This book describes The 80/20 principle, which states that 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes.

In other words: there are disproportionate outputs to some inputs.

“Never read a book from cover to cover, except for pleasure.” […]
80 percent of the value of a book can be found in 20 percent of its pages and absorbed in 20 percent of the time most people would take to read it through.

That anecdote covers the 80/20 mindset in miniature.
Start at the end, skim for the signal, ignore the filler.
You don’t get points for endurance; you get results for selecting the right pages.
Same with everything else in life: selection first, effort second.

The uncomfortable math of your time

Most of what we do is low value. A few small fragments of time are much more valuable than all the rest.
We seem to get 80% of the results in 20% of the time, but 80% of the time only leads to 20% value. This is startling: it means that we waste a very great deal of our time.
Any solution to this problem won’t be finding little improvements towards the edges. It has to be radical.

It’s not small optimizations. Not at all.
This is efficiency vs. effectiveness.

Choosing what to fail at

Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.

“Being selective” means deciding—on purpose—to do one thing now and fail by omission at many others. One thing at a time.

You don’t owe the world a broad portfolio of mediocre attempts.

You owe yourself (and your results) a narrow, high-return bet, repeated.

The non-linear nature of productive time

There is no value in doing things you don’t enjoy.
Do the things that you like doing. Make them your job. Make your job them. Nearly everyone who has become rich has had the added bonus of becoming rich doing things they enjoy. This might be taken as yet another example of the universe’s 80/20 perversity.

It’s hard to outcompete someone who’s having fun working 16 hours a day.

Be unconventional and eccentric in your use of time
You are unlikely to spend the most valuable 20 percent of your time in being a good soldier, in doing what is expected of you, in attending the meetings that everyone assumes you will, in doing what most of your peers do, or in otherwise observing the social conventions of your role. In fact, you should question whether any of these things is necessary.

Your most valuable hours are almost never the hours where you’re being a “good soldier.”
Meetings everyone expects you to attend, obligations people assume you’ll keep, the standard rhythms of your role—these are rarely in your personal top 20 percent.

Question every default. Decline more. Rearrange your day around when your brain actually works, not when other people’s calendars are free.

There is no shortage of time. In fact, we are positively awash with it. We only make good use of 20 percent of our time. And for the most talented individuals, it is often tiny amounts of time that make all the difference. The 80/20 Principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20 percent of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60 percent more than now. This is light years away from the frenetic world of time management.

It’s not a lack of time that’s the issue. It’s your decisions about how you spend it.

The ruthless elimination of time sinks

Eliminate the wasteful 80%. You might first think this impossible. It probably isn’t.

Your first instinct will be that you can’t escape the low-value stuff because “it’s required.”
Start cutting anyway. Automate it, outsource it, postpone it, or kill it.

Especially kill it if it’s one of these:

• the things other people want you to do,
• things done “this way” by default,
• tasks you’re not unusually good at or don’t enjoy,
• work that’s constantly interrupted,
• work few others are interested in,
• collaborators who are unreliable or low quality,
• projects past their original time budget,
• predictable recurring busywork,
• and reactive time sinks (hello, phone).

If a thing keeps you in motion without progress, it’s waste.

On the flip side, your best uses of time are the ones that

• advance your purpose,
• you’ve always wanted to do,
• already show a 80/20 payoff,
• slash time or multiply quality,
• look “impossible” to others,
• borrow working models from other arenas,
• use your creativity,
• can be done by others with little input from you,
• involve high-caliber collaborators,
• or are genuinely now-or-never.

Spend more of your week there. A lot more.

When thinking about any potential use of time, ask two questions:
• Is it unconventional?
• Does it promise to multiply effectiveness?
It is unlikely to be a good use of time unless the answer to both questions is yes.

Playing your own game

Even if you work for a large corporation, you should think of yourself as an independent business, working for yourself, despite being on Monolith Inc.’s payroll.
The 80/20 Principle shows time and time again that the 20 percent who achieve the most either work for themselves or behave as if they do.

It’s hard to capture just how useful this mindset has been for me.
Take responsibility for—and respect—your time. Work to the best of your ability, always.
Say no to things you don’t think are a valuable use of your time.

The Protestant work ethic is so deeply engrained in everyone, of all religions and none, that we need to make a conscious effort to extirpate it. The trouble is that we do enjoy hard work, or at least the feeling of virtue that comes from having done it. What we must do is to plant firmly in our minds that hard work, especially for somebody else, is not an efficient way to achieve what we want. Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we ourselves want lead to high returns.

Hard work for someone else = low ROI.
Working smart for yourself = high ROI.

How to work less and achieve more

“Lazy” here means allergic to wasted motion.

The strategy:

Specialize narrowly and build a core skill you can be the best at.
Choose a niche you enjoy and can dominate.
Then live the cliché properly: knowledge is power. Not “know a lot”; know more than anyone about something specific—and keep widening that lead with practice and curiosity. Don’t stop until you’re actually the person others come to for that thing.

From there, get leverage.
Learn from the best; copy what’s transferable and then push it further.
Capture more of the value you create by moving toward self-employment early, so the upside lands with you.
Hire or collaborate with net value creators.
Outsource everything that isn’t your edge.
Later, add capital leverage to multiply what your system already does well.

Identify your market and your core customers and serve them best. Marketize your unique knowledge, to create a market and a set of loyal customers.

It’s important that you become independent early. You get freedom over how you spend your time, and you get as much value as possible.

There is one sensible exception to going independent immediately: if you’re in a genuine super-learning window—those first couple of years in an elite environment where the learning per hour is off the charts—then the learning itself might be worth more than the dollars.
Milk that period, then leave.

“Be willing to pay a high price to work for the best.”

Find excuses to orbit the top people. Watch how they think, spend time, and interact.
Leaders aren’t just “working harder”; they’re doing different things in different ways.

Meanwhile, keep asking the ruthless questions Koch pushes:

• What is the majority doing wrong?
• What is the minority doing right?
• Could you do what the minority does, but more extremely or more cleverly?

If you feel like you have to work 60–70‑hour weeks just to cope, or always feel behind, you’re doing the wrong thing or you’re doing the thing wrong.
You are certainly not benefiting from the 80/20 principle.