To get ahead, lazy does it

If everything had gone according to plan, elves would have written this story.

At least, that was the hope inspired by two new books -- “The Lazy Way to Success” and “The Lazy Person’s Guide to Success.” Both say loafing is the secret to accomplishing goals.

To back up that claim, authors Fred Gratzon, a former ice cream mogul, and Ernie J. Zelinski, a Canadian writer, offer anecdotes, aphorisms and quotes from famous dawdlers. “Hard work has absolutely nothing to do with success,” Gratzon asserts. If it did, “physical laborers would be the richest people in society.”

Fittingly, both authors followed their own advice in writing the books. Zelinski’s 286-page manual is actually half that length because every left-hand page is nothing more than quotes and large-print summaries of the main text. Likewise, Gratzon’s 216-page tome is padded with more than 200 illustrations.

Laziness seems to be a mini-trend in book publishing. A Chicago philosophy professor has just released “The Importance of Being Lazy,” which extols the virtues of vacations and leisure time. Other idle titles include “The Lazy Person’s Guide to Fitness,” “Learn German the Lazy Way,” “The Lazy Man’s Guide to Purchasing an Acoustic Piano” and an updated edition of Joe Karbo’s ‘70s classic “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches,” which focused more on positive thinking than on literal idleness.

Perhaps it was inevitable that laziness would emerge as a self-help gimmick. Every other gimmick has already been tried.

During the past 50 years, says motivational speaker Jack Zufelt, “we’ve been taught that the keys to success are goal-setting, affirmations, optimism, visualization, walking on hot coals, breaking boards, meditating, finding the inner child, subliminal tapes.” Yet the search for a shortcut to success continues.

Could loafing be the answer?

Skeptics roll their eyes. “It’s ironic, in this time of growing unemployment, that there’d be a market for what I think is basically bad advice,” says Edward Lawler, a USC business professor. Still, the lazy method isn’t totally misguided, he adds. “Like a lot of fads, there’s a kernel of truth to it.”

Brainstorming

Gratzon, 57, says he’s been “lazy to the core” since the late 1960s, when he graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey and hitchhiked to Mexico to surf. Returning in 1970, he signed up with former Beatles guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as a teacher of transcendental meditation.

When the maharishi later opened a university in Fairfield, Iowa, Gratzon and hundreds of other meditation instructors moved to the tiny town. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t a big market for meditation teachers in rural Iowa, so Gratzon brainstormed another source of income.

Noticing all the cows in the area, he founded the Great Midwestern Ice Cream Co. In 1984, People magazine named his blueberry concoction the nation’s best. He was invited to the White House. But in 1988, the company’s board of directors fired Gratzon after a national distribution plan flopped.

A year later, he launched Telegroup, which sold discounted long-distance service. After catapulting to $400 million in annual sales, it crashed into bankruptcy in 1999. Along the way, Gratzon also ran for the U.S. Senate, racking up a whopping 4,248 votes (out of 1.2 million) on the maharishi’s Natural Law Party ticket.

Today, he lives with his wife and son in a million-dollar Iowa home with an indoor pool and private lake. Last fall, he self-published “The Lazy Way to Success,” which he sells via the Internet at www.lazyway.net.

Although generally entertaining, the book is thin on specifics. “It’s more of a philosophical book instead of a step-by-step guide,” Gratzon acknowledges in a telephone interview.

The central thesis is that people should junk the idea that long hours bring wealth. “I will readily concede that if you achieve something in one hour, you will achieve two somethings in two hours,” he writes. “But what if you want a million somethings? Then you need a new math.”

One key to that new math is lots of leisure time, so the brain has a chance to unwind and hatch brilliant ideas. Consider the case of composer Johannes Brahms. “He became fed up with the pressures of composing music. So he quit,” Gratzon writes. “He retreated to the country, where he enjoyed long walks and a carefree life. Then a funny thing happened. Music gushed out of him in torrents.”

Lawler, the USC business professor, says Gratzon has a point. “If you want people to do creative thinking, you need to give them a little slack time,” he says. But Lawler disagrees with almost everything else in “Lazy Way.”

For example, Gratzon advises readers to quit their jobs unless the work is “pure, unadulterated fun.” Do what you love and riches will follow, he insists.

Not necessarily, says Lawler. “You probably will ultimately be happier, but I don’t know that the money will follow. That’s wishful thinking. Look at the average pay for actors in the Screen Actors Guild [three out of four earn less than $7,500 a year]. Look at all the unemployed PhDs in English and history. They may be very happy, but I think it’s misleading to suggest wealth will follow.”

Zelinski, the other laziness author, gets around that problem by urging his readers to rethink their definition of success. Instead of seeking fame and fortune, he advises people to be happy with what they have and spend more time with family and friends. “It’s possible to be a huge success at work and miss out on life completely,” he writes. “Day-to-day life will have little meaning if your main reason for going to work is to pay for the possessions you don’t have time to use.”

In other words, “if you work more than eight hours a day, you are in the wrong job,” he says.

The 53-year-old Canadian bases his advice on firsthand experience. After getting fired from an engineering job in 1980 (for taking an unauthorized two-month vacation), Zelinski decided to curtail his spending to the point that he needed to work no more than four hours a day -- and not at all during months that don’t have an R in their name, he says.

His 1991 self-published book, “The Joy of Not Working,” which discussed such topics as “How to be an aristocrat on $500 a month,” became a modest hit, selling 130,000 copies after Ten Speed Press bought the rights.

A flawed premise

Alas, Zelinski’s frugal approach apparently hasn’t done much for his love life. “A lot of women look at me as being irresponsible,” he admits during a telephone interview from his home in Edmonton. So he wrote a book about that too -- “The Joy of Not Being Married.”

All told, he has churned out eight books, including two lazy titles, “The Lazy Person’s Guide to Happiness” and “The Lazy Person’s Guide to Success.” Three other books are in the can, he says.

Some of the material overlaps, but that seems inevitable when practicing what Zelinski calls “creative loafing.”

In Pennsylvania, John C. Norcross, a University of Scranton psychology professor who has researched various self-help programs, says some of Zelinski’s advice is sound, but overall it’s flawed. “Although laziness may be a pithy marketing hook, there’s practically no scientific support for it as a path to self-help success,” he says.

People are always looking for effortless formulas for success and personal growth, Norcross adds, but the truth is it takes “a concerted and sustained effort.”

Hmm. Sounds suspiciously like hard work.

Afraid so, says USC’s Lawler. “It has been very popular of late to argue that you can have great success in your career while also having a balanced life. That’s not true.” People in senior-executive-level jobs “have to work very hard and have to end up with a pretty unbalanced lifestyle,” he says. “I wish that weren’t true, but to argue otherwise is to really mislead people.”

Motivational speaker Zufelt concurs. “I promise you the Sam Waltons of this world didn’t get where they are by doing less.”

*

Idle beliefs

Thoughts on laziness:

* “It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take a chance?”

-- Ronald Reagan

* “Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.”

-- Soren Kierkegaard

* “You’re young and you got your health. What do you want with a job?”

-- William Forsythe

in “Raising Arizona”

* “Determine never to be idle.... It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”

-- Thomas Jefferson

* “I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention -- invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”

-- Agatha Christie

* “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.”

-- Proverbs 10:4

* “Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.”

-- James Thurber

Sources: Washington Post, www.bartleby.com, Reuters