The 80/20 Principle

Hi, this is Brian with another mini chapter from A Philosopher's Notes. This one's called 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 somewhere around 20% of your activity is leading to somewhere around 80% of your result. 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, 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 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. As we remember Goethe's wisdom, things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least. The 8020 principle. Let's rock it. 20% of our efforts are leading to 80% of our results, right? That means that 80% of the stuff we do only gives us 20% of the things we want. So let's shift, spend more energy on the most effective stuff that gives us the most joy and the most effective results. That's what it's all about, the 8020 principle. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have an awesome day.