How to live a productive, healthy and successful life with the 80/20 rule

The ultimate guide to living a fulfilling life stemming from the 80/20 rule.

“Time is the only luxury. It’s the only thing you can’t get back.” In today’s society, we are so often caught up consumed by the depths of our work, that we sometimes neglect and forget what is important and valuable. A phenomenon where we are too consumed by our present life to understand or even realise the source to what is giving me the most joy, the most fulfilment and in a business man’s context which deals give me the most profits.

The last analogy may seem most confusing, but don’t get caught up in the ideas of profit. However think of the idea of profit to be analogous to that of an indicator to a specific portion of your success. Often profits come in 2 forms, economic profit and accounting profit. Accountant profit is more or less the definition you have been taught as profit being the money gained.

While the idea of an economic profit differs much, being made of an equation that measures your money gain against the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost is the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one particular alternative is chosen over the others. However, the idea of irrationality and free will against logic leaves open the door for choices that are pure stupid leaving a better alternative untouched. Sure this may be the case, but our objective here is to find fulfilment that the term economic profit can help us grasp. In terms of the ideas of profit what the 80/20 rule in this scenario states is to focus on 20% of your consumers that usually makes up 80% of your profit, in simple words focus on the big players because they make the most of your salary. Yea, we all do this we piortitise more time to do the major assignments and leave less time for less important homework but we rarely see such business mindset applied to our lifestyle.

Dumping 80% or distributing your consumers opens up a void of opportunity as it allows for much more innovation, testing and bettering your products rather than constant production.

Time many people fundamentally don’t understand is an opportunity itself . The more time you invest in one subject, the more time you work on yourself means the happier you are. This of course is a concept or the fundamental reason why many people subconsciously wish to be more productive, freeing up time and finding time is something that humans have always struggled. However again what we propose and this idea proposes is that you retain 80% of your assets, which constitutes to only 20% of your assets or customers. Freeing up your time focusing on the 20%, leaving time to ensure that the biggest portion of your income is satisfied and loyal.

The 80/20 rule emphasises the need to really take control of your life and be on top of everything, to be your own CEO. This idea of dropping the workload, and suggesting it to your boss may be career suicide. However recognising that there are greater profits and greater horizons that would happen if you would advocate taking this course, is a key argument in itself. Essentially recognising that 20% of profit can be easily covered by using the extra time to devote yourself to training, better your mental health or open up exciting new opportunities that you previously could not achieve because of time. As any psychologist will tell you working internally and on human capital is key to self generating success. And self-generating success is all that a company wants from its employees.

Working internally and freeing up time, is of course anyone dream. But should it really come at the expense of money and activity in the actual feild itself. Let’s take UPS as an example, to our surprise they spend 200 million dollars every year just to train their employees. Now you may say spending 200 million dollars on training per year, is too extravagant just to deliver packages. Yet, UPS is one of the most successful and popular delivering services, packaging and sending out about 21 million packages every day.

That may give them the ability to spend 20 million, but why spend 20 million in the first place. As to understand the whole purpose of the 80/20 rule and the large benefits from bettering your abilities and work, comes from understanding what UPS sees as the result or the benefits from such investment. That makes 200 million something you would happily throw away, from just training drivers and employees how to drive with extreme caution, deliver with the least amount of moves and in a single coordinated flow. However, their efforts are not failing them receiving only less than 2000 tickets over the course of 2 years all for very minor doings out of their 129,000 drivers, a very respectable number. Saving UPS millions of dollars each year not only from paying less tickets which averagely “will cost you around $150 USD, but in some states a driver can be fined up to $2000 USD or more depending on the offense and the state laws.” A hefty fine to pay off, but most fundamentally without such rigorous training actually opens them up for poor service and eventually failure due to the intense nature of the delivering sector, the opposite of what most believe.

The UPS training is what makes UPS unique itself, and its ability to thrive in a very competitive state of oligopolies. Allowing their service to keep up with demand with an emphasis on quality. As an increase in traffic violation causes a downfall of employees, injuries without the training present again causes a loss in the need for insurance and to some extent settlement to prevent a trial in court. However more importantly you see UPS operate as a reliable company, simply because the way they care about their employees, is reflected in how the employees care and are dedicated to delivering their products. Allowing UPS to distance themselves with quality and stay ahead in the game with fast shipment and dedicated employees(an immeasurable benefit).

