Jordan Peterson REVEALS The Key Principle To Be MORE Productive In Today's Chaotic World

You've heard about the 8020 rule, I presume 20% of your customers provide 80% of your business. That's not the rule. The rule is way more remarkable than that. So here's the rule. The square root of the number of people that work for you do half the work. So that means if you have 10 employees, three of them do half the work. And if you have 10,000 employees, 100 of them do half the work. Now, this is an unbelievably well documented phenomenon. I'm not telling you something that's in the realm of speculation. This is a super solid statistical law. Now, there's a rule that goes along with it. This, and this is very difficult for managerial people to understand because they almost always do exactly the opposite. Spend all your time with your most productive people. Now, the typical manager does exactly the opposite. They find the 10% of their staff that are floundering and spend all their time with them. I can understand why you do that from the perspective of, let's say, sympathy, although it's counterproductive. You're not going to help them. You don't have the ability, you don't have the time. They don't have the motivation. It's not going to work. You can't do it. You spend all your time with your most productive people and the same with your own use of time. You spend all your time on those things that are, that you are best suited to do. And you have to be brutal about that.

How do you decide who gets your time, what gets your time? And how do you politely say no to set boundaries? Because it's got to be all these opportunities. There's opportunity costs, right, with opportunities. So you have to spend that time well.

There's a variety of ways of doing that. And you have to build. As your wealth of opportunities increases, the infrastructure that you have around you to deal with the opportunities also has to expand. And so there's a variety of ways that you decide what gets your time. When you have more opportunities than you know what to do with. And first thing you have to do is figure out what your priorities are, right? So you need a vision for the future that's well developed. And then you have to see if the opportunities that you're being presented with are in keeping with what it is that you're trying to achieve. And that should be very well delineated then. I have a lot of people who help me with that. You know, I'm surrounded. I wouldn't call them gatekeepers exactly because that's not right. The right way of conceptualizing them. I have a variety of people around me who help me negotiate and who prioritize potential opportunities for me. And they're people who know why I'm doing what I'm doing and who are on board with that. And so when they're making decisions, I can be confident that they're bringing to my attention and prioritizing opportunities that further the broader mission. And then I suppose that I also use money because money is the way that we negotiate priority. And so. And it's a very efficient way of doing that. If I have two opportunities that look like they're of equal value with regard to the relevance to my aims, and one pays twice as much, well, it's obvious which one to take. And that's partly why we use money, right? Because money is a universal representation system for value. And it can't. It's not perfect because it doesn't fully capture potential opportunity. Right. It's like when you're trying to value a company. You can value the company with regards to its current earnings or its profit margin, but you also have to factor in growth. And that's a difficult thing to do. And so if I'm trying to prioritize opportunities, the financial return is obviously relevant, but the possibility for growth coming out of the opportunity is also. Now, that's more difficult to quantify. But that's also why I have lots of people around me who help me with that. And like, I have lots of people around me who. Who do this for me. There's probably altogether, all things considered, there's at least 15 people, there's probably more like 30 who are doing this for me all the time. And so all the opportunities that do end up on my desk, so to speak, have been vetted extraordinarily thoroughly, and they're almost inevitably worth further pursuit. But so if you're overwhelmed by your responsibilities and your opportunities, part of the reason for that is that you haven't distributed enough responsibility to other people. You haven't set up a team that's of sufficient quality. And then you have to ask yourself why. You know, one possible reason might be that you're not brutal enough to make the hard decisions that are necessary with regards to staffing. So, for example, I've been running a tour now for eight years, I guess. Eight years. And we're very cut and dried with regards to our touring staffing. We have very stringent rules. And one rule, for example, is don't bother the people who come and see me. You are obligated to be 100% polite to them under all circumstances, all the time. And that goes as well, for I travel with some security guys, for example, and they help me with logistics. And, like, they have to be good to the waiters and to all the service staff that we encounter. Like, I want to travel to the places I'm going, leaving nothing but a good taste behind. And this is something very important to consider if you're running any kind of business, especially as you become more successful, because if people have a certain degree of admiration for you, let's say, or you're even willing to meet you halfway, and then you disappoint them, they will never forget that. And they will tell, like, a thousand people. And you don't have to make many mistakes like that till word gets around and things are not good. And so our policy, especially on the tours, is you don't make mistakes. If you make mistakes, you don't come along. And I shouldn't exactly say that, because people are going to make mistakes. They have to fix them, right? I mean, things are going to slip sideways from time to time, but you have to fix it, and you have to treat everyone well. And that's our criteria for that are very strict and stringent. And that's the case for all the staffing and hiring decisions that we make. And because of that, I'm surrounded by people that I can really trust, and they have their things to do, and I leave them alone. So that's another thing, you know, if you. If you're overwhelmed with responsibility and opportunity, you got to ask yourself if you're trying to control too much, and you might think, well, I want to pay every attention to every little detail. It's like, no, you don't. No, you don't. You want to use your time, which is rare, so that you focus on those things that only you can do and that you do best, and everything else that anyone else could do that should be distributed down to them. And so. And you can do that if you're willing to be picky in your hiring and your. What would you say, your willingness to maintain people over the long run. If you're picky in that about that, then you can distribute responsibility. And the huge advantage to that is then you get to focus on what you're best at and what you find that's most compelling. And you could get to further your aims, and there's no loss in that. And it also stops you from getting worn out and it stops you from getting resentful and you don't want to get worn out because then you do stupid things and you die. And you don't want to get resentful because then you're miserable to yourself and everyone else. And so you maximize the opportunity that's in front of you by building an efficient infrastructure. And then you shouldn't be overworked.

