Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m lazy.
That’s not something I suppose I should admit in on such a public forum, but being lazy is precisely how I managed to an expert in my field.
It all started back in high school. I asked myself one simple question, “Why am I studying all this useless stuff?” I couldn’t see how Shakespeare was going to help me on my entrepreneurial journey. Biology wasn’t going to be much use for me if I decided to go on to be a pilot. Don’t even get me started on South East Asian history.
The point is that so often in life we are asked to do things that really have very little relevance to our better tomorrow. I decided that I would focus my energy only on the things that mattered most. Later on in life, I learned from my mentor, Jim Rohn, that some people “major in minor things.”
PARETO
In essence, he was talking about Pareto’s principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. I highly recommend picking up Richard Koch’s The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less to those who want to learn more about it. In a nutshell, an Italian economist discovered that there was a correlation between cause and effect which was that 80% of the results come from 20% of our efforts. Conversely, that means 20% of our results comes from 80% of our effort which is the recipe for disaster.
Even more shocking is when we go deeper with this principle, an incredible 4% of our efforts result in 64% of our results. In reverse, that means 36% of our results come from 96% of our efforts. Therefore, to improve our chances of success whether in business or at school, and reduce our stress at the same time, it’s imperative we learn what 4% of our efforts will reap the biggest rewards.
40 MINUTES
When I started out my career, I hadn’t heard of Pareto, but I figured if I could out how to make my work easier, the less stress I would have and the more I’d be able to enjoy my life. I set about to learn everything I could about my job. I came in early, stayed late and practiced at home. Within a short period of time I had pretty much got everything down, so my day consisted of about 20 minutes planning at the beginning of each day and another 20 minutes getting things ready.
40 minutes and I was ready. Most of my colleagues spent more than two hours doing the same work. I honestly couldn’t figure out what took them so long. That gave me about an extra hour and 20 minutes each day which I reinvested in myself learning a number of different skills (and the occasional nap).
I was just trying to make a good impression and save myself some time and trouble and I had stumbled onto one of greatest time management secrets there is. The better you become, the easier things get.
TWO PEOPLE
That’s why two people who work at the same office, the same amount of hours, doing the same work can get vastly different salaries. One is accomplishing that much more. Too often in life people confuse doing with achieving. They couldn’t be more different.
Let’s use two imaginary employees – John and Chris to illustrate. John spends all day working and get very little in the way of results. Chris, on the other hand, spends 90 minutes and gets more done than John does all day. How does that happen?
INVEST IN YOURSELF
What we often don’t see is all the work Chris put in to become who he is. Maybe he took a speed-reading course back in college, allowing him to whip through the material. He may have invested in some home study programs on Udemy or from speakers such as Brian Tracy or Dan Kennedy. Perhaps he spent a year in Italy taking intensive Italian. There are any number of things Chris could have done allowing him to achieve incredible results.
LAZY
The goal should never to be to work longer. Anyone can work long and hard. It takes skill to work less and achieve more. In fact, many successful people I know often have a lot of time on their hands. But trust me, most of them worked hard to build their company or to become president of a Fortune 500 company. It’s just we might not have seen it.
Personally, I have invested more than 10,000 hours on time management and personal development, written one book, co-authored another and will soon be co-authoring a third. I created my own time management program and became a joint venture consultant. All because I wanted to be “lazy.”