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Bill Gates 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." What's a real-life example of this?

I was working as a stockboy in a supermarket and when we had to fill the milk cooler people would bust open a 12 pack of milk cartons and put them in one by one.

On my first day I just placed the 12 pack in the cooler and cut the plastic off on one side with my box cutter and yanked it from under it and the look of the store manager and the other employee who was training me was pure bewilderment.

From that day everyone did it my way.

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  • Literally anything innovative.
    Laziness is the root of all invention.

    We didn't invent the wheel because it allowed us to work more- we invented it because it was easier than carrying the same load before.
    Computers? we invented the abacus because counting that much on hands is difficult. Easier to use an abacus. and computers were just one more step along that journey. Sure... it enables very much more complex math...
    ... computer modeling/simulation? invented because it's less work than building physical models and testing that way. (especially if you consider expenses as being a measure of other kinds of work- like fund raising.)

    there's very few things that were innovative, that weren't ultimately developed because somebody had an idea for easing workloads.

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