The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less (34 page)

Another key component of a happy day is
mental stimulation.
You may obtain this at work but, if not, ensure that there is some intellectual or mental exercise each day. There are a huge number of ways to obtain this, depending on your interests: crossword puzzles, certain newspapers and magazines, reading part of a book, talking for at least 20 minutes to an intelligent friend about an abstract topic, writing a short article or journal entry, in fact, doing anything that requires active thought on your part (watching television, even of the high-brow kind, does not qualify).

A third essential daily regime is
spiritual or artistic stimulation.
This need not be as forbidding as it sounds: all that is required is at least half an hour’s food for the imagination or spirit. Going to a concert, art gallery, theater, or movie all qualify, as do reading a poem, watching the sun rise or set, looking at the stars, or attendance at any event where you are stimulated and excited (this can even include a ball game, race meeting, political rally, church, or park). Meditation also works well.

Daily happiness habit number four is
doing something for another person or people.
This does not have to be a major work of benevolence; it can be a random act of kindness such as paying for someone else’s parking meter or going out of your way to direct someone. Even a brief altruistic act can have a great effect on your spirits.

The fifth habit is to
share a pleasurable break with a friend.
This must be an uninterrupted tête-à-tête lasting at least half an hour, but the form of the occasion is up to you (a cup of coffee, a drink, a meal, or a leisurely walk are all appropriate).

Habit number six is to
give yourself a treat.
To prompt you each day, write down now a list of all the pleasures in which you could indulge yourself (don’t worry, you don’t have to show the list to anyone!). Ensure that you chalk up at least one of these each day.

The final habit, at the end of each day, is to
congratulate yourself
on having followed your daily happiness habits. Since the point is to make yourself happy rather than unhappy, you can count a score of five or more (including this number seven) as a success. If you haven’t notched up five habits, but have still achieved something significant or enjoyed yourself, congratulate yourself anyway on a day’s worthwhile living.

MEDIUM-TERM STRATAGEMS FOR HAPPINESS

In addition to your seven happiness habits, Figure 39 distills seven shortcuts to a happy life.

Figure 39 Seven shortcuts to a happy life

Shortcut number one is to
maximize control over your life.
Lack of control is the root cause of much unease and uncertainty. I would rather drive a long way round a complex city route, with which I am familiar, than try to navigate a potentially shorter course that I do not know. Bus drivers are more frustrated than bus conductors, and more liable to heart attacks, not just because of the lack of exercise on the job but because they have much more limited control over when the bus moves. Working in the classic large bureaucracy leads to alienation because one’s working life cannot be controlled. Self-employed people who can determine their working hours and work scheduling are happier than employed people who cannot.

Maximizing the proportion of your life under your own control requires planning and often risk taking. The happiness dividends, however, should not be underestimated.

Setting reasonable and attainable goals
is the second shortcut to happiness. Psychological research has shown that we are likely to achieve most when we have reasonably challenging but not too difficult goals. Objectives that are too easy will lead us to be complacent, accepting mediocre performance. But objectives that are too tough—the sort of objectives set by those of us laden with guilt or burdened with high and punitive expectations—are demoralizing and lead us to self-fulfilling self-perceptions of failure. Remember that you are trying to become happier. If in doubt, when setting yourself goals, err on the soft side. It is better for your happiness to set soft goals and succeed than it is to set tough goals and fail, even if the latter would have led you to objectively superior performance. If there is a trade-off between achievement and happiness, choose happiness.

The third shortcut is to
be flexible when chance events interfere with plans and expectations.
John Lennon once remarked that life is what happens while we’re making other plans. Our objective must be to make our plans stick so that we happen to life rather than the other way round, but we must be prepared for life to insert its quota of objections and diversions. Life’s interjections should be cheerfully and playfully accepted as a counterpoint to our plans. If possible, life’s unplanned contribution should be incorporated into our own plan, so that it can proceed to an even higher level. If imagination fails us here, life’s objection should be worked around or quashed. If neither of these tactics works, we should accept what we cannot control with grace and maturity and get on with molding what we can control. On no account should we let life’s objections ruffle us or make us angry, self-doubting, or bitter.

Fourth,
develop a close relationship with a happy partner.
We are programmed to develop a close living relationship with one person. This selection of the partner is one of the few decisions in life (one of the 20 percent) that will help determine whether we are happy or not. Sexual attraction is one of the universe’s great mysteries and demonstrates an extreme form of the 80/20 Principle: the real chemistry can occur in fleeting seconds, so that you feel 99 percent of the attraction in 1 percent of the time and you know at once that this is the person for you!
¹²
But the 80/20 Principle should put you on your guard: danger and wasted happiness could lie ahead. Bear in mind that there are many people with whom you could, in theory, bond; this rush of blood to the head (or the heart) will happen again.

