Extremism is Simple

We all have good and bad attributes to our personalities. One that I have come to accept and lately embraced with myself is my laziness. I am beyond insanely lazy. In fact so lazy that I will not care to remember things people say or things I do unless I know for a fact I will need to use the knowledge within a short future. There is a reason my mom calls me like twice to remind me if we are going to do something on an appointed day.

I say that I embrace my laziness but that is not to say that I just accept that it’s there and that I have to live with it. It is not saying that I like it either, but that I have come to use it to what I believe is my advantage, and especially come to find ways to work around it. You could call it tricks to make myself less lazy. One of those tricks is using a calendar, but another more important trick is what I want to talk about in this post.

Diversity is a keyword in my life. I like to do many different things, see different places and have many different experiences as all people do. But diversity is the opposite of focus, which I believe is key to doing things efficiently and well. To lead a good life one needs diversity, to accomplish and achieve one needs focus. Diversity and focus ties in deeply with my laziness. Being lazy is clearly counterproductive to being focused, but it helps me to be diverse. Laziness breaks focus and allows me to pursue other interests, but it also forces my brain to be occupied by just the important things. As I said: the laziness makes me easily forget that which I don’t really care about.

The laziness thus brings up two clear disadvantages in my life. Sometimes I need to be very focused for long periods of time and sometimes I need to remember things that aren’t necessary to my immediate survival and happiness, like meeting with my mother or other recreational and social interactions. It makes me happy but my brain doesn’t always deem it important enough to remember.

The remedy for loosing focus was very hard for me to track down, but I think I have found it. I found it trough experiencing real pressure from school and work where focus is crucial. The solution, while taking around 20 years to find, is really very simple and can be expressed in the word Extremism. Do everything to the max. Need that report written? Spend 15 hours straight writing it. Now this sounds very much like the reasonings of a procrastinator, and in part it is. To me, procrastination and laziness are synonymous. The difference is that the word procrastination suggests that the task is not one the procrastinator wants to do. I want to do many things but am just too lazy to actually do them.

I’ll give you an example of something I would not have accomplished without extremism and that is not, in my definition, procrastination. I managed to exercise daily for three months in 2009 because I did it to the max, making a challenge of it and working out an hour a day. When I’ve tried working out before with the regular twice a week schedule I end up breaking the schedule and finally quitting after just a couple of weeks. My laziness sort of pushes it out of my mind and makes me forget that it’s important to me, effectively making it unimportant for me. Extremism makes me accomplish things I would otherwise not pursue at all.

People tend to call me disciplined recently, which spurred this post. If they could see the real me, the 13-14 year old Fredrik that still lives inside me, or just see my room, they would realize that discipline is the wrong term to use. I am anything but disciplined. When you see someone spending 12 hours in school 7 days a week, discipline is usually the word that comes to mind. Extremism is the word that comes to my mind. I just know it has to be done and the only way I can do it is to the extreme or it wouldn’t be done at all.

Extremism also helps out with diversity. I have tried combining school and work in an effective manor, but I can’t do it without starting to feel worn out and like I’m not producing good enough results in either thing. But by doing things to the max I’m able to finish one thing in half the time, way ahead of schedule so that I am subsequently focused on the second thing. Extremism makes me in this case be able to do two things instead of just one.

Extremism is what keeps my life going sometimes, shutting of my brain except the one part that needs to focus on the task at hand.

I could continue this post for another thousand words just defining the difference between extremism and discipline. But then no-one would read it, so I wont. I hope I’ve managed to get some sense across of what it is that makes me be able to stay focused even though I’m lazy, and that the laziness actually helps me to unfocus and live.

Extremism is what makes me tick, not discipline.