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To make room for growth you have to sacrifice something in order to make space for it. Keep 80%, replace the other 20. Improve
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[00:00:00] Did you know that the law of the vital few could actually be the thing you've been looking for? I'm actually working this particular law right now in my life, and I'd love to share with you what I've been experiencing right after this.
[00:00:35] Hey, everyone. Welcome to shifts and ladders with Ryan Robinson. Glad that you're able to join with us today. We've been talking about the level of principles that are active in our lives that we talked about. The principles you've learned about in science. Right? Like we talked about gravity, inertia, resistance, all those other principles that you see that are expressed not just in the areas and fields in which you study them, but how those laws permeate into other areas, like finance, like with health, with relationships, all that kind of stuff.
[00:01:13] The one thing that I know most people avoid is this particular law. And it sounds great.
[00:01:21] It sounds great. It's actually one of the most powerful ones that you see that goes through the world. And one thing that happens with this particular law is it actually was the revolution for quality assurance and economics. Right? So it is the law of 80 20, or the law of the vital few, or, as many of us know.
[00:01:45] Pareto's principle, you may not know it by this person's name, but that is who is famous for it. This italian socialist and economist Vilfort Pareto was the individual who actually created this study at a university that talked about that 80% of the consequences are caused by 20% of its causes. So, in many cases, what we find is you are the inputs and the outputs don't have the same equal result. You won't always get out what you put in it. There we go. The inputs and the outputs based on this particular law just don't equal out. And most people don't realize that at a certain point, you will start getting what we call diminished returns. So the longer you work at something doesn't mean you're going to get more output from it. In fact, after a certain threshold, you will start to decrease in your productivity. Right. You may be spending, you know, 15, I don't say 15 hours or maybe 15 minutes on a particular task, but if you go to 30, the quality of your work actually goes down. Why? Because you're spending more time on it. And the focus, the skill, and the potency of your particular area of oversight actually starts to get lower. I mean, try and stay up typing at nighttime, best believe you're going to miss a few words, right? You're going to have some spelling errors, you're going to have some mis punctuations. Just because you're working longer doesn't mean you're working better. And what Pareto's principle actually concludes is because you have not narrowed down your focus, you are still dealing with the undisciplined many and never focusing on the few things that actually create the greatest amount of return for you. And most of the time, we just don't ever want to get rid of what we've added in our lives to focus in on what is most important.
[00:04:01] You may find this particular principle in minimalism.
[00:04:06] I mean, again, that's a way most people live by just getting rid of all the extras and just sticking with the things that add the most value. Maria Kondo's the magical Art of tidying up, which is an incredible book about organization, has moments and principles of 80 20. In Ithoodae, there's a criteria that she places in it as to does this particular material spark joy in my life? And if it does, you keep it. If it doesn't, you just get rid of it. But then at that point, you have to decide what are you going to keep? And essentially, the numbers actually add up that this is like, this becomes an 80 20 like rule. Economists work on this as well, but we've also found that it works in finance, too. In many businesses, they said that many of the 20% of the business customers drive 80% of the revenue. Right. So again, all of this particular, all this works out in many cases. Now, I do want to say this, okay? It does not mean that the distribution of the causes are, have to equal 80, okay. There might be seven things, I mean, just for easy. Number five things. And one might have more tallies, if you will, that could be causing people to, causing you to fail, or causing a business to fail or causing a relationship to fail. It doesn't matter. It just says, out of all of these particular inputs, what is the principle that drives most of the causes that I'm experiencing? So if you are trying to save money and you're trying to figure out what the causes were, what you would do is you just list out your subscription. You say, I got subscriptions, I got bills, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and then start going through and find out what do I have more of that I shouldn't have. And essentially, if you can't save money at the end of the month, you go through that particular number. It could be subscriptions that are kicking your tail. It might be eating out every day, it might be getting a latte every other day. It could be a number of variables, but what you have to do is determine what that 80 or what that 20% is. What is the activity that I am engaging in that is driving down the goals that I'm trying to reach. Okay. What's frustrating about this, though, and I'm going through this personally, okay.