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You know, you gotta also ask yourself if you're overworked, if that's a reflection of egotism, you know, because you might. There might be part of you that's thinking, well, you know, only I can do this. It's like there are probably some things that you're doing that only you can do, but you have to be able to maintain that, sustain it across time. But as I said, even more importantly, the probability that you're the only person that can do absolutely everything you're doing is very low. There may be some things that you're particularly good at. You should obviously be doing almost nothing but that. So on the tours, for example, I don't do anything but show up. I show that, like, there's a rule I'm to be there an hour before, come hell or high water and ready, so I have to have a rest beforehand. I don't pay attention to flights, I don't pay attention to hotels. I don't pay attention to restaurants or any. Any details whatsoever. I have people that I follow when I'm walking through airports. Like, all I'm doing is focusing on the tour. And I suppose a subsidiary concern there is my wife, because she travels with me and we have to set up the tour so that she's also thrilled to be along. And thrilled matters, because we've been trying to make this. Which is probably the most intense thing that I do, we've been trying to make this sustainable. And to make it sustainable, you have to not be upset about it because otherwise you'll just. You'll stop doing it. And so well, You handle more responsibility and opportunity by building a more differentiated substructure under you. And that's the other thing that's cool about that, is there's no limit to what you can do then, right? Because you Just keep building layers of infrastructure beneath you. And if you hire properly and you're very careful about that, then you can just keep jumping up the ladder, so to speak. That's how you're. That's how you work neurologically, by the way. When you pay attention to something and you practice it, you build little automated structures that are neurological and then they run unconsciously, and then your consciousness jumps up a letter, a level so that you can concentrate on things that haven't yet been automatized. So you're trying to put in routines all the time underneath you so that you can free yourself up to attend to only those things that are crucial. You know that if you study people too, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, I mean, Jobs in particular was absolute. I know people who've worked with him very closely as well as Musk. Jobs was unbelievably good at deciding what he wasn't going to do. He put all his attention on the things where the maximal return would be. This is something to know, too, even technically. So you know, you've heard about the 8020 rule. I presume 20% of your customers provide 80% of your business. That's not the rule. The rule is way more remarkable than that. So here's the rule. Among the people that work for you, the square root of the number of people that you that work for you do half the work. So that means if you have 10 employees, three of them do half the work. But if you have 10,000 employees, 100 of them do half the work. Now, this is an unbelievably well documented phenomenon. I'm not telling you something that's in the realm of speculation. This is a. This is a solid statistical law. Now, there's a rule that goes along with it. This, and this is very difficult for managerial people to understand because they almost always do exactly the opposite. Spend all your time with your most productive people. Now, the typical manager does exactly the opposite. They find the 10% of their staff that are floundering and spend all their time with them. I can understand why you do that from the perspective of, let's say, sympathy, although it's counterproductive. You're not going to help them. You don't have the ability. You don't have the time. They don't have the motivation. It's not going to work. You spend all. It's not going to work. You can't do it. You spend all your time with your most productive people. And the same with your own use of time. You spend all your time on those things that are, that you are best suited to do. And you have to be brutal about that. And there's nothing in that that's anything but good because you end up doing the maximum amount of good that you can in the most sustainable way and you provide the largest possible number of people with the greatest opportunity. There's nothing in that that's anything but good. And the people who are floundering, you know, I had a hard time in my lab when I was a professor letting people go when I should have. And I learned to do that quite painfully, I would say. One of the things I realized, and this is something to really get in your head too, if you can, especially if you're a little more on the agreeable side. You don't like hurting people's feelings. Enabling someone's failure is not a moral accomplishment. And so if you have someone who's either outright failing or worse kind of drifting along so they're not, you know, performing poorly enough to really come to your attention, but they're really not all in. It's like there's no reason not to sit down with them and say like, you know, you're not thriving, so what the hell are you doing? You want to drag your sorry carcass through this job doing a second, you know, hitting this in a second rate manner for the next 15 years as you age painfully, or do you want to go out and see if you can find something you could commit yourself to? Like this is not a game. And so there's some pain in letting people go, but there's pain in main, there's real pain in maintaining people in a quasi failure situation. And so it's better just to say, why don't you go find something you want to do? And you know, people don't like change and they might be all upset about the fact that that didn't work, but you lying about the fact that it's working isn't helping them. And then you could put someone in that position who's like pretty thrilled to be there and is they're going to devote themselves completely to it and then, you know, God only knows how good that's going to be for them and the people around them. The other thing, other problem with having people around who are doing a second rate job is that they're really hard on the people that work for them. You know, they don't know how to distribute reward properly. They're jealous of anybody who's working effectively. They're going to push down anyone that they see to be a threat. They're going to, you know, hoard information.

