PNTV - The 80-20 Principle by Richard Koch

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do an episode on Richard Koch, I think is. How you say his last name. Great book, the 8020 Principle. As always, great book, Philosopher's Notes. We've got six pages with about 10 of my favorite big ideas in there. This is an awesome book. Read it, I don't know, many, many years ago and loved it. So, the 8020 principle. Have you heard of the 8020 principle? The basic idea is that 20% of our efforts create 80% of our results. 8020 principle. 80% of our results come from 20% of our work or efforts. Now, what he did was he wrote a whole book on how the 8020 principle affects our lives. And he says the subtitle is the secret to success by achieving more with less. And the whole idea here is to identify the 20% of our activities in our business, in our relationships, in our lives that result in 80% of the benefits because we're wasting 80% of our energy on only 20% of the results, which doesn't make any sense. So we're going to look at some of the big ideas on how we can rock the 8020 principle in this quick episode. First, we've got to go back to 1897, and a guy named Vilfredo Pareto, sweet name, an Italian economist was studying wealth distribution in England. And what he found was that about 80% of the wealth in land was in the hands of about 20% of the individuals. Right? And he said, wow, that's amazing. Then he did a little bit more research on it, and he found that this actually, this trend occurred in many other domains, including his garden. Apparently he had pea pods or something where 20% of the pea pods produced 80% of his harvest. Right? And then if we look in the world, we see this 80:20 correlation. 80:20 ratio shows up again and again and again and again and again. Pretty amazing stuff. So it's known as the 8020 principle or the Pareto principle, named after our friend Vilfredo. But check it out. 20% of criminals account for 80% of crimes. 20% of married people account for 80% of divorces. 20% of the roads we drive on account for 80% of the traffic. And in fact, if you look in your closet, you'll probably find that 20% of your clothes are worn 80% of the time. I've got some other funny ones. What else? Those are some good ones. 20% of what is it? 20% of beer drinkers drink 80% of the beer. I love that one. That's pretty funny. So I could go on, but there are a lot of 80 20s out there. We need to start identifying where they show up in our lives and then putting our energy into the 20% that produces the 80% of the results. So let's look at that. He talks about business in the book a fair amount. I'm not going to go into that right now. But essentially, look at where your business, if you run a business, look at where your revenue comes from, where your profits come from. Hunch is you're going to find an 80:20 ratio. You're going to find that 80% of your revenue or profits come from 20% of your activities or clients. Check it out. And then when you identify that, the smart thing to do is to look at it and see how do you replicate more of the 20%? Get rid of the 80% that is only resulting in 20% of your profits and revenues and focus on the 20% and create more like that 20%. Powerful idea. Again, check out the book. I talk about it a little bit more in the note, but let's get into the personal lifestyle stuff, which I find most fascinating. He's got a chapter in this book called you can always get what you want. It's the name of the chapter, you can always get what you want. And he's all about being unreasonable and being really clear on what you want because you can have it. He has an exercise, a bunch of exercises in the book. One of the exercises I have in the note is to get clarity on if you could have anything, anything you wanted in your life, what would it be? Identify that. What would you be doing?

How would you spend your time?

What would your ideal day look like? Who would you spend your time with? How much money would you make? Would you have a schedule? Would you have total freedom? What would it look like? We need to spend time with looking at this and creating it in our minds. As we discussed in the episode on Stephen Covey, the seven habits begin with the end in mind. Habit number two, what's your ultimate outcome? Start by envisioning that we got to have that thought about in order to actually manifest it. Really powerful stuff. He also talks about the importance of focusing on what comes easily to us. Too often in the literature, self development literature, we're all about improving our weaknesses and stuff like that. But the fact is, even scientifically, Martin Seligman, the author of Authentic the Science of Happiness tells us that we need to focus on our strengths. And another guy named Robert Sternberg wrote a book called Successful Intelligence, which looks at why people with high IQ aren't necessarily that successful. And what he found was sq. Successful Intelligence. Those people knew what they were good at and they did that often. And they knew what their weaknesses were, but they didn't try to make their weaknesses into strengths. They just spent enough energy on their weaknesses to make sure they weren't kicking their butts. Then they put all their energy and passion into what they were good at, which tends to be what we love to do, which tends to be what the world rewards us for doing. So we want to identify the things that come easily to us. In fact, the things that we can do way better than anybody else that just come effortlessly, then we want to put our energy there. So there's a question for you. What do you absolutely love to do that comes so effortlessly, effortlessly for you that you naturally do way better than anyone else? And how can you spend more of your energy doing that and create your life around doing that consistently and having fun doing it? So there you go. There's an idea. How about this relationships 8020 principle applied to relationships? He says this, that 80% of our pleasure in relationships come from 20% of the people we hang out with. Now, it might sound a little bit harsh, but he suggests we take a very close look at who we spend our time with.

Right.

And he suggests that we actually create a little exercise here and write down the 20 people you spend the most time with, 20 of your friends, family, etc. And then rank order them 1 through 20 in terms of people you like hanging out with the Most. Then take 100 units of pleasure and divide it across those 20 people. This person gets five, that person gets 20, this person gets one, that person gets 30. Whatever it is, 100 units across these 20 people. Might take you a little while to figure it out, but get that done and, and then look at how much time you spend with each of these people and see if you get 80% of your joy from only 4 or 5 of the people. 80, 20 principle. But if you're spending way more time on the people you don't even really like hanging out with. And he makes the point. We've got to get clear on who we love to spend time with and consciously choose to spend more time with the people who give us the most joy. Being unreasonable. You can have anything you want, and it's an important thing to consider. Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, early mentor who recently passed away. Like to say that you're the average of the five people with whom you spend the most time. You're the average of the five people with whom you spend the most time. Think about that. If you're with people who are depressed and depressing and bring you down, you're going to come down. If you're with people who are super inspiring and firing you up all the time, they're going to bring you up. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Really big thing to think about. And when I do my friends list, I include God on my list of friends and I make sure I spend a lot of time with God because I love meditation, I love quiet reflection and all those good things. And then the great teachers I consider friends of mine, I get so much out of it and I consciously put a lot of energy into that. So think about where you spend your energy, whether you're averaging up or down, and choose wisely. So that's 8020 principle in relationships. How about the 8020 principle in learning? He's got some great ideas there and says that in any given book, his included, 80% of the value is probably in 20% of the pages. So unless you're reading for pleasure, don't pick up a book and read from COVID to cover. Start by looking at the back of the book and getting an idea of what it is and kind of flip through it. Maybe look at the table of contents and see what you can expect. Flip through to sections that really interest you and be creative about it and look for those 8020 principles in the book that you're studying. Really big idea. I actually taught this to a kid who was struggling in school and her C's went to A's really quickly. Combining that idea with mind mapping, which I've discussed a few times, I'll link to that again. How about your diet? Really quickly, your diet? Too often we jump from fad diet to fad diet, but the fact is there's a few key fundamentals we need to do to be really healthy, and the question is, are we doing them? So what's one or two or three things you could do for your overall health in your diet and physical exercise that would give you so much benefit and is now a good time to start doing it? Well, there you go, 8020 principle super quickly.

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