Mini Ep. 58: The 80/20 Rule

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJ Mental Models.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And in this week's mini episode, I want to talk about the 80/20 rule, how you can use it in Jiu-Jitsu, and where its limitations are. And that last piece is very important. So, before we go further, if you haven't already done so, I recommend listening to last week's mini episode, The Map Is Not the Territory. That's a powerful mental model for understanding the limits of other mental models like this one. The goal is to make sure that we know that most mental models cannot be universally applied. The 80/20 rule is a great illustration of this because since it is so often discussed in pop science, people love to talk about it and love to apply it, but it's not a universal rule that works all the time, despite the fact that it has rule in the name. There's places where it can be useful, but there's also limitations. So, first, go back and listen to that episode, The Map Is Not the Territory, if you haven't already. I'll put a link in the show notes to make it easy to find. With that said, let's talk about the 80/20 rule. So, the 80/20 rule is also known as the Pareto Principle, which is named after the Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto, which is an amazing name. The Pareto Principle basically talks about uneven distributions of results. And a good way to explain how this works in practice is to draw a contrast to what results could look like if they were more evenly distributed. So, you may have heard of a bell curve. This is often the way that you would expect things like test results to be distributed at school. So, if everyone in the room takes a test, you would expect that most people will probably be around the middle, and then you're going to have a few outliers at the edges. Some people who got really high scores and some people who got really low scores. If you plot all of those tests onto a graph, what you'll see is that it looks like a bell. There is a big space in the middle where a lot of people are at or around average, but then you've also got those outliers on the edges, the people who scored really low or the people who scored really high. A lot of distributions take a bell curve shape. So, again, test results is often one. Um, human height is another, weight can be another. So, these are examples of distributions that are a little bit more even. However, distributions don't have to be even, and that's where the Pareto Principle comes into play. So, the Pareto Principle observes that in some cases, you will see a small sliver of the participants achieve a massive portion of the results. And a very common distribution that you might have heard discussed is 80% versus 20%. That's where the name 80/20 rule comes from. So, the idea being, if you are seeing an 80/20 distribution, it would mean that 80% of the results are coming from 20% of the efforts. A great example of where you see a distribution like this is wealth inequality, where you might see a small group of people who control a significant portion of the society's overall wealth. That would be a Pareto distribution and not a bell curve distribution. Arguably, if it were a bell curve distribution, life would be a lot easier for many of us. So, again, when we talk about the 80/20 rule, this is a specific application of the Pareto Principle, where you are seeing that 80% 20% breakdown. There is not necessarily anything magic about those 80% 20% numbers. And in fact, a lot of the time people use the term 80/20 a bit too loosely, where they'll say this is an 80/20 distribution, but really if you look at the math, it's not exactly 80/20, maybe it's more like 90/10. But the idea is the same, even if the numbers are not exactly the same. You are talking about a Pareto distribution where you have a small percentage of winners who are taking a massive portion of the winnings. If you think about Jiu-Jitsu, there's a lot of examples of the 80/20 rule in Jiu-Jitsu. I mean, I again, I can't give you hard numbers, but if you were to guess that 80% of competition wins can be attributed to around 20% of competitors, I don't know if that's entirely accurate. I don't know if those numbers line up, but I would suspect you would probably see some sort of Pareto distribution, where you've got a small group of people collecting the majority of the wins. I don't know if it would be 80/20, maybe it would be 95/5, maybe it would be 90/10, I don't know. But the idea is that you would see a small group of big winners and a big group of average people or losers. Um, that's often how a Pareto distribution works. Now, a Pareto distribution can explain things like why we have some people who seem to win all the time in Jiu-Jitsu, but it can also be used from a strategy standpoint. Where the 80/20 rule is used a lot is in process optimization in business. When people are looking at how can we cut costs and get things done faster, they can use the 80/20 rule. Find the places where we are getting a lot of results for minimal effort, focus on those, and see if the remaining 80% of things you're doing that aren't really getting results