Stupidity is not an excuse for laziness, so argues my favorite marketing guru Seth Godin (bold emphasis mine)
(Is it that you can't do it or perhaps you don't want to do the work?)
When I was in college, I took a ton of advanced math courses, three or four of them, until one day I hit the wall. Too many dimensions, transformations and toroids for me to keep in my head. I was too stupid to do really hard math so I stopped.
Was it that I was too stupid, or did I merely decide that with my priorities, it wasn't worth the work?
Isn't it amazing that we'd rather call ourselves stupid than lazy? At least laziness is easy to fix.
People say that they are not gifted/talented/smart enough to play the trumpet/learn to code/write a book. That's crazy. Sure, it may be that they don't possess world-class talent, the sort of stuff that is one in a million. But too stupid to do something that millions and millions of people can do?
I'm not buying it. Call it as it is and live with it (or not). I'm just not willing to believe we're as stupid as we pretend to be.
Instead of stupidity, my encounters with such genre of an excuse often times are packaged as self-imposed handicaps or even as fear of failures, e.g. I am not a college graduate, I am not an economics graduate, I am just a small investor, I am not good looking, work is too overwhelming and etc.
But as Mr. Godin rightly points out most of these are in essence as signs of laziness or sloth which can be rectified.
After all, mental attitude is about our desire and our corresponding actions which can be directed either to strive for success or to condescend to failure.
The sad part is that for many, failure is seen as endemic trait even without lifting a single effort to go for success.
