Putting high effort in the activities that bring you the most results

Put your effort towards the things that are important for you

People have very busy shedules this means that we have to focus on the important thing and to get rid of the unimportant.

The Pareto distribution is very well-known to many people. This rule means that 80% of the positive benefits are being created by 20% of the effort and 80% of the negative are being created by 20% of the activities. If you know which activities to dismiss and which ones to focus on. Let’s take a look at some examples of the rule applied to health. If you are eating healthy during the week but unhealthy in the week the negative effects of the weekend can reduce the benefits you gain from during the week.

A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. – Elbert Hubbard

To receive awesome results we expect to have to perform an enormous amount of effort. However if you ask anyone who succeeded with some big result will say that yes they worked hard, but it was doable. Not many people would do it if they were forced to perform a ton of work to succeed. Rather than constantly being forced to work hard you can have great activities 20% of the time to get the best result 80% of the time. If you are having difficulties to achieve your goal you can start with focussing on what bad activities you should start to reduce. Start reducing them and slowly you can implement the things you really need to participate in.

A different example where doing something small each day helps greatly is for learning an instrument. Instead of doing 2 hours each day or even 2 hours on sunday it’s much better to do 15 minutes each day. It’s not the total amount of time that you spend, rather the spaced repitition that helps you learn. Your body and mind will learn the movements while resting/recovering. The same thing goes for working out. You don’t have to workout for 2 hours each day because your body wont be able to recover. It’s rather not laying in the couch all the time and just having some movement that will get you 80% of the results.