"taking it easy is the best policy"

Actually that's exactly what I mean by lazy (not willing to work hard, that is). Obviously there needs to be a balance. Not everything can be done with minimal effort, and not everything is best done with the most effort.

I'm sure you often hear people saying "if you just did it the hard way you would have finished by now" or some variant of that. But doing it the hard way is like hard coding, and the easy way is like doing a function.

It turns out that coding the function might actually take longer the first time, but it saves so much effort later on by being reusable.

The smart person is probably often unintentionally driven by the fear of repeating some difficult time consuming task to implement a more clever solution.

But this smart person is partially helped by the fact that coming up with a reusable or more clever solution is much more mentally stimulating, something they may not have anticipated before starting. And so it turns out that even though doing some clever solution is initially harder, the person ends up not even noticing the increased effort.

The smart person knows how hard copying the dictionary is, but it's often not possible to grasp the difficulty of something novel, like a scheme to copy it faster by using multiple pencils.

So rather than taking the known hard way, the smart person chickens out of fear of working hard and takes the mystery box (a new unknown method), only to find out that the sheer novelty of the mystery box was all that was needed to motivate him/her to work hard.