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<p>You also mentioned, I believe, working hard on political campaigns. </p>
<p>What is there in common among the things that do seem to elicit a “work ethic” from you?</p>
<p>One of my best friends at Pomona College was a National Merit Scholar. He was too lazy to study or go to class, and thought he could rely on his inner intelligence to get through. That only worked for the first semester, then he started bombing tests. He took a semester off to gather his thoughts, and then came back for a third semester, all ready to knuckle down. Then he started skipping classes again, and flunked out. He ended up joining the Navy, but never got any promotions, and left after his enlistment was up. The last I heard, he was working as a clerk.</p>
<p>Original poster should go back to college himself and prove to his son that he can finish. Show that motivation plus hard work equals success.</p>
<p>In essence, nobody cares if you’re “smart but lazy” and live your life accordingly, as long as you do not make claims on the resources or sympathy of others. It’s not as if the only two choices in life are to be a hyperdriven burnt out overachiever or a street bum. People make all kinds of balancing choices. </p>
<p>It seems to me that there is a sense of entitlement here; “I’m smart and easily bored, so I shouldn’t have to work like a migrant, even if I failed to take advantage of available opportunities to get an education and training to do something more renumerative and secure.” That’s unappealing.</p>
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<p>Good point, adad. Here is the description of Rip Van Winkle:</p>
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<p>My sister is chronically un or underemployed. It has been said that she doesn’t like to work. In reality, however, she has not found a *paying job *at which she likes to work. She loves to cook and loves to write, but hasn’t made any money at those pursuits.</p>
<p>I think that there are lots of people who would admit that they are lazy on the job, at a job they don’t like, but yet they spend a lot of active hours pursuing a passion that doesn’t bring in any money.</p>
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<p>Most jobs do not require genius, and those that do still require a very strong work ethic. For instance, you can’t be “smart but lazy” and be a good physicist. </p>
<p>For most jobs, being smart may not make you better at your job unless you reach a certain threshhold of work ethic. </p>
<p>If school subject material is easy for your son, perhaps he could be a high school or junior high teacher in a subject he enjoys? This is assuming that he put forth enough effort to master the material. Once you develop a teaching rubric the first year or so, you can pretty much just do the same thing year-after-year. (Before anyone flames me, I know some teachers do go above and beyond the call-of-duty to their student’s benefit, but I think someone of National Merit Finalist intelligence level could teach a high school class well without having to put in a huge amount of effort.)</p>
<h1>65 I disagree. Smart lazy people make lousy teachers. Interpersonal skills and the ability to motivate groups are more necessary to a successful teaching career than raw intelligence or mastery of subject matter. You also have to deal with parents and community, grade papers and return them in a timely manner, keep organized records, deal with student crises, etc. I know that there are teachers who do not do this, but the vast majority do.</h1>
<p>Also I would say that the smart but lazy person is not looking for work which is based on simple mastery of easy material - because that would be boring.</p>
<p>Maybe something like air traffic controller would be a more appropriate line of work, where it is one long string of problems that need to be immediately solved?</p>
<p>I guess it depends on the level of laziness we are talking about. I think once you develop a good lesson plan and set of lectures, especially in math or science, you are pretty much set. </p>
<p>I disagree that a smart person would find it boring. I know I enjoy giving lectures even on basic material. </p>
<p>Sure you have to grade things on time. You also have to show up to class every day. Every job has some kind of requirements.</p>
<p>EDIT: The prospect of a lazy air traffic controller scares me.</p>
<p>One of the things I’m learning from this thread is that there are apparently more of us out there than I ever realised. Doesn’t that strike anyone as a waste of brainpower that could be put to good use if–yes–society could make a little more accommodation for us? I don’t mean “accommodation” in the sense of a handout; I mean give us some interesting and important problems to tackle, a flexible schedule to work with, and just a modest level of pay (I’d be happy with $20K a year).</p>
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<p>Definitely some big “ifs” there. Funny that you mentioned electrical engineering: that was my first major (had several after that).</p>
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<p>Those are great suggestions, because they are two things I know I’d enjoy doing and I’ve done a little of each (total lifetime earnings in the two categories combined is just a few hundred bucks though). That would be a good area to steer my son toward (particularly the tutoring, as those companies charge people amazing amounts; I don’t really know how you make a living freelance writing but maybe I’m just ill-informed).</p>
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<p>Yup, we’re offering our son financial rewards for good grades, but as you say, at some point the drive has to come from within–and if he’s like me as much as it seems he is, it’s not there.</p>