[00:06:59] It is hard.
[00:07:02] It is challenging because the things that you have been utilizing at one point in your life are no longer useful as you're going to the next level.
[00:07:13] In fact, what got you here can't take you there. I'm gonna say that again. What got you here won't take you there. At one point, your skill set was a 20%. You have been used to doing what you have been doing from a day to day perspective, and that's awesome. Okay. But then there's this aspiration that you have to go to a different level, right? So that means you have to say no to a bunch of other stuff in order to reach something that you would have to get. You literally have to get rid of stuff. So we recently had, like, a garage sale, and in order for my basement, which I'm in now, to have space to do other things in it, I have to get rid of stuff. Right? Getting rid of stuff sometimes is hard.
[00:08:06] It sucks. There might have been. We had my daughter's clothes or my son's toys and all this stuff where you start having memories and you're like, oh, I wish I kept that. And this Daniel, honestly, they're too old now to even have playing with it. It was really for me to keep the memory. Right. So what keeps us from actually letting go of those things is being comfortable in where we are, because we don't have vision for what we want to have.
[00:08:39] It's because we do not know clearly what we're going after. So we just really settle and say, you know what, this is pretty cool. It ain't bad, it's not great, but it's not the worst. So we just settle in the book, be your future self now by Doctor Benjamin Harding. One of the things that he implements and teaches on is the fact that being your best self now is influenced by a future vision of yourself. Okay? So whoever you want to be in the future, you have to start being that person now and doing the things that person does in order to have what the person in the future has. Okay? So if you want to create or say you want to be. I'm always using financial fitness or finances or music fitness, but I'm going to use fitness in this case, if you say you want to be an individual who is a healthy person, you have 10% or 12% body fat, whatever goal is, the things that you have to do now to become that kind of person are pretty straightforward. You got to cut out pizza, you got to cut out drinking, you kind of cut out smoking, you got to cut out staying up late. You have to cut out things right. And in doing that, you will expedite your process to getting to that future version of you. Okay, but the thing is, saying no to something and deciding that that is not what you're going to do anymore is a very hard thing.
[00:10:23] We live in a world now where we have options, and options are great until you don't. Until you have to choose one of them. You can't have your cake and eat it, too, or you can't have all 31 flavors at Baskin Robbins. I don't know if they even exist anymore.
[00:10:41] But you can't have all 31 and expect it to taste wonderful.
[00:10:45] At some point, you're going to have to choose yay or nay.
[00:10:50] What are you going to do?
[00:10:52] And saying no to something and deciding what you clearly want to do is a challenge that all of us run into every single day.
[00:11:07] But I will tell you, the people and the folks that are clear on what they want out of their life are the ones that are willing to sacrifice the hard stuff now to have an easy life later.
[00:11:24] Say that again. They're willing to sacrifice the hard stuff now so that they can have an easy life later.
[00:11:32] Bishop Jakes had said this one time, I heard in one of his sermons that said, your old you is counting on the young you to be smart.
[00:11:48] So the young, the older version of you, is counting on the younger version of him.
[00:11:58] Or let me rephrase that, the older version of you is counting on you to be smart. There we go. And why is that? Because one day we're all going to get old, and then we're going to start looking back and wishing the younger version of us did something that we should have done better.
[00:12:16] Because now they have perspective. And honestly, that's where wisdom comes in. That if you don't have the wisdom, God freely gives that to those who ask for it, and he gives liberally.
[00:12:29] And you need to have the perspective because he is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. He is outside of time. Therefore, he can guide you in the things where you can get understanding about what you should do, where you should go, and getting the direction you need in order to prepare yourself for that future that you have desired in your heart. And this is the key. God desires and actually places these desires in our hearts for a reason. The things that bring you joy aren't the things that bring me joy. Okay? I love speaking, connecting with people. I love music. I love arts. I love that kind of stuff. But not everyone loved that kind of thing, right?
[00:13:17] But what ends up happening is because we've let so much into our lives, it makes it really difficult to cut out the noise and just focus on the little bit that I have.
