Pareto Principle Revisited

Here’s another one that we’ve already discussed in this course and that is the Perino principle.

It’s one of the principles that has really been everywhere through all my learning journey and is mentioned

over and over by some of the world’s top performers.

Now the Perino principle has been popularized by Tim Ferriss who has written for our chef The Four Hour

Work Week and a lot of books on essentially learning something efficiently.

Now Tim Ferriss discusses this idea that mastery actually requires you not to be the best in the world

but just to be the top 5 percent of the world which is actually quite achievable.

It’s not as hard as you think to be in the top 5 percent to be the best in the world though that is

extremely hard but top 5 percent is achievable.

So in order for us to get to the top 5 percent of the world to become masters of whatever we’re learning

we can use the period or principle to actually have an effective strategy.

The idea with the period or principle when it comes to techniques is to figure out exactly what the

critical skills are for you to get results as fast as possible because the potato principle states that

20 percent of work activity leads to 80 percent of the desired results.

That means 80 percent of the task usually produce 20 percent of the desired results.

So that means by being able to use immediate really efficient core 20 percent we can get the 80 percent

of the results.

Remember when we talked about how learning the first hundred most commonly used words in Spanish is

a great way to start learning Spanish.

Well again this is using the Prieto principle because you don’t need to know all the words in Spanish

because some of them are not used that often.

Instead you start off with the 20 percent.

In this case even less the first 100 words that are used 80 percent of the time.

So the Perrigo principle teaches us this idea of selection.

What are the critical skills that can achieve that immediate gratification that reward system in us

to want to constantly learn to get closer and closer to that top 5 percent of the world.

One of the things that I really try to emphasize when using the Prieto principle in my studies is to

always ask myself the question is this the best use of my time.

Is this the most critical piece of information for example going back to learning how to code when you

want to become a programmer a developer an engineer.

There’s so many things to learn.

We live in a world where technology is evolving so fast that when you’re just starting out it’s extremely

overwhelming you don’t know what you should learn.

It seems like you need to learn 200 topics all at once to even get an entry level job but instead by

using the Prieto principle you can do something like this.

You can go and research what are the job posting saying what are the most common things that show up

in job postings for requirements for a job then take those topics that top 20 percent and learn those

first that give you 80 percent of the results.

And once you’ve learned those asking yourself the question is this the critical piece of information

then you can move on to more obscure and more obscure topics.

Now the key with the Prieto principle is that it’s just as important to select what to learn as to remove

what not to learn.

A lot of people won’t achieve great success when it comes to learning because they tried to do everything

instead tried to remove the unnecessary from your life.

Is this the best use of my time.

We live in a world where we have limited time.

There’s so much information out there there’s so many topics to learn.

There’s so many articles books and videos to watch but not all of them are created equally.

Some are better than others and this is something we’ve already discussed in this course.

The key is to remove the noise remove the things that aren’t of the highest quality find the people

that you trust.

Find the sources that you trust what has proven to work for others find that 20 percent and start with

that 20 percent when creating a roadmap.

This is the principle that you have to have in the back of your mind.

Is this the critical piece of information.

Is this the best use of my time to finish off.

I want to show you something.

There was an interesting article on Hacker News recently which talked about how Wikipedia now has more

than 6 million articles in English and Wikipedia is such an awesome resource right.

It’s like the world’s encyclopedia.

But there’s no way you’re ever going to be able to read six million articles.

But an interesting stat here is that over half of these pages actually get less than 10 views in a month.

And this person actually discovered that the top seven point two percent of Wikipedia pages actually

earn 87 percent of the monthly views.

So that means that you can create a product like Wikipedia that only contains seven point two percent

of the articles and get eighty seven percent of the traffic.

Now the Prieto principle isn’t an exact science.

It isn’t always the 80 20.

But the idea is that of the core of the selection of the removal of the unnecessary I’ll see in the

next one.