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<p>I don’t see myself modelling a good work ethic–just not in the cards. Fortunately my W (my son’s stepmom) does have a very strong work ethic to the point of being borderline workaholic (she was summa cum laude in undergraduate honors, Phi Beta Kappa, and is about to finish her second master’s degree at the age of 27). </p>
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<p>Agreed about the wise and thoughtful responses. Not sure the rest of your post isn’t self-contradictory though, as if anything it underlines my point about the hostility the industrious have toward people like me. I don’t believe it’s true about my personal life, though I’m not sure how to respond to that beyond denying it. In the workplace, I feel that I am too conscientious to shirk duties and dump them off on co-workers; in fact, I actually feel shocked when I see other people doing this. Instead, I generally do what’s expected of me but I work as few hours as management will let me get by with. And if I still feel overloaded, I quit. I can’t count the number of jobs I’ve quit over the years; so I suppose I may have left some people with extra work to do while they were hiring and training new people in–however, I was no longer getting paid at the time so I draw a distinction there.</p>
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<p>My wife recently showed me an article in her NEA magazine (she is a student teacher on the verge of being certified as a high school social studies teacher) about just this subject. The research seems clear: telling kids they are “smart” seems to really undermine them, which surprised me. I have been trying to apply this to helping my son, but it’s so entrenched: we had a meeting (with my son present) with his school counselor to try to work on his study habits, and the counselor said she had read the same article, yet she repeatedly told my son “you are so smart…”. Hard habit to break!</p>
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<p>Good advice–I’ve definitely got that one down. Rice and beans is a daily staple here, we walk or bike to the store whenever possible, buy clothes at the Salvation Army, use Netflix instead of going out to movies (and for that matter we don’t even have cable or satellite)…etc. We even keep glass bowls in the sink to catch the water from washing our hands, and put it in buckets next to the toilet to use as “grey water” for flushing. I find though that even with our “severe frugality” as you call it, we often come very very close to not making ends meet (though we do always make it and end up never paying bills past their due date or anything). It’s continuously stressful, I find.</p>
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<p>This sounds just like one of my best friends, who also had high test scores and dropped out of college–but when it comes to frugality he and I are opposites. He could have twenty bucks in his pocket and no idea when or from where he’s going to get any more money, and he’ll buy some seafood (he lives in Portland, OR) and a bottle of wine. Whereas I would stock up on the aforementioned rice and beans.</p>
<p>The “smart” part really doesn’t matter, either in terms of explaining whether a perosn has met their potential or not, whether they succeed in school, what one does in life for work, whether one is happy or whether is a good parent or not.</p>
<p>It’s ALL about what you ACTUALLY DO. To do well in any job requires good hard work, and that work might come easily to someone or not, but it’s the effort that one puts in.</p>
<p>And that’s related to drive, the desire to do a good job and engage one’s full self, whether in play, or work or family or school. And we all end up dealing with genetic or psychological limitations, like - in my and others’ cases- ADD . . . we all must learn how to cope wiht our own selves’ limits</p>
<p>In reading the posts here I get the sense that the references to being “smart” here tend to be either explanantions of why people did well in life, then didn’t, or they are placegholders for lost potential (as one friend says, we are the misisng links between apes and true humans; by “true humans” he means creatures who are fully actualized and engaged completely in life, and there are very few of us humans who are that)</p>
<p>It’s similar to the Marxist idea of praxis: as we unite theory and practice through action in the unfolding of history, so in our personal existence: unite the smarts and what we’ve learned through ACTION in the unfolding of our own lives</p>
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<p>What sort of “interesting problems” would you or your son be able to solve?</p>
<p>It seems you get bored and overwhelmed with jobs. Perhaps it would be better to have several jobs where you can control how much work you are going to do instead of being locked in to a 9-5 schedule. You mentioned tutoring. If you or your son have computer skills you could control your income by signing up with some agency that refers you to people who need services rendered. I’ve seen this with IT. That way you could work when you felt like or needed to. </p>
<p>The key is that you have to develop some type of skill.</p>
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<p>Well, while this may sound dubious to you, I actually believe that in my spare time, without any economic training beyond the one semester of econ I had in high school, that I’ve come up with an explanation for the economic crises of 1929 and 2008 that has eluded pretty much all the conventional, Ivy-trained “experts”. I’ve had several predictions about the stock market turn out to be amazingly prescient (though sadly I never had any money to invest). I also have a variety of proposals for how better to organise various institutions in and out of government to both efficiently and humanely meet human needs. So, stuff like that. 
