Extolling the Virtue of Laziness
On Grace, Expertise, and Invisible Work
There is a peculiar quiet as the house lights dim on opening night.
Months of preparation are compressed into a single moment. A hundred rehearsals. Countless cues. Last-minute adjustments. A held breath, quietly exhaled.
The curtain rises.
Action.
In another life, I spent some time as a stage manager.
It is a curious profession because success is measured almost entirely by how little anyone notices you. At least during the performance. If the audience is thinking about the stage manager, something has almost certainly gone wrong. When everything runs smoothly, the scenery moves as if by magic, the actors appear exactly when they should, the lights fade on cue, and the audience simply enjoys the performance.
At the time, I thought this was something unique to theatre.
Over the years, I have found myself admiring a particular kind of laziness.
Not the laziness that avoids work.
The laziness that refuses to do the same work twice.
Give an engineer an hour’s repetitive work every week, and they’ll happily spend an entire day ensuring they never have to do it again. To an observer, this can seem absurd. Why spend eight hours avoiding one?
Because next week it takes no time at all.
Nor the week after that.
Nor for anyone else who comes after.
The lazy engineer is not avoiding effort.
They are simply moving it.
There is an old engineering anecdote that captures this better than I ever could.
A factory had been brought to a standstill by a failed machine. After exhausting every idea they had, they called in an elderly engineer.
He studied the machine in silence for a few moments, produced a stick of chalk, and placed a small X on one of the panels.
“The fault is behind there.”
The part was replaced, and the machine sprang back into life.
A few days later, the engineer’s invoice arrived.
Surprised by the amount, the factory owner asked for an itemised bill.
The reply came back.
One chalk mark: £1.
Knowing where to put it: £9,999.
Whether the story is true is almost beside the point. It survives because it contains a truth that anyone who has devoted themselves to a craft instinctively understands.
We are rarely paying for the minute it took to solve the problem.
We are paying for the decades that made the solution look obvious.
The irony of expertise is that it has an unfortunate habit of concealing itself.
Someone truly accomplished at their craft makes it appear effortless. The difficult becomes ordinary. Problems are anticipated before they arise. Decisions become instinctive. Complexity is quietly absorbed until only simplicity remains.
To the untrained eye, this can look suspiciously like doing very little.
I have been guilty of making exactly the same mistake.
Looking across an organisation and wondering what another department actually does all day. HR. Finance. Legal. Facilities. The question is easy to ask when all you ever see is the finished performance.
Spend a little time alongside them and an entirely different picture emerges. There are policies you never knew existed, regulations quietly navigated, reconciliations painstakingly completed, difficult conversations held behind closed doors, and problems solved long before they ever reached your desk.
There is, as it turns out, a whole world in every little thing.
Most of us simply never have reason to step inside it.
The further away you are from that world, the easier it is to mistake its absence from your view for its absence altogether.
Perhaps that is why the very best people can sometimes appear the least remarkable. They are not constantly firefighting because they solved the underlying problem months ago. They are not making difficult decisions because experience has taught them which decisions matter. They are not drawing attention to themselves because the work itself no longer requires it.
Mastery is making complexity disappear.
Not because it no longer exists, but because someone else has quietly chosen to carry it.
It took me rather longer than it should have to realise what the theatre had been trying to teach me so long ago.
Every profession has a backstage.
The world is a stage, after all.
But you’ll find me here, waiting in the wings.
A thought in return?
If this wandering led your thinking somewhere unexpected, I would enjoy hearing where.
mental@mentalblock.net