CHAPTER 6 A Little Bit Goes a Long Way
CASE STUDY #4
My client’s home was up for sale with another agent for six months with no movement. She hired me, and I sold it within four months. Not only that, I helped her sell it for 96% of her asking price. In 1906, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto created the Pareto Principle, also called the 80/20 Rule. The premise is that 20% of your effort nets 80% of your results. He got the idea from his garden—he realized that 80% of the pea pod seeds on a plant seemed to come from about 20% of the pea pods. He launched into research to test his theory, and, sure enough, it held up across a wide range of fields! This rule can apply to pretty much everything in your life, such as 20% of your work leading to 80% of your income, 20% of the time you spend on a project leading to 80% of its progress, etc. What about the other 80% of your effort? Well, it’s obviously important, but it’s just not as impactful as that other 20%. Microsoft found out the 80/20 Rule was legit in a couple ways. As they looked into crashes in both Office and Windows, they realized that 80% of the problems were caused by 20% of the bugs they found. Beyond that, over half of the problems came from only 1% of the imperfect code. (Note that the 80/20 rule isn’t always exactly 80% and 20%, although it’s usually close; regardless, the idea that most of any given outcome stems from a relatively small source holds).
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