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<p>I can’t speak as to what my son or any other “smart lazy” person would be able to accomplish–that would depend on the individual–but surely something. I mean, even for myself on a more quotidian level, I know that I can help people significantly improve their school performance in math in particular–I’ve done it. But I’d rather help kids from poor backgrounds who need the most help, rather than those whose parents can afford to hire tutors (and I’m not motivated enough to be self-employed anyway). I think that any school would do really well to hire someone like me to take kids aside who are having trouble and work with them one on one. But I’m not certified as a teacher, and am not likely ever to be, so even though I would do it for less pay than a teacher gets, the schools are losing out on someone who could make a real difference in student achievement.</p>
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<p>I honestly wouldn’t get bored with any job that allowed me to read, write, or even watch movies on the job. I just don’t like to walk around and do “chore” type stuff (I’m not physically lazy though when it comes to riding my bike or, especially, playing tennis which is a great passion of mine).</p>
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<p>Was so glad to read this and other similar sentiments!</p>
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<p>Right, and it’s more the dearth of “work ethic” that I’m talking about here, rather than the possession or lack of a college degree per se.</p>
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<p>Those were cool examples, missypie–nice! Then of course there’s Dagwood and Andy Kapp, although Kapp is not very nice to his wife.</p>
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<p>Thanks, beawinner–and way to smash a stereotype! So no “Tiger Mom” for you, eh? ;-)</p>
<p>We all do have to admit that not everyone who leads a financially comfortable life has earned the money themselves.</p>
<p>I know a guy who is very good looking, not all that bright and admittedly lazy. His path to a comfortable life was to marry a very wealthy woman.</p>
<p>Another guy I know had the good fortune to have a grandfather who bought land in the '50s that the guy inherited, that the state condemned for a highway. $17 million. He fills his time studying foreign languages.</p>
<p>Having money does not necessarily mean that you have worked hard, and working hard does not necessarily mean that you’ll have money.</p>
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<p>Thanks, Skyhook! I appreciated this.</p>
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<p>I’m not arguing that it’s a virtue per se. But how do you know it’s not in my inherent makeup to be lazy? That is, that it’s perhaps a sort of disability? This is the fundamental issue I’m tackling: the idea that if one has certain “advantages” like native intelligence, it is a moral failing for them not to “live up to their potential”. Check out this excerpt from a Sports Illustrated article. On the one hand, science is increasingly finding that how hard you train matters more for athletic performance than the physical musculoskeletal potential one has locked in their genes. But at the same time, paradoxically, it’s becoming increasingly clear that while the basic physical building blocks to become an elite athlete are much more common than ever previously thought, the mental tenacity to outtrain the other athletes may be the rare gift. I think this can apply beyond sports and, at the other extreme, to someone like me who could be said to be almost pathologically lazy:</p>
<p>[WHO</a> HAS THE SPEED GENE, AND WHO DOESN’T? HOW MUCH OF - 05.17.10 - SI Vault](<a href=“http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1169440/1/index.htm]WHO”>http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1169440/1/index.htm)
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<p>Isn’t ADD treated with Ritalin? I was initially with those who dismissed that idea, but while I had this study bookmarked, I hadn’t remembered the mention of Ritalin. Hmmmm…that’s pretty intriguing.</p>
<p>I have a lazy smart son and a hardworking (smart enough) daughter. My son barely got out of HS with a 3.0 and that was “paying for the grade” for Algebra 2 at one of those private HS as he didn’t decide e wanted to go to college until senior year and we had to cram all the bare necesseties in. He went on to attend a California state 4 year university and he is graduating in 4 years (next month!!). He worked really hard and went to CC 2 summers and took some concurrent CC classes while at his university. He was academically ill prepared for a 4 year university, but rose to the challenge :0 A success story 
My daughter has great choices including state, UC, and privates due to her hard work. She is not as smart as her brother, but worked hard, and I can only hope she will be as successful as her brother was!</p>
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I don’t believe this works. Read Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards.</p>
