General Jackassery

This is in response to a comment left regarding You don’t get it…. Let’s say that I work as a brick layer or carpenter building houses. I work very hard; all of the people I work with say I’m the hardest worker there. But, I’m also extremely intelligent. When I graduated high school I could have gone to college and in fact I was offered scholarships to several schools. I decided not to go because I didn’t feel like it. So instead of using my brain to do something that could benefit mankind, my country, my family and my self, I decided to become a framer. What does that make me?

I would agree with your comment that not all American’s are lazy. However, I don’t think that my definition of lazy is the same is yours, at least not in the context I’m really talking about.

The answer is no, I don’t think that all American’s are worthless couch potatoes. In fact I feel like the majority of American’s still outwork the rest of the world. The problem is found in the fact that we as American’s are underutilizing our strengths. There are too many brilliant framers out there. There are too many business majors that chose the field because it was easier than engineering. Bottom line we spend too much time telling our kids that they can do whatever they want to do and not enough time challenging them to be their best. If given the choice between engineering and business, the majority of students would choose business. It’s simple! If given a choice the average person seldom takes anything but the path of least resistance. This is laziness to me. The average American, me included, will challenge their self to run a marathon before they challenge their self to go back to graduate school. In all honesty the marathon is probably much more time consuming than grad school, but we perceive physical effort as easier than mental effort. Our schools don’t push us to our limits, nor do we push ourselves.

If we go back to the cold war era, we did push the limits. We were running scared, we brought in the best engineers and the best scientist and we trained our own engineers and scientist to an extent not known today. Now that the cold war is over people don’t seem to see that there is any competition left before us. Maybe this is because that competition doesn’t truly threaten our lives, but it does threaten our livelihoods. Consider what happens to this country as the trade gap continues to grow.

Working your ass off and working your ass off to meet your full potential are not always the same. Just because I work 250 hours of overtime a year (nearly a month and a half above and beyond what the normal person works in the same 365 days) doesn’t mean that I’m not lazy. I AM lazy! I decided that I was tired of school. I turned down offers to the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan to get a Master’s degree in Structural Engineering. I decided to not go through with the fellowship I had at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. While I have no doubt that I’m smart enough to get a Ph.D. in any field I choose I’m not motivated to pursue it. People my age in India, China, Japan and Europe ARE chasing after those degrees and they’re taking up the space left vacant by American students. They’re also taking those jobs with them to whatever country they live in.

Just because you work 60 hours per week doesn’t mean you’re not lazy. It only means you work hard. I know that sounds funny, but are you truly living at 100% of your physical and mental capabilities or are you just busy?