A short podcast mini-chapter by Brian Johnson explaining the Pareto (80/20) Principle: many outcomes (wealth, divorces, traffic, clothing use, personal results) are heavily concentrated in a small portion of causes. Johnson uses examples to show that roughly 20% of our activities produce ~80% of our results and urges listeners to inventory the 20% that brings the most joy and focus on those. He also references Richard Koch's book The 80/20 Principle and points listeners to Brian's newsletter and ebook/audiobook.
You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More Wisdom in Less Time. This is a mini chapter from Brian's book A Philosopher's Notes. You can find it on Amazon.
The 8020 principle did you know that 20% of beer drinkers drink 80% of the beer? Yep. And 20% of married people get 80% of the divorces. And 20% of roads have 80% of the traffic. And that you probably wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time? Yep, yep and yep. And how about the fact that 80% of the wealth of 20th century England was in the hands of 20% of its noble class? Yep, the good old Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, discovered that last bit of data which led to him articulating the phenomenon known as the Pareto Principle, or more commonly, the 8020 principle. Why should you care? Well, the fact is that somewhere around 20% of your activity is leading to somewhere around 80% of your results. Whether we measure it as happiness, profits, health, well being, whatever. Which for the non mathematicians in the crowd means we're wasting a lot of time and energy on stuff that just doesn't matter and that we just don't enjoy that much. So it makes a lot of sense to identify those few things and people that give us the most benefit and joy and most importantly, focus on them. Unfortunately, most of us are too busy ick. Doing the stuff that doesn't really matter to slow down long enough to identify what really matters. My vote? Let's do an inventory of the 20% that gives us the most joy. And as we remember Goethe's wisdom, things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least. Little footnote here you can check out Richard Koch's brilliant book the 8020 Principle. The secret to Success by Achieving More with less for more 8020 mojo. We've also got a Philosopher's note on that and that wraps up our Action section.
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