About book The 80/20 Principle: The Secret To Achieving More With Less (1999)
This book is a truly enlightening and motivating look at productivity, time management, and happiness. It shows how to apply the 80/20 Principle to your personal and professional life in order to work less, earn more, enjoy more, and achieve more. The main idea: in business and personal life, “pursue those few things where you are amazingly better than others and that you enjoy most,” and eliminate or outsource everything else. This has immediately become one of my favorite self-improvement books.The 80/20 Principle is the doctrine that in general, 20% of efforts produce 80% of results. There are only a few things (the vital few; the 20%) that ever produce important results, and most activity (the trivial many; the 80%) is a waste of time. The ratio isn’t necessarily always 80/20, but the idea is that the relationship is unbalanced. To learn more about the 80/20 Principle, see the Wikipedia article on the Pareto Principle.I liked these major ideas: • It’s more effective to focus on improving the top 20% than the bottom 80%. • Employ others rather than being employed. • Calm down, work less, and target a few valuable goals. • There’s no shortage of time; we only feel that way because 80% of our time is wasted. • Set impossible timelines to force a focus on only what’s important. • Happiness depends on relationships, so forge and maintain a few close personal and professional relationships (the 20%).At the end of the book, Koch addresses objections to applying the 80/20 Principle to life. I liked his response: “We don’t want to be obsessed with efficiency, but we do want to dispose of the non-life-enhancing activities as easily and swiftly as possible.”The 80/20 Principle appears in many other books, including the concept of the most important thing in Getting Things Done by David Allen (my review), Habit 3: Put First Things First in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (my review), the Hedgehog Concept in Good to Great by Jim Collins (my review), and most of The 4 Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss (my review).I read this book because it was featured in 50 Self-Help Classics (my review).Part 2: Corporate Success• 80% of profits come from 20% of customers, and 80% of sales come from 20% of products.• Neither big nor small businesses are necessarily better; it’s simplicity that leads to higher profitability. Because of scale, big and simple is best in theory; in practice, small businesses tend to be simpler.• Focus on your competitive advantage, and outsource everything else.• Corollary: the 50/5 Principle: the bottom 50% of customers, products, and suppliers make up only 5% of revenue and profits.Part 3: Work Less, Earn and Enjoy More• 80% of achievement and happiness takes place in 20% of time.• Money not spent today can be saved and invested for future use, but happiness not used today doesn’t carry forward. Use it!• The 20% of people who achieve the most work for themselves or behave as if they do.• Just say no to low-value requests from others.• Focus on what you find easy, not difficult.Career successSpecialize in a narrow niche, then use the 4 forms of labor leverage: 1. Leverage your own time by focusing on your strengths.2. Capture 100% of its value by becoming self-employed. 3. Employ as many net value creators as possible. 4. Outsource everything that you and your colleagues aren’t best suited for.Happiness• Read Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (my review).• Change your attitude and actions to achieve happiness.• “Optimism...is a medically approved ingredient for but success and happiness, and the greatest motivator on earth.”Shortcuts to a happy life • Maximize control over your life. • Set attainable goals. • Be flexible when chance events interfere with plans. • Have close relationships with your partner, a few happy friends, and a few professional allies. • Evolve the lifestyle you want.
There's a good side to this book and there's a bad side to this book. Good side first. Ever since reading the book I've put 80/20 thinking to use, that is to say that cause and effect are rarely linked in an equal way. 80% of the world's energy is consumed by 15% of the world's people, 80% of hospital costs come from 20% of the patients, 80% of your sales come from 20% of your products etc. It's not so much the "80" and "20" that are the point with this book, it's the theme that the inputs are never balanced with the outputs. Therefore, take a look at your thriving 20% efforts and figure out how to duplicate them. If you spend 5% of your time hiking but it brings 65% of your total enjoyment of life, then start hiking 10,15,20% of your time and cut out the dead weight that doesn't lead to happiness (insert example: relationships, profit, exercise, etc). The down side to this book is that it could be summed up in one Harvard Business Review article and any self respecting smart person would get the point pretty quickly and be able to use it tomorrow. However, the author took 262 pages to make his point. He rambles quite a bit and really just says the same thing over and over again. just says the same thing over and over again. just says the same thing over and over again. just says the same thing over and over again. It got old pretty fast but I eventually stopped reading after about 170 pages. My last negative point is where I actually put the book down, I didn't even finish it. There was a part of the book where two paragraphs, one after the other, are exactly the same. I thought maybe he was making a clever point or perhaps he was just being coy. No, I had several people look at this too and it just seems that they didn't do a good job editing. That's when I moved on to another book instead. Here are some good quotes I took away from it:"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself" - George Bernard Shaw- - The rest are from the Author himself:"Ambition is not served by bustle and busyness" "Happiness is not equal to money. Money can be saved and multiplied but happiness cannot. Happiness not spent today does not lead to a greater store or multiplication of happiness for tomorrow""Simplicity requires ruthlessness""The way to create something great is to create something simple""Time and time again, those who recognize the effective 20% and seize the day never fail to become seriously rich" "Many managers would rather run large firms as opposed to exceptionally profitable ones.""Defending the role of the middle manager is one of the lamest most self serving defense mechanisms ever contrived"
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I get it. 80% results from 20% effort. I got it before reading this book. Nothing new was shared, there's not really much more to it than that.I read 100 pages of un-credited examples, made up company names and far reaching generalizations. The point was made through the title alone. The table of contents added some details and ideas on where this phenomena can be found, but really, there was nothing profound here outside of 80/20 itself. I skimmed the last half of the book hoping something would catch my eye, and it did, unless I started reading the same old thing. "many people..." without credit to any sort of study. "A manufacturing company used this ...". Oh? What sort of industry? Any other contextual information you could spare here? How do I know that the numbers aren't completely fictional?2 stars. Great title, un necessary body of text.
—Ben
I didn't finish this book...I could say the reason why is that I learned the principle he was teaching (20% of the effort accomplishes 80% of the results) in the first 20% of the book and didn't need to read the rest, but it was actually because it was due back to the library...I don't remember much of the actual book, but the principle really stuck in my mind. And the more I've observed my own behavior and of businesses, etc. the more I see that a large chunk of the work really is finished with the first 20% of the effort, but that we can waste tons of time pushing the 80% up to ~100% when it's frequently not necessary. I find myself getting into this trap at work, tinkering around with formatting and adding the finishing touches to a project only to realized that the extra hours/days I've spent haven't added much value and I could have given it to my boss before he expected it with positive results: the content was there and I got done early.This book is definitely worth picking up if you're not familiar with the principle, and probably worth it if you are as a refresher.
—Ethan
Exactly. I was wondering about this myself. It is so weird and ironic that an author talking about 80/20 principle, productivity, and efficiency himself wrote a book that is 90% repetitive.
—Nyssa Silvester
