It is also a great first step into deeper topics such as spirituality. There is one chapter dedicated to what Koch calls “Your Hidden Friend” that could be a gateway to many other books and topics that will take you down a deeper and meaningful road.
The book has all those great components you are looking for in a business/professional growth book. It has examples, it has strategic advice, it has stories, and also has tactical advice on how you can take action by applying what you are learning.
Flow: 5/5
Actionability: 5/5
Mindset: 4/5
Some of My Highlights:
“The universe is predictably unbalanced. Few things really matter.”
“…some forces are more forcefully than others and will try to grab more than their fair share of resources.”
“A 51/49 split is inherently unstable and tends to gravitate towards a 95/5, 99/1, or even 100/0 split.”
“A few things are important; most things are not.”
“George Bernard Shaw put it well: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'”
“Joseph Ford comments: ‘God plays dice with the universe. But they’re loaded dice. And the main objective is to find out by what rules they were loaded and how we can use them for our own ends.'”
“When I left the first strategy firm and joined the second, I raised the average level of intelligence in both.”
“It was better to be in the right place than to be smart and work hard.”
“Acting on a few key insights produced the goods. Being intelligent and hard-working did not.”
“Conventional wisdom is not to put all your eggs in one basket. 80/20 wisdom is to choose a basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk.”
“The most valuable insight from 80/20 Analysis will always come from examining nonlinear relationships that others are neglecting.”
“Thinking requires, and with practice enables, us to spot the few really important things that are happening and ignore the mass of unimportant things.”
“For every ounce of insights generated quantitatively, there must be many pounds of insights arrived at intuitively and impressionistically.”
“be selective, not exhaustive”
“strive for excellence in a few things, rather than good performance in many”
“only do the thing we are best at doing and enjoy most”
“calm down, work less and target a limited number of very valuable goals where the 80/20 Principle will work for us, rather than pursuing every available opportunity.”
“A firm cannot be judged successful unless it has a high absolute surplus (in traditional terms, a high return on investment) and also a higher surplus than its competitors (higher margins).”
“Firms rarely reach the highest level of surplus that they could attain, or anywhere near it, both because managers are often not aware of the potential for surplus and because they often prefer to rung large firms rather than exceptionally profitable ones.”
“The world is full of small causes that, when combined, can have momentous consequences,”