Focus on the Smallest Changes That Make The Biggest Difference

Most of the results in life come from just a few of the causes.

The Pareto Principle, sometimes also known as the 80/20 principle, says that roughly 80% of results come from 20% of causes (and roughly 50% of results come from just 1% of causes). It holds true almost everywhere you look:

• You wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time
• The 20% of words that are most frequently used account for 80% of words used
• According to Microsoft, 20% of bugs result in 80% of the crashes in Windows
• 20% of the holdings in a portfolio usually account for 80% of the growth
• 20% of customers are responsible for 80% of the sales
• 20% of the salespeople are responsible for 80% of the sales
• 20% of products sold make up 80% of the revenue
• The best 20% of employees do 80% of the work
• 20% of the work done on a project accounts for 80% of the results
• Just 20% of customers account for 80% of complaints
• The top 20% of books sold make up 80% of book sales
• The wealthiest 20% of people control more than 80% of all wealth
• If you master a new language, 20% of the time spent studying gets you 80% fluency
• Here’s a weird one: 20% of the carpet in your office gets 80% of the wear (but it makes sense, how often do you go stand in the corner?)

We could go on and on with this. The point is that some causes account for outsized results. Sometimes this is out of your control and is merely an interesting fact. For instance, the fact that just 20% of stock account for 80% of the market’s return doesn’t do you much good, since you don’t know ahead of time which ones will be winners. The best bet is to buy index funds and not worry about it.

You can see ths post for more info on investing:

Sometimes however, you can use the Pareto Principle to your advantage, focusing your time and energy on activities that will provide the greatest return.

For instance, in his classic book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss relates the story of how he cut down from working like crazy on his former online business to only needing to work on it for four hours a week. One of the ways that he did this was by looking at the things that were taking up his time, and found that handling complaints and returns was a major time commitment. He also realized that most of the complaints and returns were coming from the same few customers, who accounted for relatively little profit. So he basically decided to “fire” these customers. He didn’t directly say that he wouldn’t do business with them anymore, but he cited a “change in company policy” that would enforce some much stricter rules and regulations and not let them take advantage of the system.

They could take it or leave it, and either way, Tim would win.

If you are a marketer, you might notice that 20% of your social media time is taken up by Pinterest, and 80% with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. But 80% of your traffic comes through Pinterest. Why not flip the script and spend 80% of your time on Pinterest and 20% of your time on everything else?

Sure it’s likely you’ll eventually hit a point of diminishing returns on Pinterest, but it’s worth some good experimentation to see what can happen.

Go Big By Starting Small

When you have a big goal such as losing a lot of weight/belly fat, it’s not going to be good enough to use willpower to get you where you want to go.

You need to develop systems that keep you on track, and you’ll need to develop them one habit at a time.

Small steps, repeated = enormous results.

When you are coming up with a game plan, you want to strategically pick changes that are small but have disproportionate results.

For instance, with weight loss you might look at the biggest bang for your buck activities in the categories of diet and exercise:

Diet

1. Drink water and cut soda and other beverages almost entirely
2. Stop eating out so much and start making most of your meals at home from unprocessed or minimally processed ingredients
3. Eat a protein packed breakfast

Exercise

1. Take one leisurely 30 minute walk a day
2. Incorporate strength training once a week
3. Add in high intensity interval training

You’re much more likely to be successful with implementing these strategies if you don’t try them all at once.

But if you are just going to focus on one or two, it’s helpful to start with ones that are small but make the biggest impact.

The switch from soda to water is not exactly easy if you are hooked on sugar/caffeine, but it is small, manageable, and will make a big difference. It’s a great one to start with.

Once you have that one under your belt, you have some mental bandwidth freed up to go after the next one.

Conclusion

You won’t be perfect in your efforts to identify the best “bang for your buck” opportunities, but the better you become at it the more you will be able to do and the farther you will be able to go.

People will look at you and think they don’t have enough time to do what you do, even though they are working with the same 24 hours a day that you are.

This is the twenty-first in a series based on my article 30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30. Shoutout to Dr. Christine Bradstreet 🌴 for the idea to turn the post into an in-depth series.