If you have not yet selected a partner, remember that your happiness will be greatly influenced by the happiness of your partner. For the sake of your happiness, as well as for love, you will want to make your partner happy. But this is a great deal easier if your partner has, to start with, a happy temperament and/or if he or she consciously adopts a prohappiness daily regime (such as my happiness habits). Team up with an unhappy partner and the odds are that you yourself will end up unhappy. People with low self-esteem and self-confidence are a nightmare to live with, however much mutual love abounds. If you are a very happy person, you might just make an unhappy person happy, but it is a hell of a trick to pull off. Two mildly unhappy people who are deeply in love might just, with strong determination to be happy and a good happiness regimen, manage to attain mutual happiness; but I would not bet on it. Two unhappy people, even in love, will drive each other nuts. If you want to be happy, choose to love a happy partner.

You may, of course, already have a partner who is not happy and, if so, you will probably be seriously subtracting from your own happiness. If so, it should be a major project for both of you to make your partner happy.

The fifth shortcut is to
cultivate close friendships with a few happy friends.
The 80/20 Principle predicts that most of the satisfaction you draw from all of your friends will be concentrated in your relationship with a small number of close friends. The principle also indicates that you are likely to misallocate your time, spending too much with the not-so-good friends and too little with the very good friends (although you may allocate more time per friend to the good friends, there are more of the not-so-good variety in most people’s friendship portfolio, so that in aggregate the not-so-good friends take more time than the good ones). The answer is to decide who the good friends are and give them 80 percent of the time allocated to friends (you should probably increase this absolute amount of time as well). You should try to build these good friendships as much as possible, because they will be a great source of mutual happiness.

Shortcut six is similar to five:
develop strong professional alliances with a small number of people whose company you enjoy.
Not all your work or professional colleagues should become your friends; if so, you would spread your friendship too thinly. But a few should become close friends and allies; people whom you will go out of your way to support and who will do the same for you. This will not only enhance your career. It will also immeasurably enrich the pleasure you take at work; it will help to prevent your feeling alienated at work; and it will provide a unifying link between your work and play. This unity, too, is essential for full happiness.

The final shortcut to lasting happiness is to
evolve the lifestyle you and your partner want.
This requires a harmonious balance between your work life, home life, and social life. It means that you live where you want to work, have the quality of life that you want, have time to attend to family and social affairs, and are equally happy at work and outside it.

CONCLUSION

Happiness is a duty. We should choose to be happy. We should work at happiness. And in doing so, we should help those closest to us, and even those who just stumble across us, to share our happiness.

PART
FOUR

FRESH INSIGHTS: THE PRINCIPLE REVISITED

16

THE TWO DIMENSIONS OF THE PRINCIPLE

Over the past ten years I’ve been delighted to receive many hundreds of e-mails from readers of the first edition of this book. Equally important, and in many ways even more stimulating, have been many reviews posted on the Amazon sites; there are currently seventy reviews on the
Amazon.com
site alone. These e-mails and reviews have led to fresh insights into the way the principle works, particularly its relationship to its two dimensions of efficiency and life enhancement.

Some of these reviews are highly critical of the book and the principle, and for me these are the most challenging and useful. The two main critical questions that have been raised are “Does the 80/20 Principle really apply to our personal lives at all?” and “Isn’t the 80 percent really essential too?” I shall come back to these later in the chapter.

The stories that inspired me most were not where readers had used the 80/20 Principle to enjoy work more, or make more money, or both. The most moving accounts were ones where the principle had focused readers on what was truly important in their lives.

My favorite story comes from a fifty-year-old Canadian, “happily married with three wonderful kids.” Darrel, as I will call him, needs to remain anonymous, but I have not changed anything apart from his name. He’s had a successful career as an educator, and is currently the CEO of a large school district. Three years ago he was diagnosed as having a non-verbal learning disability (NLD). He told me:

It was a hard pill to swallow, but I know my diagnosis is accurate…when I spend minutes searching for my car in the parking lot, or going through my desk looking for that piece of paper that is right in front of me or maybe even in my hand, I realize just how true the diagnosis is. Here I am, trying to find ways to support children with special needs, which is a big part of my work, and, wouldn’t you know it, I have special needs myself…

I publish a lot…advocating that teachers become leaders. It was because, when I was a principal, there were so many things that the teachers could do much better than me, I delegated to them the 80 percent of tasks that I wasn’t good at. It ended up in them nominating me for a leadership award which I received in 1999. Little did they know that my empowering them and cheer-leading them, while authentic, were also done out of necessity…

I realize how the 80/20 Principle has really been my reason for success…I also want to use your 80/20 philosophy in helping others with learning difficulties focus on the top 20 percent of what they do well…In the not too distant future, I hope to remove the veil that prevents me from showing others the person that I truly am.

Darrel has written a moving article called “Finding power in weakness,” which applies the 80/20 Principle in a novel way. Essentially he says that when our weaknesses are apparent to us, we can rely on our strong suits more potently: partly because we have to, and partly because we realize the gap between our weaknesses and other people’s strengths. We appreciate how dependent we are on other people and in return strive to help them with the signature strengths that we happen to have. Denying our weaknesses, or even reducing them, can cut us off from our strengths, and from those of the people around us.