy choices in this video I'm going to show you how but to even begin to win the battle against our internal inertia we need to

define what laziness is the definition matters and it's probably a little bit different than you think see laziness is the misalignment between our ambitions and our desires let's say your ambition is to get into law school but you actually hate studying law so you sit there and play video games for another 12 hours boom now you have laziness laziness is therefore not the lack of doing something after all you're doing plenty while playing Elden Ring you simply aren't doing the things that you would hope for yourself to do that means the solution to laziness is

not necessarily motivation or willpower or better self-discipline but alignment alignment between those ambitions and those desires and so that means that you either change your ambition or you change your desire and in this video we're going to break down how to do each of those and our story begins with an empty $2,000 table at a restaurant nobody wanted to go to when I was in my 20s I used to go out and party at least three or four nights a week something I don't really recommend to be honest and in the process of all of

this partying I got to know a number of promoters and managers of nightclubs also something I don't really recommend there was one promoter that I knew let's call him Steve steve was saying that the club had been having trouble selling their VIP tables now if you don't know the way that nightclubs make most of their money is by placing maybe a dozen small tables right near the dance floor and then charging an obscene amount of money to reserve them within the clubbing subculture it is understood that these are the VIP tables and sometimes clubs will

even hire models to stand around them so that douchebags will spend all of their money in hopes that drinking a thousand bottle of champagne will magically get them laid but I digress steve was saying that the club had been having a really hard time selling the VIP tables and having all the tables sitting there empty most of the night well it looked really bad it made it seem like the club was lame and nobody cool wanted to be there but what Steve did next was actually brilliant he took these empty tables he put a red

velvet rope around them added champagne bottles and ice buckets on top and then put a big reserve sign in front of them even though nobody had reserved them amazingly within an hour multiple guys started coming up to Steve asking if they could buy one of the VIP tables for the night the lesson of the empty VIP tables is actually very simple but profound we are highly motivated to impress others and win the validation and approval of others yet often the things that we want in order to impress others have no value themselves they are simply

made up take a deep hard look at whatever you feel lazy about in your life ask yourself is your ambition just an empty VIP table do you actually want to go to law school or are you just trying to prove something to your parents do you really want to get jacked with a six-pack or do you just want girls to notice you more often because here's the ugly truth there are plenty of ways to get your parents approval without wasting years of your life studying something you hate and trust me you can definitely get attention

from girls without starving yourself and spending 2 hours in the gym every day i mean have you seen Pete Davidson lately this is the first and most important lesson of laziness make sure your ambitions are actually your ambitions get clear on what you want and don't just chase the empty VIP tables because even when you do get them chances are you'll still feel like you lost something the philosopher Renee Gerard had an idea called the mimetic theory of desire gerard argued that everything we want is ultimately a function of what the people around us want

and psychology shows us this as well if you take an out of shape person and then surround them by a bunch of healthy people that person will strangely start to become healthier there's an old saying that you are the average of the five people closest to you and that's simply because we begin to adopt and inherit the desires and ambitions of the people around us in the case of the VIP table this can be weaponized against you making you want to spend a bunch of money for something that you don't care about but you can

also use this aspect of your nature to your advantage simply surround yourself with the people that you would like to become and you will naturally start wanting to become validated by them by doing the things that those people do now I know what you're saying right like you're not supposed to care what other people think you're supposed to follow your truth man look it's impossible to not seek validation from other people it's a fundamental part of our nature you can't ever stop needing validation instead simply look for validation from better people and for better reasons

you can use this desire for social approval to boost you ahead you just have to set things up so that you get validation for doing the things that you actually want to do and what's the best way to do that create stakes find people with similar goals to you and set up accountability systems with them when I was writing my second book I was stuck horribly behind on my deadline stressed out of my mind i'd been writing for months but felt like I was getting nowhere soon I found myself waking up later and later putting

off my writing sessions even longer spending more time traveling with my wife and playing a bunch of video games it was becoming a huge problem i wanted to write my book but the pressure had become too burdensome too overwhelming so instead of attacking the project I found ways to run away from it fortunately a friend of mine was in a similar position nearel was also struggling through his second book so he and I made a pack together every single week we would get together write together and then discuss what we wanted to accomplish in the

ensuing week we set timelines and goals for ourselves and then held each other accountable to those goals we had a deal that if either of us ever screwed up we would have to pay the other one $1,000 now when people attack their laziness they tend to see it in terms of just purely summoning up willpower or motivating themselves in some magical way but the truth is that most of this comes down to incentives if you simply make failing to do something far more embarrassing and painful than doing it poorly then you will naturally get off

