The 80/20 Principle

The 80/20 Principle reveals how you can boost your effectiveness both in your own life and for your business by getting you in the mindset that not all inputs produce an equal amount of outputs and helping you embrace the Pareto principle.

You might know that the 80/20 principle says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the work (if not, now you do :P).

But that’s actually a tough thought to wrap your head around.

We expect things to be linear, fair and balanced, but that’s not how nature works.

There’s a reason we were the only species to separate from all other mammals, why startups like Uber grew to billion dollar businesses in such a short time and why 1% of the population owns 50% of the money.

Imbalance is the natural state of life and we all have to come to grips with that.

For example, we only use 700 words for 66% of what we say during our daily conversations. If you take into account the derivatives of those words, you’ll see that 1% of the words of the English language are used for over 80% of what is said.

The reason for these imbalances are feedback loops.

When you put 5 fish of the same size into a pond, eventually, 1 will end up a lot bigger than the rest. That particular fish might only be slightly bigger than the rest in the beginning, but that slight edge allows it to catch more food and grow faster.

Of course, this reinforces its advantage, and because it grows faster it can get even more food, until it completely outgrows all the other fish.

Life works the same way, so stop blaming external factors like “unjust wealth distribution” and get started on creating those advantages for yourself so you’ll end up on the better side of the imbalance.

I love the story of Steve Jobs explaining how focus means saying no. It embodies this lesson perfectly. Koch agrees when he says that the most important thing any business can optimize is their product range. He himself found out that for some companies as little as the top 3 products ended up making over 50% of the revenue. You could dramatically grow your business by focusing on these 3 top-sellers, but never make any headway when you keep trying to sell the other 97 ones you have that don’t really get traction. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company had over 300 products in its line-up. He reduced that number to less than 10. This insane focus allowed him to improve those already well-performing bestsellers and turn them into the everyday encounters they…