Laziness is often bundled with immediate gratification and/or procrastination. 
As for the OP - you did a good thing. I know for me, one of the biggest demotivators for me was my parents making a BFD about things. This made the issue 1) about them, which took away my ownership of the problem and even worse 2) made it about their feelings which is obvious total bullshit and made me lose respect for them, and by proxy, respect for their ideas, including the idea of doing well in school.
It may be difficult to have much influence with kids who don’t like to talk, although getting one of those books about how to talk to your teens so they’ll listen can help. But two things have helped with me:
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Not giving advice directly. I don’t want to be told what to do, no one does. If your advice is actually worth something, point me to the source of your advice, but let me come to my own conclusions. Tell me your personal anecdote as an amusing story, but without the parental slant of expecting you to take a specific action. If you were excited by solving a similar problem in your own life, or regret having taken a certain path, by all means tells that story, it’s useful, but leave it as about you and not them. If you’ve read something that makes you knowledgeable about the situation, point it out to them and let them read it for themselves and come to their own conclusions.
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Avoid excessive emotion either positive or negative when dealing with their behavior because it will be really obvious that your reaction is primarily about your feelings about them, and not actually about them, and trying to pretend any different is going to lose you credibility. If my parents had spelled out what would be the consequences for certain actions, either their own, or natural ones, and let me decide what to do things would have been fine. But they had to make a BFD about everything. Not only were there consequences, but everyone had to be upset and feel bad about them, which was far worse in most cases than any of the actual consequences themselves. This lead to me not being able to feel the weight of and get a sense of the real consequences of my actions outside of my parent’s emotional reaction. So if they lose their allowance for a week for doing something, just let it be that. Sorry kid, no allowance this week, try again next week. Not “you had to go and do something stupid and now you’ve lost your allowance and you should sit in your room and think about how angry I am blah blah blah”. The same with positive consequences. “You’ve done your chores, here’s your allowance”. Not “oh you did your chores, you’re such a good kid, Mommy loves you so much!” You should only be angry at your kids if they actually do something personally to you, like call you a name, or hit you, or destroy your property. And in those cases you have to be really really careful about distinguishing which of your reactions is as their parents, and which is as someone in a personal relationship with them.
That is great advice, IMO. We’re having our first child in the spring so recently I was talking about parenting with one of my friends who has 4 kids. He said you’ve got to be involved in their day to day lives because if you aren’t, and then you try to punish them when they fuck up, they’re going to think, “you don’t care about anything else I do, why do you care about this?”
And, I don’t want this to turn into a couch session or anything, but looking back, I think what you said here, jackdavinci, is a huge part of why I was a “problem child”. I never felt like my parents were doing what was best for me when they punished me, I just felt like they were pissed off and reacting to their own emotions. And looking back I still feel the same way. If anything it’s worse now because growing up I thought all parents were like that. My wife’s awesome parents and other awesome parents I’ve met have made me realize I was wrong.
Umm, yeah, actually we are spending the holidays with my wife’s family, why do you ask?