80/20 Your Middos for Faster Growth!

October 31st, 2008          Email This Post       

There are many traits and middos to work on. You want discipline, joy, calmness, patience, sensitivity, and kindness, among many others. You can work on any one trait for your entire life – but you need them all! If you want to put serious effort into your middos, then how can you work on so many? Don’t you have to focus on just one for a very long time?

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle helps us greatly. The 80/20 rule says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the time or effort you put in. Things aren’t linear – each hour of work doesn’t produce the same amount of results – just compare answering email to having a sales meeting with a potential client. There are 193,071 books about productivity on Amazon, but read more than a few and they would all start to say basically the same thing. In corporations, 80% of the revenue often comes from 20% of the clients and 20% of the products. If you focus on that 20%, you can achieve tremendous results in much less time.

I am not proposing leaving the job half done, but to make the qualitative leap for a new trait or middah. Reading and applying merely three books on productivity (.00001% of all productivity books on Amazon) would make a tremendous improvement. While being joyous can be the work of a lifetime, the first 20% of the time and effort will help you reach a threshold that makes a tremendous difference in your life.  An “extreme” sense of joy is to remain joyous even when nothing is going your way. It will take you a lot of time and effort. However, consider if you would be joyous when nothing is wrong (most of the time) or when things are only a little wrong (the relatively minor stresses that come up). That would make a major impact on your life, but isn’t nearly as hard to reach. That smaller amount of effort gives you the majority of the benefits.

Make a list of the traits and middos you would like to integrate into your character. How little would you have to do for it to make a major difference in your life?

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