80/20 is the new Half-Ass

I'm an 80/20 kind of person. I catch on quick, I'm good at ignoring details, and can usually hammer out a version 0 of something very fast. Then I get bored and don't want to do the hard work of actually making something useful. I've found that outside of looking clever in new situations, this approach really hasn't gotten me very far.

Universally, I have seen really successful people do the extra work for the incremental gain. Competition and success happens at the margins, so it's not surprising that is where the effort needs to go.

Incidentally, this is a justification for "top tier" employers that are looking for perfect grades or test scores. These are a strong signal not just that someone is smart (which in itself isnt to rare or exciting) but that someone is willing to do what's needed to eke out incremental gains at the extreme margins, which is a much more important quality in competitive businesses.

Edit - something like this is mentioned in Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood". There is a character who was a natural musical prodigy and could sight read a song and play it well very quickly. But she could never be a competitive musician because she didn't want to put in the rest of the work to go from good to perfect.

I want to be clear that there are great reasons to use 80/20-ing https://xdg.me/80-20/ and I do use it myself. I'm just expressing a latent feeling/worry that too many people think it is the secret to success because 80/20 authors try to 80/20 other people's success in an attempt to 80/20 their own.

The world doesn't need more overhyped-never-delivered things. Let's make 100%ing cool again.

I always thought that Adam Sandler used the remote wrong. If I had one of those I would always be hitting the pause button. I could instantly be an expert on anything, and I'd never be sleep deprived again. #sequelplot

Rather than premium mediocre, I'd say Pareto is a hallmark of Veblenian Entrepreneurship[1], which is my favorite description of hustle porn.

[1]:https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3479042

Used informally it’s a way of avoiding busy work and focusing your limited time and resources on the most important tasks, hang out more with the 20% (maybe it’s 10% or 70%) of friends that have the most fun with, and so on.

There are a lot of people who get trapped in the roughly 80% of effort that leads to the 20% of benefit, spinning their wheels, doing tasks that have little benefit. We’ve all wasted time unecessarily

There are many ways to think about this general idea of focusing on what’s important. Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People talks about four quadrants: 1.urgent and important 2. Urgent but not important 3. Important but not urgent (he notes that it’s common to neglect this quadrant) 4. Not important and not urgent.

Ideally, we’d spend most of our effort, maybe it’s 80%, on 1 and 3.

A trite and possibly gag worthy way of way of saying it is, “work smart, not hard,” which I’d amend to try to work smart and hard.

Anyway, it’s useful to take a look at these ideas but not as an excuse to do shoddy work.

Starting a new project, feature, hobby, whatever?

Figure out the 20% that gives you 80%. This is your primary focus. Then iterate and tweak, for the other of ~50%.

Aiming for 100% is counter-productive unless you work in an environment that 100% is required. So yeah, if you are working on a heart pacemaker, 99% is not good enough.

Should you 80/20 your primary life's work? Probably not, but I doubt you will. But for everything else, it's an incredibly useful idea to keep in mind. Life is short, people have other responsibilities, and you shouldn't sell yourself short or sell short what limited time you have to explore new areas in life.

Even if it is really half-ass (50/20?), most people can get farther as a beginner than they realize.