<p>Slackerdad–as someone who just quit a not-awful but time-consuming full-time job, so I can go back to part-time adjuncting and work on my writing, which is what I really want to do but pays, um, nothing, I think I understand you really well. It’s hard to keep working at what seems rote, unnecessary, or in general, BS. The movie “Office Space” resonates deeply with my family; we dont like doing something extrinsically useless for money. We support ourselves, but we don’t like buying into a program if we deem it damaging, either personally or societally. Which makes a lot of limitations, but is also oddly freeing.</p>
<p>As another smart but lazy (and probably ADD) person, I have little sympathy for slackerdad. I was NMF, so-so grades, and flunked out of college my freshman year. But you what, I matured. I realize that although no one loves mundane work some of it is necessary to achieve your other goals. I think I was lucky to see early the lives of others who took alternative more “fulfilling” paths, and I realized that poverty did not suit me. So I worked, even when I didn’t like it, finished college and grad school and became a professional. It’s enabled me to support my family, and in fact, though a bunch of the work getting there was pretty tedious, a lot of my job challenges me on a daily basis and has me solving interesting problems.</p>
<p>So yes, there’s some compromise if you want certain things in life. And please don’t overvalue “intelligence” - it’s just not the most important thing out there. I been in some hiring positions, and although I value intelligence, it doesn’t mean much without cooperation, some willingness to compromise, and a halfway decent work ethic (which I’ve learned to develop). I have a hard time believing that others have not picked the the slack for slackerdad or else I think he would have learned these lessons a long time ago.</p>
<p>When we are young and without children, we could live any way we want. I really have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact a parent would rather be lazy(in OP’s case, it is out of laziness) than to provide a healthy environment for his/her children, and I am specifically referencing the fact OP hasn’t had health insurance for over a decade. Sometimes we fall into a hard time through no fault of our own, but to consciously decide to quite a job because it is not fulfilling, and then to deprive one’s family with basic health insurance is beyond me. Op asks why his son is like him and how to help his son. I would say start to set an example. </p>
<p>OP started this thread to get sympathy from people and to make himself feel better. If he didn’t want to put himself out then he should have thought twice before having kids. To me having kids is a privilege. We have an obligation to make sure they are properly taken care of. Sounds judgemental, but I would have scrubbed floors (held down multiple jobs) to make sure my kids could have health insurance and proper food on the table.</p>
<p>Reading through this thread I feel fortunate that my son, another very bright lazy (hate that word) type, is both happy and financially successful in his late twenties. Our son never got Fs or Ds, hardly even a C, but that may be because school was always so darn easy. But…he rarely got all As like the good little (mostly) girls. Never cared much for homework especially if it was busy work. We referred to him as the world’s smartest A-/B+ student. Even in 4th grade when the perfect kids brought home their straight As, and got their names in the paper, he was not on the ‘high’ honor roll. Same through high school. A-/B+, a mismatch given SATs were highest in the grade (like so many mentions on this thread) and a fifth of the class ranked above him. And through college. A-/B+ in a top computer science program. I now view this as a talent. How little can you do to get that A-/B+ in any course at any level. </p>
<p>I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years. My observations at least wrt him> He is the son of 2 overachievers. As such he was and still is in many ways an enigma to us, smarter than we are. But we, back when, got top grades. I don’t know if work ethic can ‘wear off’ on a child. But at least, although overachieving in the classroom (I mean as far as getting As goes) was foreign to him he was able to see firsthand that we had successful careers due in large part to hard work. He had to realize this.</p>
<p>We may need to rethink terms like slacker, and lazy. In the conventional sense my son was and is a slacker. But instead of getting bogged down with memorizing Civil War dates, he was reading philosophy, political science, technology, the big bang. But you don’t get rewarded for intellectual curiosity.</p>
<p>My son (ADD and anxiety(?) diagnosed at age 21 by a child psychologist) now 7 years later sees a psychiatrist, perhaps the only person he’s ever referred to as brilliant, regularly. Weekly if he needs to, more often biweekly or monthly. Medications, which are continually monitored and tweaked, are necessary and indispensable. </p>
<p>When I think of life jobs for bright slackers like the OP and maybe his son, computer science field comes to mind-- coding, trouble shooting, problem solving, etc. Logical thinking at a high level. People skills are useful but often not necessary.</p>