the 80/20 rule

In Business School the Pareto Principle, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule, is a basic rule of thumb that you are taught to strategically assume across many different situations in business. 80% of the world’s goods are consumed by 20% percent of the world’s population, 80% of your business will come from 20% of your clients, and 80% of your time should be dedicated to 20% of your tasks. The list goes on and is quite extensive, as somehow the 80/20 rule seems to apply to almost anything in the corporate world.

Interestingly enough, however, the most intriguing application of the 80/20 rule that I’ve ever heard was not presented to me by one of my professors, but instead by a cheesy Janet Jackson movie that I came across while channel surfing one night. While the movie was terrible, as one would expect a Janet Jackson movie to be, it did offer an extremely enlightened version of the theory.

It arises when a character in the movie is discussing his infidelity with his friend and is justifying his affair with the fact that he believes this new woman is everything that his wife is not. To this his friend replies with an ingenious application of the Pareto Principle. He explains to his cheating friend that when in relationships, we can only expect that our partners will fulfill 80% of whatever we perceive to be ideal. Over time, when the missing 20% begins to escalate in importance and wear the relationship down, our perception tends to become skewed.

Then along comes the 20. The 20s, my dear friends, are people we have all met. They step into our lives when we are at the peak of our frustration with our current relationship and offer to us exactly what we’ve been lacking: the missing 20%. In this moment, the 20 radiates with perfection. In utter delusion and a bit of temporary insanity, we begin to regard the 20 as our ideal 100%.

And in this way, many of us make the mistake of leaving more for less. Blinded by the temporary fulfillment, we are unable to see that the 20 is purely just that: only 20% of what we desire. Soon enough you discover that you have forsaken someone who gave you 80% of what you needed for someone who will disappoint you far more than you’ve ever been disappointed in your life.

In business, that’s called a bad investment.

Since watching this movie, I have reflected quite extensively upon this version of the 80/20 rule. While the theory is technically not a correct application of the economic principle, it was surprisingly insightful for a horribly b-list film.

In the case of the 80/20 in relationships, hindsight is definitely 20/20.