There’s the story of the German General, Helmuth von Moltke, who classified all officers into four categories based on smart/stupid and lazy/hard-working.

• The stupid and lazy ones were given mundane tasks where they couldn’t cause too much problems.
• The smart and hardworking ones were staff officers since they obsessed over details, but weren’t put into command. They’d see and plan out four different ways to solve a problem that really only had one good solution.
• The stupid and hard working ones were the most dangerous, since they’ll invent problems for themselves and others.
• The smart and lazy ones were the ideal and were put into positions of command. They’d never lose the forest for the trees, like the smart and hardworking ones.

   

  It seems that people really into to Toastmasters almost always fall into the smart and hardworking category. At least this is my experience in dealing with people at the District level as an Area Governor and hanging out with higher ranking people. It did seem sometimes that a lot of the work, meetings, and procedure could have been cut down if someone lazier (like yours truly) was running the show.

   

  I had a friend from Microsoft who showed instinctively that he knew the difference even when he was in college. He was taking an artificial intelligence class and the final project was to program the computer to play Stratego. The final class the different teams would compete against each other, with a time limit on each move.

   

  While everyone else slaved away coming up with super complicated schemes, my friend just programmed up a system where the #1 piece, which can defeat any other piece save a mine, would attack any of the opponent’s pieces that moved. A mine can’t move, so their #1 could take anything. When the day to run the program came, everyone else’s really complicated logic ran slowly. They ran so slowly that they up forfeiting the game because they couldn’t complete their turns on time. Only my friend’s really simple logic paid off. And it angered

   

  Analysis paralysis can break people, Toastmasters, and even computers.