It can be frustrating to know what to do when everything seems overwhelming. There seems to be so many problems to solve, so many things to account for, so many things to manage, and so on and so forth.

Luckily for us, one Vilfredo Pareto figured something out that can help us. Studying Pareto's work, Joseph M Duran developed the Pareto principle, or as you may know it — the 80-20 rule.

As creatures bound by finitude, we can only manage a finite number of resources, and we can only stretch our attention so far. We can leverage the Pareto principle to know what is worth doing and what isn't.

According to the Pareto principle, 80% of the results are got from 20% of the effort. This is great news!

That means that you don't need to continue doing whatever it is you have been doing unnecessarily. You can simply analyse your system and locate the 20% of input that produces 80% of output, and invest all of your resources there.

And you know what's more. You can implement the Pareto principle on the Pareto principle! After finding the 20%, you can find the effective 20% of that! The more precise the allocation of your resources, the more powerful the output. And you can do this exponentially, effectively achieving more and more with much less effort.

20% of the posts on this website generate 80% of the readership, 20% of the words in this post contain 80% of the information, 20% of your time requires 80% of your attention, 20% of the apps on your device makes up 80% of your usage.

That's all fine and good. Then what do we do with the 80% of input producing 20% of the output? That might seem like a good question, but it's really beside the point. 20% output is still output, and we want that. What we don't want is to be inefficient. We want to go all in on our strengths and outsource our weaknesses, and that way our success is assured.
 

May 26, 2025, 1:35 p.m.

Written bY CYril