Creating Impact the 80/20 Way

One thing that I love to do is I love to foster and create the hypothetical what ifs. I want you to look into your life I want you to contemplate I want you to use your imagination and look into your life. And ask yourself, what areas Am I already really, really good at? And where am I the most impactful? Now, as we begin to play this out? I want you to also imagine that what if it could be twice as impactful with not necessarily twice the effort. Not from a phonetic, I’m killing myself to continue to produce and produce in a space and the secret. It’s not so much a secret, but it’s a secret, because it’s rarely utilized by individuals like you and me.

And as we begin to utilize it, it’ll no longer be a secret, it’ll be something that people will come up to you and ask you. How do you create these results that seem to exponentially grow on top of each other? And the way that we do that I will discuss in this episode. So I want to begin. The best place to begin is right now by telling you have a story of a gentleman, an economist in the late 1800s, early 1900s by the name of Fred Oh Pareto Vilfredo Pareto and he was an economist and he began to start noticing patterns. I love people who notice patterns. And this pattern that he noticed was a distribution of 8020, he noticed that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people.

Now, this ratio began to gain some notoriety because the frequency of this distribution began to be noticed over and over again. It began to be coined as the 8020 rule. And so the 8020 rules is something essentially that says that 20% of the inputs produce 80% of the results. So something magical begins to happen. Once we understand which inputs yield the most impactful outputs. Usually at that point in business, they would double down. But for you and I not only How can we double down on what’s most effective, but we can also make that 80%? A little bit more efficient. So, ultimately, we begin to grow and bubble and expand and create more impactful lasting results. So what does that look like on a day to day basis, you ask.

That means re appropriating time used for less efficient behavior more towards that gym, that is the most impactful, so we have to double down. On that time, we have to double down on that effort that yields the output. And we see this at 20. And so many other areas of our life. 20% of the time yields 80% of the stuff, you know, as an entrepreneur, I began to notice this myself is I could do a week’s worth of work in a few days. And you continually ask yourself, How do I double down on this? How do I get the most out of myself. And a startling revelation was given to me by a business coach at the time and he told me Rahim, you have four choices.

And a scenario where it’s time to make a change, you can embrace what you say you don’t want to do. Number two, you can eliminate it. Number three, you can delegate it, or number four, you can automate it. So this method is about figuring how to solve a consistent challenge, so that you can be spinning more time, where you make the highest level of impact. It’s essentially putting wheels on a wagon instead of just dragging a sled. less traction, a more smooth ride. And so continuing with the theme of being more impactful, I want to talk about a book that I recently had the chance to go through. And the book was by a gentleman by the name of Greg McAllen. And his book is called essentialism.

So if you break down the word in itself, it is doing what’s essential, leaving the fluff alone, and getting to the core of the activities that have the most impact. And the phrase that really sticks in my head, as I think about the book is the discipline, pursuit of less. I’m gonna say it again, slowly, the discipline, pursuit of less, as opposed to what we do more often is the undisciplined pursuit of more. The best way to become more energy efficient, is to water down something good. And you have something good, you have a talent, you have a skill that you leverage, right. And so the more time that we spend on what you’re great at that essential aspect of what you’re really there to contribute, instead of the dog and pony show that keeps everybody else happy.

What if you double down on what you’re essentially great at? What would those results look like? And so in his book, he continues to challenge some of our habitual behavior, saying yes to everything, showing up to every meeting, wanting to be engaged in the email chain, wanting to be part of every conversation that may not drive the needle of progress forward. So I, I suggest you check out his book. Like I said, his name is Greg McCowan, the name of the book is called essentialism. Doing that essential thing, another book that really influenced me in terms of having an doing more impact is how much time do we get lost in strategy? How much time do we get lost in our own thinking, the the parts of our behavior that love to plan Love to conceive love to plot, instead of giving that idea life by cutting off the time between inception, right, and launching it, and seeing what the world really thinks about it.

So many times we get caught up in our own ideas of how things should be that we never give it a chance to be. So in Lean Startup, one of the most interesting things is called an agile product, like an agile startup. And so what the agility allows is that you’re gonna get real time feedback, and then you’re gonna be able to maneuver. How does that relate to essentialism and being more impactful is that you spend more the time doing the essential things that show you the path to success. So if the product was never gonna work, I’d rather you find that out early than invest a year in your life and something that’s not yes, you’re gonna get life experience, yes, you’re gonna learn a lot of things.

But what if we can cut that life cycle from a year and a half, to three weeks. And so that book is littered with a lot of gems. It is called Lean Startup by Eric Ries. And the last thing that I want to really challenge you with, is each one of us deserves to be a little bit selfish. I think selfishness gets a bad rap. But in order to be impactful, in order to be impactful, we have to embrace selfishness. And what I mean by that I know it sounds contrary to things that we’ve probably said and heard and even done in our life. But um, what are you spending your time consuming? The interesting thing about capitalism, about media about all this stuff, and it’s not a knock to any of these things, but the commodity that you’re exchanging is attention.

What if we re devoted some of that attention that other people are asking for, to ourselves, to our ideas, to our vision, to the actual pursuit and execution of what makes us great? And I challenge you, here’s my challenge, I would challenge you to look at the different areas of your life, how much time take it take inventory, go through your day, ask yourself how much time you’re spending on each kind of task. How much time are you Netflix and and chillin? How much time are you just spent in recreation or entertainment or on the blogs or all that stuff? If you know that the impact that you have, if it requires us a little bit more time? What if you reappropriate that time, what if you devote a little bit more time to what you say you want to be great at, the more time we spend consuming the last time we spin creat 18 That is the difference between a consumer and a creator.

So this ultimate secret that I hinted to at the beginning of episode is doubled down on where you are most impactful, the growth will not just be a double, but over time, it will be exponential. The power of being exponential is something that people rarely understand the first double doubles. But if you double the double, Soon, it will be bigger than you could even imagine. I love to do the math for you. But let’s just say within 30 iterations. The numbers astounding, just get in your calculator and do one plus one. And then double that number two plus two, double that number four plus four, eight plus 816 plus 16. You’re going to be at a million sooner than you think then you’re going to be at a billion sooner than you think.

And you’ll be at a trillion sooner than you can even imagine. So the power of this growth, this impact is exponential. And the sooner that we take this into consideration and learn how we can really reallocate the time that goes to that because it’s not going to be as simple as saying I want to do more but we’re gonna have to start Making choices. And as I said, those choices are number one double down. And then to make other things more efficient, and making other things more efficient, that has choices within itself. And those choices are to embrace it, delegate it, eliminate it, or automate it. And as we begin to take our mindshare off to things that don’t really yield the results that have the most impact, we get to devote our time to what we’re here on this planet to do that special thing that we are here to do, because currently, how much time are you devoted to that special thing to that one thing that makes you unique that you offer the world that nobody else offers?

Is it 5%? Is it 10%? Is it 20%? And the fact that you may not know that answer is troubling, and it’s not just troubling to me, but I’d asked you if it’s that important. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you can double down I love it.