can be just disregarded or abandoned or canceled. Maybe those things that you're spending the majority of your time on are not actually yielding any significant results. So, again, I just want to bring this up again. We will say the 80/20 rule just because that's kind of shorthand language that people use for this concept. Really what we're talking about is any Pareto distribution where you've got a small group of big winners, and then you've got a big group of everybody else. So, in Jiu-Jitsu, when we're talking about strategy, we might want to look at the 20% of techniques we're doing that are getting us 80% of the results. Many grapplers have a specialty where there are certain techniques that they're just good at, and they might be getting the majority of their results from those techniques. Theoretically, you can optimize your game by knowing what those big winners are and focusing on them and avoiding all of the things that don't get you results. That would be an example of using a Pareto distribution, like the 80/20 rule, to optimize your Jiu-Jitsu. However, the trap with the 80/20 rule is that it can lead to short-term thinking, because you're so focused on the things that are getting you results right now, that you might be disregarding things that are an investment into the future. So, back to this example of the 80% of stuff you're doing that's maybe not getting you any results. Well, maybe those are techniques that you're just learning for the first time. Maybe you're not very good at them. Maybe if you kept training them, you would get amazing at them, and one day those could become the techniques that are getting you the big results. Maybe you're just not there now. So, the trap with the 80/20 rule is if you rely on it too much, you can wind up throwing out all of the aspects of your game that are still in development and focusing only on the things that you're already good at. And that's a quick path to stagnation, because you'll always be doing the stuff that you know works and you'll never be trying to add new things that maybe you're not great at out of the gate. So, there's the trap with the 80/20 rule, both in Jiu-Jitsu and in business, it can lead to situations where you over-optimize and throw out things that maybe they're not getting you big results now, but maybe they are critical investments into your future. So, another limitation there to discuss with the 80/20 rule. One of the cool things about these Pareto distributions, like the 80/20 rule, is once you know that they exist, you start seeing them all over life. And once you realize that you're dealing with an 80/20 rule or Pareto distribution, you know that you have the option to focus on the big winners and disregard the things that aren't getting results. That's an option that you can use whenever you see this distribution. Again, though, just as a caveat, there are limitations to what you can achieve by cutting out the poor performers. You do that at your own peril, because sometimes you might be eliminating the things that are investments into your future, things that down the road might become critically important, but right now just aren't yielding what you need. So, I hope all of this is useful. Again, a very well-discussed pop science concept that is useful, but also has limitations. People talk about the uses quite often, but I don't hear many people talking about the limitations. So, I wanted to do that here today, um, just to make sure that people don't get too carried away when they hear someone talking about the 80/20 rule. It's useful, but it's not complete. It doesn't apply all of the time. It doesn't always apply exactly in an 80/20 distribution, and relying on it too much can hurt your future growth. So, this is kind of the stuff that really makes BJJ Mental Models what it is. This kind of discussion is what we focus on and an area that in my opinion, other people in Jiu-Jitsu don't focus on enough. Good news is, we've got a lot of content like this. If you want more of it, just go to BJJ Mental Models.com. All of the long-form episodes that we do are intended to be timeless and educational lessons that you can apply just as well today as you could when we recorded them originally. If you don't have time to listen to everything, we've also got a lot of mini episodes like this. I would suggest binging those to really quickly learn the key mental models behind Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And if you want to kick this up to the next level with us, please do consider BJJ Mental Models Premium. This service is unlike any other Jiu-Jitsu subscription service that you will find out there. I will spare you the whole pitch because it's on our website, so you can learn more there, but I will just say that this is not yet another video academy library of techniques. These are big ideas and community networking that will change the way that you operate in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, both as a practitioner and also as a coach or a business owner if that's your game. So, all of that is at BJJ Mental Models.com. Thank you again for listening. Truly appreciate it, and I will talk to you in the next episode.