This week. Refocus, reconnect, and rejuvenate.
Over the years we’ve all been in workshops, lectures, and seminars that love to hype things. I will admit that I love to weave a story and a lot of times I end up weaving more than basket making, I get lost in the hype also. For that, I apologize in advance because I do get caught up in fancy phrases and quotes.
That’s not what these NFTM are to be used for… This is a distillation of the work that I’m doing on myself every morning and I hope that maybe you get some inspiration, or that after I publish this maybe you take one idea and it “turns all the lights on.” I live for those moments. The moments when I’m turned on about something.
This morning has been a battle… so let’s get to work.
What is your superpower? I mean really, what is it?
I read something over the weekend called the “20% Spike” and the author who said that believed that within the CEOs, superachievers, there is something they have isolated and are doing it which is creating all of their achievement. Some CEOs are sociopathic monsters, but they might know how to do mergers and acquisitions really, really well. The key here is they know they are extremely good at that, and they protect that skill; so even though you don’t want to spend 2 weeks with this person, you might want to spend 2 hours hearing about how to do mergers and acquisitions from them. I’m very interested in what my 20% is… What is the 20% of what I’m doing that provides me with everything else?
I’m thinking though is that I don’t think it’s the 20% of my behaviors or activities that’s making a difference. I actually know now that it’s more like 1%. If we use the psycho-CEO analogy, then it’s just one thing that they do well.
I want to refine the 20% spike idea and use it in finding my 1% superpower. My question really is, what is the 1% thing in us that really can make us the 1,000,000% gain? That’s what really interests me.
Here’s something I love: the Pareto Principle. This is really what we are talking about right? So let’s try it. But this time, I want to do something different with it. I want to take the 20 and apply the same logic on it as 80/20. You start with 100, break it into 80/20… now take the 20 and go 20/4, then take the 4, take 20 percent of that, and so on…
Pareto Experiment Question: Can I use the 80/20 rule, recursively, on the 20, and if we do, can we use it to refine our activities down even more?
Experiment: I identify the 20% of what I’m doing daily, then I find the 4 things that are driving the 20%, of those 4 things, what are the 0.8 things that I’m doing that drive those 4… Enter this big chart:
Nice chart Dan. What it tells me about life is exactly nothing. But, it sorta looks interesting. It took a while to make this chart, and I could barely keep all the zeros straight… about halfway through counting zeros on my phone’s calculator one thing did occur to me. I can take math off the list of things that are providing me with 80%. That’s for damn sure.
Seriously though. What I did come up with is that we need to be doing less. We need to prune the things out of our lives that are keeping us from being the most effective that we can be. That’s what Pareto is really all about and how we can use it. It’s about knowing yourself better and making the small course corrections that get us to the destinations we set.
I believe that we all have one or two talents that we can use to make a huge impact in our lives and in the lives of others. I also believe that like me, we don’t always know what they are, but with a little work, using the Pareto Principle or not using it–we can figure it out.
Have a great week all! I’m sending love to you. I believe in you 100% — that’s for sure. Let’s go crush it!
Featured Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