[00:13:32] It said this, and I'm going to conclude on this particular point in the book called the one thing.
[00:13:40] The author was working as a, I believe it was the CEO of a company, and he was working day and night, night and day, about, they said about 60 to 70 hours a week. He was working his tail off, and he got sick, he got real ill. And what ended up happening was he had to. He was suggested that, listen, you're really running everything down to the ground in you. So what I suggest you do is you cut back your hours, probably step down as from a CEO or executive leadership role, and then see if they hire you as a consultant, and then get your personal life and everything together, right?
[00:14:29] So he follows the doctor's orders and, you know, he cuts back his time, and he goes to being a, you know, being a part of the group, to being a consultant instead of, like, retiring.
[00:14:41] So this is what's crazy.
[00:14:45] During this time, this particular senior leader switches to consulting consults for the company that he was in and actually gets more money, gets more money working on less.
[00:14:59] He also is very disciplined about leaving at five every single day.
[00:15:07] One of the things that was suffering because of his work ethic was his family, and he wasn't spending a whole lot of time with them. So he said, listen, this one I'm gonna do every time at 05:00 p.m. i am leaving this building.
[00:15:21] If you need to get a hold of me, you can email me, we'll talk about it in the morning. But at the end of the day, you're not gonna call me. I will get to you the next day. Not only was this individual's professional life financially viable, he was getting back relational equity with his family.
[00:15:40] He was also getting, again, like I said, clearly, monetarily, getting compensated very well. But one of the things his was his health improved. He was getting adequate amount of sleep. He wasn't stressed out about what was to come.
[00:15:59] Now, the keys and the power of the Pareto principle or the 80 20 rule, or the law of the vital few, is that you have to do the hard work of saying no to something. Steve Jobs was said this was said this at one interview.
[00:16:21] He said he was very proud about the things that Apple hasn't done as well as the things that Apple has done.
[00:16:31] They were extremely disciplined about keeping things simple.
[00:16:38] I get enamored by Steve Jobs because of his willingness to sacrifice something good for something greater.
[00:16:46] And most of the time, ladies and gentlemen, we all settle for just something good.
[00:16:53] There's nothing wrong with good. But when there's greater out there, are you willing to sacrifice what you got now for the cost of what it is to be greater? You know, Will Smith said it recently. He said the line between good and great is an extra 2 hours studying or heard as an extra two weeks of editing. When it comes to a book, it don't cost that much.
[00:17:22] It's just harder because you could be done, but you refuse to be done because you're willing and you're deciding that it's going to be the best and the greatest that it can be, whatever it is for you.
[00:17:40] So as you're going through applying some of these principles, or at least seeing these principles functioning out in the world, the one I want you to personally work on is the 80 20 rule.
[00:17:52] I'm right now, I written out lists of things that I'm doing currently that are not getting me to the next level. The next level for me is communicating at a different level. I'm doing it on YouTube. But one of the things that I have a very.
[00:18:08] I have a challenge doing is being myself, being authentic. I work in corporate America. I can turn it on and off. And you might be able to go in here, some of my previous podcasts where I'm talking kind of like this, but that's not really me.
[00:18:22] I want to be authentic. And what does that mean? I have to be okay with my own skin. And that's an 80 20.
[00:18:30] I can do it in pockets with people, but I need to do it to this camera, to the people that are on the other side to you who's on the other side of this camera, need to be honest and transparent. That's an 80 20.
[00:18:46] Okay. There are some things that are hard now. But if you're willing to do the hard work now, I guarantee things will be much easier for you. All right. Now I want to ask you to like this podcast, like the video on YouTube, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify on YouTube as well, and share this with someone you know, if someone's trying to slim out something, cut something out, send them this particular podcast or video, because the Pareto principle is actually the key to at least pointing you to the areas that cause the most challenges and could make the biggest difference in your life. All right, now keep it locked here. Keep it subscribed. We'll have you with another podcast next week. But until then, talk to you soon. Peace.
[00:19:47] Bye.
