Hey innovators,
This week, I want to share with you a simple principle first discovered by an Italian economist in 1896 that gives you practical ‘cheat codes’ to drastically increase your achievements in almost any field of life…without doing ‘more’ work.
(no, it’s not embezzlement)
I want to share this idea because it’s been an incredible help in learning a new language—but it applies equally well to magic
What is this principle?
Discovered by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in 1896, this principle has been coined ‘the 80/20 rule.’
In essence, it argues that 80% of any given outputs come from 20% of their inputs.
To illustrate, here are few easy examples:
80% of the sales come from 20% of the clients
80% of the wealth is held by 20% of the population
80% of the errors are contained in 20% of the code
This isn’t an exact science (maybe the distribution is 75/15, or 90/10) but the idea is the same:
The majority of the outputs can nearly always be traced back to the minority of the inputs.
Interesting, right?
Now, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of this principle before.
So before you leave this email thoroughly un-enlightened, let me tell you something that very few people realize about this principle…
The 80-20 rule is ‘fractal.’
A fractal, in non-mathematical terms, is a pattern that repeats itself as you zoom in.
In regards to the 80/20 principle, we can look at it as follows:
If 20% of the inputs are responsible for 80% of the outputs, then 20% of that 20% is responsible for 80% of that 80%, and so on.
(Maybe read that a couple of times.)
All it’s saying is that the 80/20 principle applies to itself.
A quick example will make everything crystal clear:
Let’s say we run our own business. Over the course of a month, we’ve had 1000 customers, and from them, we’ve made $10,000 in revenue.
According to the 80/20 rule, we can predict that around 20% of those 1000 customers (200 people) are responsible for around 80% of our $10k revenue ($8000).
But we can go further.
If we take our new data set (200 customers and $8000 in revenue), we can apply the 80/20 rule again.
We would predict that around 20% of the 200 customers (40 people) are responsible for around 80% of the $8000 ($6400).
If we iterate once more, we would estimate that 20% of the 40 customers (8 people) are responsible for 80% of the $6400 ($5120).
We can keep on playing this game until we run out of numbers, but I think you get the point.
In our imaginary business, it would be very much in our interest to figure out exactly who this small group of customers are.
Maybe they’re enterprise clients with corporate budgets.
Maybe they just really like what we sell.
Either way, rather than expending your effort equally on marketing to all 1000 customers, you can spend the majority of your time focusing on the core group that makes up the majority of the revenue.
The end result of such an effort would likely be less time spent marketing and more results gained.
Of course, this example is just an illustration.
The beauty of the 80/20 principle (and its fractal breakdown) is that it can be applied to nearly anything you’re working on.
Just isolate the minority causes that result in majority results, zoom in on those causes, and optimize for them.
Alright.
I know what you’re thinking…
What does this have to do with learning a language or magic?
Here’s a simple 3 step answer:
There are a lot of words in any given language (just as there’s a lot of moves in magic…)
According to the 80/20 principle, a relatively small proportion of words/moves (20%) should make up the majority of conversations/performances (80%)
If you focus on learning these particular words/moves, you’ll achieve more results in less time
Is this the case?
Absolutely.
I won’t bore you with the statistics, but this overall idea—that a small group of words makes up the majority of day-to-day conversations—is definitely the case.
If you can isolate that core group of words/magic moves, you can become proficient in a language in a much smaller amount of time than you might anticipate.
Hopefully, this is of some use to you all!
Your friend,
Benji
The Daily Magician Inner Circle
Helping You Think Differently