I remember when I first joined college, I was this super patient student who wanted
to get the highest marks possible in the class, in other words, to be the best in the class,
so I would come to every single class and in my first semester I guess I did not even
miss a single class and when the time for finals would come I would study every single
thing.
there is nothing wrong with this method of studying, indeed it really works, I actually
got one of the highest GPA in my class if not the highest, there were a hundred people
in my class and its really hard to track the record, anyways, the frustrating part was
that, the exam paper would focus only on the 20% of the things we have learnt during the
semester, and if you can get these 20% right, you can get A without even going through those
endless notes and tutorials. of course you can argue that, you should not study for the
sake of getting A, but rather you should study to learn and that’s a very solid point and
that’s the reason why I was studying everything but the problem with that is, by the next
semester I would forget most of what I have learnt and I won’t even remember the final
paper questions.
so the questions that I was asking is, why would I put all that effort just to get A
when there is an alternative option, where I can achieve the same results with much lesser
effort.
so what I did in the next semester is that, first of all, I skipped all the classes that
I thought were not very important and I pretty much saved a lot of time where I could do
more important things rather than just sitting in a class that is completely useless, I think
I am exaggerating, lets say almost useless, and during the classes I would note down what
the lecturer would emphasise more and by the end of the semester I basically studied only
the focus areas that the lecturer has given and the notes that I have taken down and pretty
much with half of the time that I have spent in my first semester, I ended up getting the
same results.
since then i kept doing that and kept my grades pretty high.
and that’s exactly what the 80/20 principle rule is about, it basically tells you that,
listen 20% of your work gets you 80% of the results, when it comes to the exam paper like
in my case, that means 80% of the final paper question comes from the 20% of the syllabus.
and this principle applies pretty much to everything, 80% of a value of a book comes
from 20% of its content, when it comes to YouTube, 80% of views and subscribers come
from 20% of the videos.
20% of humans consumes 80% of world resources.
80% of cigarettes are consumed by 20% of smokers and the list goes in.
what I am trying to point out here is that, if you really want to take out the maximum
advantage out of your time, then you have to work with an 80/20 principle.
weather you are getting ready for finals or working on a project, this really helps.
and I think the quote that says” don’t work hard but work smart” actually came
out of this principle.
it doesn’t really mean that its always going to be 80/20, it could be 70/30 or 90/10, whatever,
the bottom line is, most of the results come from minority causes.
You can also apply this when it comes to a business, lets take a look at a company like
apple, they have a quite good number of the products, iPhones, MacBooks, iwatch, apple
tv, iPod, they are all great products but they do not equally contribute to the company.
indeed, iPhone alone stands for more profit than all these products combined.
the point here, its wiser for apple to focus on developing the iPhone than the iPod for
example so if you are in business, its wiser for you to focus on those tiny number of products
or services that generate most of the revenue.
Thanks guys for watching, this was a short interaction of 80/20 principle rule, if you
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channel and see you guys in the next video.