Utkarsh Amitabh, CEO of NetworkCapital, breaks down the 80-20 principle: a small fraction of actions produce most results. He traces how a few projects at Microsoft and his fellowship drove outsized outcomes like promotions and subscriptions, then shows how to audit your own inputs and outputs to find what actually moves the needle.
Chapters
Hi, everyone. I'm Utkarsh. I'm the CEO of netcapital. Today I'm going to tell you about a really interesting concept called 80 20, which is equally applicable to management principles and business as it is to personal life. So today's key question is how you figure out your 80 20. On any given day, any given month in India, 20% of your actions create 80% of the results. When I look at my time at Microsoft, 20% of the projects that I did led to 80% of the outcomes that I got in terms of promotions, hikes, accolades, and so forth. Even in terms of network capital. If I were to really calibrate what happened in 2020 and the way we've been shaping network capital, it all comes down to a few thoughtful, sometimes serendipitous actions that happen which led to disproportionate outcomes. Let me give you an example. We decided to set up the I don't Know what I Want to do with my Life fellowship largely as an experiment. There was no way of knowing whether it will work, whether there will be a wide reception for something like this. But we soon discovered that just the phrase I don't know what I want to do with my life resonated with hundreds and thousands, thousands of millennials in Gen Z around the world. And when I look at 2020 and half of 2021, that has already passed, can't believe time flies. But this particular fellowship, just organizing this and putting this on network capital tv, designing a cohort based program around it, leveraging something that we have been working on for a while, which is the community aspect of it, led to a very, very strong outcome. We got hundreds of monthly paying subscribers based on this single initiative, which was essentially an experiment that tended to work well. Similarly, if I were to do a review of the entire year of NetworkCapital TV, the product that we set up, it would be a handful of actions that led to most of our outcomes that we are proud of today. So what does 8020 look like in your life? What have you done which created the kind of happiness, satisfaction, outcome impact that you expected and that you've been proud of? My sense is if you trace it to your inputs, some of the strategic choices that you do, it'll become clear that this 8020 works like magic. So what's the larger lesson for you? The larger lesson is that all actions, all inputs, all projects are not created equal. You need to be able to constantly reflect on your inputs and outputs and figure out what times of the day do you get ideas that create disproportionate impact. Are there people who you work with or you collaborate with where you are able to get the best out of yourself? And those are the kinds of times, people, circumstances, contexts that you want to build upon and accelerate. There are so much of wasteful activities that we all do intentionally or unintentionally. What's interesting is that just if you zoom out and look closely, you will be able to find the few activities that really move the needle. If you adopt this 8020 as a, as a life principle, as a work principle, it will change the way you look at life, to change the way you look at relationships, friendships, and it will also change the way how you define work life harmony. I think that the phrase work life balances a bit all over the place. So to find the kind of harmony that you're looking for, it cannot be a wrestling match over the number of hours that you spent and the number of people that you interact with. All projects need to be mapped with specific outcomes and traced back to the way you got the idea and the way you originated the thought, built up the momentum, and led to the kind of conclusion that works for everybody. So tell me more about how applying this 8020 works for you, and I'll be super interested to hear on NetworkCapital TV. It's our endeavor to help each millennial, each Gen Z on the planet, build their category of 1. And to build your category of 18020 is a very useful principle. Take good care of yourself and talk to you soon.
