Achievement and Happiness the 80/20 Way

By Rasheed Ali

If there was ever a principle that was responsible for the most happiness and achievement in the world, it would be the 80/20 Principle.

The 80/20 Principle or Pareto Principle was discovered in 1897 by an Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto while he was searching for patterns of wealth and income in England.

What he found was that 80 percent of the wealth was enjoyed by only 20 percent of the population. Additionally, it was consistent in different countries and in different times.

This has been found in present day as well and in almost any activity that we perform, business or otherwise.

In other words, 80 percent of your results in a given activity, are generated by 20 percent of your input or effort. Just the same, 80 percent of revenue or profits are generated by 20 percent of your efforts or sales.

The 80/20 relationship can also easily be documented in personal achievement and happiness.

Most people have never taken the time to count their achievements or much less figure out what makes them happy. If they did, they would have realized that there are very few things that contribute to most of their happiness. They would also have found that there are very few things that they have done that has resulted in most of their achievements.

A great example of the 80/20 Principle in achievement would be to look at some achievement that you've made in your life, and write down all of the things that you did that "truly" got you there. If you're looking at it honestly you'll see that it took consistent effort on very few things to get you most of your results.

My website is another great example. I could have spent a lot of working hours and even more money to get my traffic up, but in reality it took very little work and money to get my Alexa traffic rank from over 3,000,000 in the world to currently 212,901 and climbing every week! It has taken very few, small but effective steps to achieve this. You will find this time and time again in your life if you take a closer look. What you may have thought of as hard work may have been a few effective actions combined with many ineffective actions. By the way, this was done in less than three months.

Now, although achievement makes us happy, what else does?

A serious "Happiness Analysis" is also something all of us should do at least once in our lives. If you documented the things that contribute to your happiness then number the things that make you the happiest, you will find that there are only a few things that contribute to most of your happiness. In other words 20 percent of the things that make you happy, contribute to 80 percent of your happiness!

With that said, if you were to spend more time doing the things that result in most of your happiness or achievement, you WILL double or even triple your results. •

© Rasheed Ali