The 80-20 Life
Thursday, June 29th, 2023
Ever since I read all of Richard Koch's books based on his bestseller "The 80/20 Principle," I have been trying to live the way he describes.
It has been difficult.
Despite the examples that he has given, it has been difficult to operationalize.
The best examples he gave were of people who did very little work but specialized in a very specific type of work within the firm he co-founded. That 80/20 was so compelling to me, it felt like a magical insight into a fundamental law of nature.
But I suspect that it's in more places that I can understand.
For example, after making a list of all of the things that I feel I need to do, I often TRY to eliminate 80% and identify only the 20% that will actually make a difference.
I also know that he believes that achieving such a life means being very clear on the "spikes" in ones talents: only those things that truly exceed others can one find the leverage.
That hasn't been the easier of things for me to do, but I feel that this principle is perhaps one of the most important ones that I should continue to explore.
It's just that I don't have a clear path to get there.
The strange thing is, when I talk with someone, I feel that I am able to identify that very thing for them. Not just their skills but how they should spend their time.
Maybe this is just one of those things that it takes someone externally to find and discover.
The rare entrepreneur who truly knows themselves and can put their finger on that strength, either explicitly or intuitively, has the real advantage.
The rest of us suffer from many of the forces of Conformity-As-A-Service that surrounds us.
I am reading some of these entrepreneurs on Twitter really have dialed it in. Justin Welsh, for example, has dialed in how to minimize time for maximize impact on his content production. And perhaps that is what I need to continue to do as well.
I know that writing online, in some form is a way to achieve 80/20. The issue is that it is so long term...the 80/20 I suspect is that one spends only 20-minutes or some small amount to write daily and consistently.
The output online, thanks for SEO, and more so the potential clarity of writing everyday, probably returns the dividends.
But I suspect that even within starting a venture, the 80/20 rules probably can still come into play.
For example, people acknowledge that network effects take the lion share of the market value.
That seems to mean it's pretty much only really worth building a company with network effects.
Do I 100% believe that?
I don't know, but I think it's worth exploring.
The second 80/20 which I have known to be true but have failed miserably at is connecting with people. Perhaps I should go back to the Connect With Anyone course that I took so long ago.
The 80/20 returns were that, once Scott knew a certain number of people, other people were doing the introductions. He was no longer doing outreach.
How great is that?
I just honestly don't know, but that seems to be a form of 80/20 that is definitely worth continuing to spend time on.
Maybe the newsletter doesn't really need to be that long and complicated, either.
I have been struggling with different SubStack newsletter ideas, and nothing has really landed.
The one bit of progress that I did make was to start to put things into a Building the Content Matrix....I suppose spending time on systems is a form of 80/20 leverage.
I almost feel that writing about random things for a SubStack is NOT an 80/20 rule because the impact on the market is so diffuse.
Whereas writing about my daily thoughts IS 80/20 because of the discipline, added clarity, and the ability to dump ideas that would otherwise take up space in my mind.
The hard part is tracking future ideas, and I don't know quite how to do that with this system while I am writing.
One idea is to just use the Obsidian wikilink and then click into it, which creates the Note.
Then I can start to go through the notes and see the different topics...and whether I have written them or not.
It's not perfect, because it is not easy to tell right away whether something has been published or not as far as I can tell.