“If you have a difficult task give it to a lazy person, they will find an easier way to do it.”
That’s “Hlade’s Law.” I don’t know who “Hlade” was, or how you pronounce his name, but the law holds true — lazy people make magic happen. It is a profound wisdom — cited by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and countless others.
Laziness, can be its own reward, if you work at it.
I created LakeMat Pro and MuckMat Pro because I’m lazy. Indolent folks always find the “easier way,” no matter how hard we have to work to figure it out.
Michigan summers are short and there’s always chores to do at a lake. I resented spending so many hours raking lake weeds. I worked really hard at it, but could never quite get them all. Even worse, the bottom was mucky; I’d sink in over my knees while I raked. My kids hated muck. “Yucky muck,” they’d say. What I called it was much worse.
Because you’re reading this, you probably know how creepy weeds feel touching your legs — and you never know what’s lurking in the muck. I wanted to make the nicest beach possible for my kids, so I raked weeds and shoveled muck — which is the exact opposite of lazy. Shoveling muck is the very definition of hard work. Also… shoveling muck doesn’t really work, it fills back in right away.
Eventually I got the idea to “blow” the muck out with my boat motor — it worked — a little too well. I blew out muck all the way down to the gooey, slippery clay beneath called marl — nature’s “pool liner” for lakes. So I had my choice: Yucky muck or squishy, sticky gray clay.
MuckMats Pro didn’t exist. Obviously, they needed to be invented.
My battle with muck and weeds was doomed because — MuckMats Pro didn’t exist yet. But obviously, they needed to be invented.
You may have heard everything begins as a thought and our intense desire to make it real brings that idea into existence. I’m pretty sure my original thought involved an intense desire for afternoon naps in my hammock by the lake.
It was my intense desire to have a “license to chill” that lead me to create MuckMat Pros. So I worked at it for years, coming up with all kinds of things that didn’t work. One minor success lead to another, finding one piece of the puzzle at a time. There were setbacks along the way, progress was slow. But I could feel my afternoon naps in the hammock getting closer. Finally, I won, the MuckMat Pro came to be. I could walk on my lake bottom like walking in my yard.
The kids were grown by the time and gone off to college. One of my hammock-hanging trees died and had to be cut down, so there was no good place to hang it anymore. But I did it.
Summers at the cottage are meant for fun and making memories, hanging out with family and friends — and maybe, napping in a hammock.
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