There are millions of search results for “Pareto Principle.” My favorite, written just recently by Scott Young, actually has to do with the top misapplications of the “80/20 rule.”
Quickly, if you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it essentially states that 80% of your outputs come from 20% of your inputs. It was named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who noticed and published the connection in 1896. (He observed this by studying the peapods in his garden… providing the only instance in history where peas were not disgusting and hurting humanity.)
What if you went Full Pareto?
Most of those millions of search results will lead to articles or videos telling you to focus primarily on the 20% of your activities that bring you 80% of your success.
Recently, my good mates suggested I take this a step further, and I want you to think about doing the same.
Jeffrey Eisenberg, the esteemed bestselling author and speaker who’s writing the Foreword for our forthcoming book, Brand Your Own Business, suggested it’s too meaty. He said there was simply too much to digest and business owners might feel frustrated by a lack of traction. He gave me some great suggestions for how to trim the book.
I shared this with our BYOB-VIP Facebook group, and I got some great advice from several colleagues including the ruggedly-handsome and brilliant Craig Arthur who suggested I literally dump 80%.
Do you know how gratifying going Full Pareto is?
I started whacking at the book that very night… it was terrifying, and it was also liberating.
I was able to see our story clean. I was able to quickly and clearly identify what will be most helpful to business owners to truly understand our philosophy.
Then, those same business owners will have the opportunity to dive deeper in a second version that includes exercises and a much more thorough explanation.
Resistance comes from asking anyone to do too much too quickly.
Which is what I was doing… which is what so many of us do so often. Just because we see how everything connects doesn’t mean everyone else will. It’s the Curse of Knowledge.
And so, we will have two versions of the book, and the first will be a simple-but-powerful distillation of how business owners can get customers to know, like, and trust them in this Age of Rapid Distraction.
And it will be approximately 20% the size of the workbook.
And the workbook will be approximately 20% the size of what we have planned to follow.
Start whacking.
What’s the worst that can happen if you start not just focusing less on the 80% of stuff that yields fewer outputs but focused on it not at all?
Your life, your world, your company will definitely start to change, and yes, it’ll be scary, but it will also be liberating.
Go Full Pareto. See what happens.
Oh, and PS – Here’s a video Craig put together illustrating his point about our book. It’s like a video trailer for BYOB. No one asked him to do it. Like most Aussies, he just does things for his mates he think will help. Check it out!
Good stuff as usual. I started to reflect on how to do this in my life and realized that I had already pruned some of my work by 80%.
A few years ago I was writing daily online. It was usually fun, it created some buzz and allowed me to create a personal brand. But it wasn’t short term profitable. Honestly, that’s not why I was doing it anyway, so it didn’t matter. Yet a few years later when the momentum of all I was doing online was building a foundation that I didn’t even see, I began to evaluate where I was spending my time and energy.
Instead of writing 7 days, I had cut down to 5, but I wanted to see what could be even better.
I forced myself to write one article per week, not 7, not 5, not 3. Just one. Moving from 5 to 1 was taking the 80/20 principle and applying it to my online world.
Interestingly, whether I have found very few of my peers, (and none locally) that have consistently stuck with a regiment of publishing every week, 52 weeks a year for the past 6 years I have had my current website, or if we want to count the previous 7 years on my old blogs, the number is next to zero of people who have started and completely abandoned their online projects.
Thanks, Scott!