No, you just described the typical day of most entrepreneurs.

Yeah. Hey, the management side is a tough one, you know, it's a tough one and it's hard to wrap your head around the balance between separating the wheat from the chaff, let's say, and being sympathetic and kind. But sympathetic and kind in the moment is not a good medium to long term strategy. It's kind of the difference on a trait level. It's the difference between being agreeable. Agreeable people avoid conflict and you can understand that. And they default towards sympathy and mercy. Let's say conscientious people look at performance and agreeableness isn't a bad ethic for within a family, but conscientiousness is the ethic that works on large scale enterprises. And conscientiousness is pretty straightforward. It's like, can you do the job or not? And if the answer is no, well then you should find a different job, you know, or retool your attitude. That's unlikely by the way. And you know, the probability that you as a manager is going to, are going to get someone to shift their attitude at a fundamental level is pretty low. Like, especially if they're really in a failure pattern because you don't even know what the hell's going on with them. And so better to pay, better to spend your time with your high performing people. This is a very hard thing to learn and it's cruel in a way. You know, it has that element of cruelty, but not in the long run. Kamala Harris was, Kamala Harris was talking about equity. She either didn't know what she was talking about, which is inexcusable, or she knew what she was talking about, which was malevolent. Those are the options. It's like they just mean equality of opportunity. It's like, then why do they have a different word? They don't mean equality of opportunity, they mean equality of outcome. If you're foolish enough to believe in equality.