As to strengthen my point, take a look at Manchester United, a team who after Sir Alex Furgesion(manager) retired, have been through ups and downs. But the recent arrival of Bruno Fernandes (footballer) to the club, lifted Manchester United carrying them to second in the league. Now imagine if we had an infinite amount of dedicated, delivering and passionate Bruno Fernandes in your company, surely you would like Manchester United to experience a skyrocket in profits. But Bruno Fernandes’s are rare, but to say that only a selective few can be one is stupid. Bruno’s or Ronaldo’s passion, drive and abilities all come from within. To understand that all greatness comes from within, within our minds, within our feelings and morals. Will we then understand how to succeed, placing our knowledge and experience to work, with a distinctive passion and eagerness, just like the youths who are applying for an internship and just like college graduates working at their jobs. Because only if you train will you have something to gain. And most importantly just because school ends does not necessarily mean learning ends with it, what the 80/20 rule helps is to reduce stress and allow you to find time to train and become better. Training, reflecting and progressing will bring you more profits than you realise, instead of working hard and like a robot mindlessly going through tasks.

Where the 80/20 originated

Now you may wonder about the authenticity or how the 80/20 rule came about. Well the idea of the 80/20 rule was first observed and coined by economist Vilfredo Pareto. Coming up with this rule “when he observed that 80 percent of the land in England (and every country he subsequently studied) was owned by 20 percent of the population. Pareto’s theory of predictable imbalance has since been applied to almost every aspect of modern life.” Its prominence however as you may already guess will not only be the result of one study but that of numerous findings that call to the 80/20 rule by many researchers in the future, determining not only economic phenomenons however also several set below:

• 20% of criminals commit 80% of crimes.
• 20% of drivers cause 80% of all traffic accidents.
• 80% of pollution originates from 20% of all factories.
• 20% of a company’s products represent 80% of sales.
• 20% of employees are responsible for 80% of the results.

The laws of the 80/20 rule spans much from the list below reaching into almost every subject that humankind has been or not exposed to. The presence of the 80/20 rule, defies even nature, something that we stereotypically observe as a lawless state. To have patterns emerge so rigorously across our findings displays the meaningfulness of this idea. As Vilfredo Pareto research was one of the first breakthroughs to understanding and tackling inequality. However his ideas does not stop there being applied across numerous studies, training humanity to focus on a specific part of a population instead of headlessly tackling a problem.

However the 80/20 rule is much more than applicable to our job, but most fundamentally like a calendar and events or like that of a pencil to that of our technology. They are essential in helping humanity revolve and run smoothly because we revolve our lives around these tools and around these events to get things done, to fulfil our current motives or tick off our to-do list. Imagine being a vegetarian, where meat or any food source from an animal is off the limit, sure meat is on the option, but we shift and revolve our ideal to that of the principals of a vegetarian making it impossible or hard when we get going to break these codes that make up who we are. However, if we were to strategically implement the 80/20 rule from that of work, to objectives such as sports, mindfulness (mental breaks), new adventures/learning and much more, the sky’s the limit!

Now the 80/20 rule itself is only a rule or principle. As you know a principal can’t directly transfer happiness or your wish to be perfectly fit or have a well bonding family. However what a principal can do is create a domino effect or help transpire something to something beautiful. The 80/20 rule opens up time for your enjoyment to work on yourself or work on helping others, the time you have could also be spent on procrastinating. But procrastinating will get you nowhere, procrastination is circling indefinitely with no goal and purpose but to postpone what you are currently doing. Finding direction along with the 80/20 will you now only see promising results and for that you need to build your grit and ask yourself, what do you want to achieve the most. Before branching out and writing sub-goals.

About the author:

Eldon Tse — Hong Kong 🇭🇰 | Instagram

Always open to listen to new opinion and ground breaking ideas, to reach me please feel free to contact me through Instagram.