Pareto’s principle states that a mere 20% of the causes produce 80% of the effects. Cool, right? People like Tim Ferriss, who made his name exploiting this principle to its fullest, have shown that you can produce extraordinary results by focusing your efforts on the small percentage of stuff that really matters.
There’s a flip side to this though. Let’s call it Oterap’s Principal:
80% of the work will only get you 20% of the results.90% of the work will only get you 10% of the results.
That math doesn’t seem right, does it? Anyways, let’s break this down. We can use any area of life as an example, but a job makes easy sense:
In any job, you need to show up and do the minimum of what’s required of you in order to not get fired. If it’s loading pallets, you need to load a certain number of pallets per hour and show up at a certain time each day, for a certain number of days per year. Do that, and you get to keep your job. Do only that, and you get to load pallets for the rest of your life. FYI, that’s a shitload of work, for not a huge benefit. You get a regular paycheck, probably some health risks, and that’s about it. Even if you meet the bare minimum requirements, if you’re the minimum viable worker in the factory, you’re still doing 90% of the work and getting just a fraction of the results of your labor.
If you’re working in an office, you could work the minimum required hours, do only what you’re assigned, or only work on the few things within your job description. You’d keep your job, but you’re not moving up anytime soon. And, you still have to show up every day. You still have to wake up, commute, and then sit at your desk all day, whether you’re learning or producing something useful or just reading tweets in the bathroom stall.
The rub is that for barely any extra effort, you could produce outsized results. If you thought about how you could make pallet loading more efficient, wrote up a proposal, and delivered it to the foreman, or did a bit of research outside your field each night and offered to help anybody in the office on any project they wanted, you’d stand to reap the 90% that was outside of your grasp before.
So, don’t follow Oterap’s Principle. If you’re already doing 90% of the work, like most people are, spend a few extra minutes each day to figure out where that extra 10% is and what you can do to harness it. This will let you grasp the 90% you’re missing out on. Once you figure that out, it’ll be easy enough to follow Pareto’s Principle, if you want to.
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