334: Other lawyers' tech mistakes can be a powerful shortcut (using the 80/20 principle)

The 80-20 principle got its name from an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto.

In the late 1890s, he was studying who owned what in Italy, and he noticed that about 20% of the people owned about 80% of the land.

By itself, that is mildly interesting at best.

But what made it a principle is what he did next.

He looked at other countries, and he looked at other time periods.

The same lopsided pattern kept showing up.

So this is not really about the numbers 80 and 20, because sometimes the ratio is 90-10, sometimes it's 70-30.

Once in a while, it might even be 99 to 1.

The point is that the split is almost never 50-50.

That is, a small share of what you put in produces most of what you get out, and a big share of what you put in produces very little.

Pareto spotted the pattern, but he was not good at explaining it, so it mostly sat there for decades.

But in the 1940s, a quality expert named Joseph Turan, picked it up and put it to work in manufacturing.

He called it the vital few and the trivial many.

And he is the one who attached Pareto's name to it.

The person who turned it into something you can use in your own life is Richard Koch.

He's a very successful British businessman who wrote a book called The 80-20 Principle.

And I will put a link in the show notes to it.

If you want to read one good book on the subject, read that one.

Now, if you're like me, you don't care as much about the history and the conceptual theory as you care about getting results that matter.

So let's talk about what that looks like before talking about the mindset blocks that keep many of us from using the 80-20 principle to dramatically improve our lives.