Bill Gates once said: “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Whenever Tim Ferriss considers a business decision or personal relationship he asks this one question because it helps answers many others …

What would this look like if it were easy?

This here can be anything for him.

Acting as if you are a lazy person and doing as little as possible is a viable approach to running a business and even when doing a job. It can well be a sign of efficiency.

Verne Harnish wrote in ‘Scaling Up’ that if you want your business to be truly scalable that it should be able to run without the founder i.e. You.

How do you do that? 

By getting to a place where you can choose to do as little as possible. By offloading everything except the big strategic decisions.

So to build a truly scalable business build a team that knows what to do and how to do, capable of tackling problems when they appear. Where there is a system in place to keep everyone informed, and where everyone understands the culture and works to further it.

However long it takes to build a business like this, it is worth it. 

When in a job you, of course, can’t tell your boss that you want to do the least. But that’s what your intent should be. To get the job done well, by doing the least.

Do you think you can use this approach?