Steve Bookbinder - Leverage Your Laziness: How to do what you love, ALL THE TIME!

Leverage Your Laziness!

How to do what you love,
ALL THE TIME!

Copyright 2012Bookbinder, Steve & Goldberg, Jeff

All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations or occasional page copying for personal or group study is permitted and encouraged. Permission will be granted upon request.

Sound Wisdom
167 Walnut Bottom Road
Shippensburg, PA 17257

www.soundwisdom.com

This book and all other Sound Wisdom books are available at bookstores and distributors worldwide.

ISBN 13: 978-1-937879-14-3
ISBN Ebook: 978-1-937879-15-0

For Worldwide Distribution, Printed in the U.S.A.

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From Steve: This book is not merely my advice to others; it is my mantra and my credo. Therefore, almost by definition, my thanks go out to all the other people who made my lazy life possible. This list includes virtually everyone I know. While I am leveraging my own laziness, which in my case means doing nothing but talking, these people keep all of the other fires burning that make my life possible.

I must begin by acknowledging Jeff Goldberg and Brandon Toropov, without whom you would not be reading this book; instead, you would have heard me talk about how someday, I planned to get around to it.

Also, thanks to Michael Durand and Neil Roth-stein who really invented the concept of leveraging laziness as a way to reach successwithout them, there would have been nothing to write about.

Thanks also to my business partners, David Moore, Michael Flannery and Tom Mahar, with whom I have been able to build an actual business around my strengths. This has to be the essence of laziness leveraged.

Special thanks go to my wife Fran Proto, a serial entrepreneur who wouldnt know laziness if it hit her. Without her, I would have written How to be Lazy (and broke!) on a paper bagor maybe I would have just put it off.

And heartfelt thanks go to my daughter Brittany Bookbinder, whose own philosophy appears to be Leverage Your Talent with Hard Work; her shining example of pursuing her lifes goal is a constant motivation to me.

Thanks in advance to all of you who recommend this book to others. I would tell them myself, but Im too well, you get the picture.

From Jeff: Lazy is where its at! Take it from someone who knows me. If you think Steve is lazy you should hang out with me for a day then youll see what real lazy is all about!

Of course, being this lazy means getting good help. This is where I tell you that this book, like our previous book How to Be Your Own Coach, (www.byourowncoach.com) would never have been written if not for my dear friend Steve Bookbinder and our editing pal, Brandon Toropov. My gratitude goes out to both of them.

Thanks go, too, to all the grammar school teachers who told me Id never amount to anything because I was full of potential but just too lazy to ever succeed. Their lack of encouragement and foresight werent exactly an inspiration, but they did serve as an important motivating factor.

I am also grateful to some of my smarter employers over the yearsthe ones who encouraged my particular brand of laziness and realized that sometimes youve just got to trust your gut and let people be who they areeven though doing so means your employees might not fit into the conventional mold.

Many thanks, too, go to my oldest, and dearest, friend Ken Wilensky and to his law partner Michael Vessa. Ken and Michael are great role models, two people who have been leveraging their laziness quite successfully for the last 30 years or so.

I also want to thank my dog Dora. No one understands how to leverage laziness better than a pug.

My deepest thanks go to my children, Zachary, Skylar, and Avery. They teach me constantly what life is really all about. (If youre wondering, life is about love, hugs and kisses.) They never fail to amaze me; every day, they prove just how much you can learn from someone under the age of ten.

Finally, like Steve, I want to send out a huge thank you to you, the reader. Without you, wed just be a couple of lazy guys expounding our ideas to each other on my couch instead of being wealthy (in so many ways) beyond our wildest dreams. Thanks for buying this book.

Leverage Your Laziness!

So you see, imagination needs moodlinglong,
inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

~ BRENDA UELAND

Why a book about laziness?

Because most people actually get their best work done when theyre being lazy. Its the lack of laziness in their lives that keeps them from achieving what they could, and should, be achieving. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to learn that about yourself. This book is here to help you accelerate the process.

What most people call lazy, we call life as it was meant to be lived.

This book is for you if

You know all about the rule, Never put off until tomorrow what you could do today but you end up putting off important stuff anyway.

Youve ever thought to yourself, or said out loud, something like the following: As soon as I (insert activity you dont really like very much here), then Ill move on to the task of making headway on my major goals in life.

Youre a big picture person who is lousy at the details.

Youre a details person who is lousy at the big picture.

The sheer enormity of some of your goals sometimes keeps you from taking any action at all, because you just dont know how to, or have any idea where to, start.

You have lots of great ideas, but somehow never move forward onor finish most of them.

You feel you are halfway toward achieving balance in your lifethe half that includes doing exactly what you want to do, when you want to do itbut you still feel theres something missing.

We believe that, at some level, all of us are lazy. Some of us are capable of acknowledging our own unique brand of laziness, and leveraging it. Others do a pretty good job of concealing lazinessby pretending that they like to do stuff that they actually wish they could put off doing forever.

We believe that pretending youre not lazy is a recipe for an unhappy life.

What if there was a way to put off all the stuff you didnt want to do starting immediately and then continue to put that stuff off for the rest of your life? Without, yknow, going to jail or anything?

Well, there is. We call it leveraging your lazinessembracing your inner lazy bum.

The most successful people in the world have figured out how to leverage their laziness. And, amazingly enough, a couple of lazy bums like us have figured it out, too. We figure that if we could understand this, pretty much anyone could. So we wrote this book to share the neglected art of leveraging your own laziness with the whole world.

Anyone can learn to build their lives around doing what they want to do, and avoiding all the other stuff. But there is a catch. You have to know what you like doing most, and be willing to ask yourself, over and over again, how you can find ways to do it more and more often.