A quotation about choosing lazy people for a hard job is being widely shared on social media through a post attributing it to Bill Gates. Let us fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: ‘I will always choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because he will find an easy way to do it.’ – Bill Gates.
Fact: There is no evidence to show that this statement about choosing a lazy person for a hard job was made by Bill Gates. Similar statements about choosing a lazy person were at least available since 1920. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When we searched whether Bill Gates had made such a statement about lazy people, we could not find any credible information online to confirm that he said something like that. We also could not find any credible news reports.
We searched for the same in the books written by Bill Gates – The Road Ahead, Business @ The Speed of Thought, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, but could not find any similar statements made by him. We also could not find any statements by Bill Gates on his personal blog. There is no such statement on his official Twitter and Facebook accounts too.
According to the Quote Investigator website, words with a similar meaning to the viral statement could be traced back to at least 1920. In an article published in ‘Popular Science Monthly’, Frank B. Gilbreth Sr. made some statements with similar meaning. A thematically related statement was also made by Clarence Bleicher in a 1947 Senate testimony.
To sum it up, there is no evidence to state that Bill Gates made this statement about choosing a lazy person to do a hard job.