your ass and go do it near and I built an accountability system for ourselves neither of us wanted to be the [ __ ] who skipped out on a writing session so the fear of judgment and embarrassment from each other kept us showing up every single week it took what was daunting and scary about writing and made it feel much easier which brings us to the sponsor of this video Grammarly grammarly takes difficult writing and makes it feel easier whether you're submitting a job application writing a memo to your boss or publishing your work to

the internet Grammarly is like a patient writing coach and editor always there to give you suggestions and feedback and fix those annoying typos grammarly has been in the AI game for over 14 years now and there's a reason why they've stuck around for so long over 96% of their paying users say that it improves their writing dramatically i found all sorts of uses for Grammarly in my business over the years from writing social media captions to team memos to brainstorming YouTube script ideas Grammarly can anticipate readers questions and ask you to address them as you

write it can coach you on the proper tone of use depending on who you're writing to so be sure to sign up for free and upgrade to Grammarly Pro using my link grammarly.com/manson make writing less intimidating a little bit easier use my link below you'll get 20% off Pro that's Grammarly sign up and upgrade to Pro so these rules will help you handle the desire side of the equation so if laziness is where desire is misaligned with ambition we've now addressed how to alter your desires by using social pressure for your benefit by leveraging incentives

you can hopefully direct what you want to accomplish a little bit more accurately but building the desire for something great is only half the battle to win the war on your own laziness you also have to master your ambitions and the way to do it will probably surprise you because according to science to accomplish your ambitions you should actually want less okay envision this it's 1879 and Thomas Edison is standing in his lab well past midnight surrounded by dozens of blackened light bulb prototypes each failed bulb tells a story of high hopes and fizzled dreams

for the better part of a year his team has been whispering among themselves that Edison's dreams of electrical light is just completely impossible edison himself faces moments of doubt but instead of giving up he pauses and to the surprise of everybody he decided to lower his ambitions edison gathered his team and acknowledged the obvious that making a long-lasting light bulb it seemed completely unrealistic the new plan instead would be methodical just test one material at a time learn why it failed and then try another each experiment was simply a small challenge an effort to gain

a little more information the team's expectations shifted immediately they no longer felt the pressure to invent the light bulb right now instead they just needed to test filaments the shift transformed the lab's mood and what had felt impossible began to slowly feel inevitable in a seminal paper in 1968 the psychologist Edwin A loach noted that extremely ambitious goals usually backfire goals only increase your motivation when you believe that they are actually attainable as soon as a person believes a goal is out of reach their motivation will plummet and they will actually become less likely to

accomplish the goal than before this is why Edison's trick was so powerful if you scale the goal down to what felt doable and then leverage the slow momentum over a long period of time you're far more likely to accomplish something great you're not trying to accomplish a big win all at once but accumulate a thousand small wins gradually and it turns out when you do this not only do you end up accomplishing much more but you will be more motivated and satisfied while doing it but here's the catch when you lower your expectations and simply

try to accumulate small wins you introduce another problem you have to stomach lots of failures lots of repetition lots of doing the same thing every day and not knowing if it's going anywhere and this is where finding a sense of mission or purpose comes in this is where the alignment between desire and ambition matters so much because if you want to accomplish a goal for a frivolous reason to satisfy overbearing parents or impress a cute girl at work to not be made fun of by your peers you're going to eventually lack resilience but if you

do have a higher reason to do something a mission that goes far beyond yourself some belief or cause that you care about then you will be far more likely to stomach the inevitable setbacks and disappointments that show up on a regular basis so yes we crave validation yes we crave attention but ultimately human beings are meaning-seeking creatures we want to have a sense that our lives mattered that even after we're dead the world is a better place for us having been here if you can fuel your ambitions with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose

then you make it bulletproof no amount of failure will deter you no setback will stop you laziness will seem unimaginable in the end Edison and his team tried thousands of different filaments instead of despairing when a filament went out Edison treated each result as just another piece of data it told him one more thing that wouldn't work narrowing down the options for what might work next time i have not failed he said i've just found 10,000 ways that don't work these words could apply to almost any great accomplishment in life finally one evening after countless

trials a new carbonized thread filament was installed the team held their breath as Edison turned on the current and the filament glowed first for a few seconds then minutes 5 minutes passed then 10 when Edison wanted to change the world he only created failures but when he sought out useful failures he would eventually change the world change your starting point don't just dream of the glorious point you want to end up in in your life dream of the series of a thousand small failures along the way find the failures you're okay having the failures that

you actually kind of want to have because once you find those you actually end up unstoppable [Music] all right that's it for this video guys hopefully it helped you realize that you're not actually lazy you're just misaligned with what your ambitions are you might want to learn how to get ahead of 99% of people trust me it's not the way you think it is click below to watch that video [Music]