Chapter 5: Enjoy Work and Success

Overview

It s true hard work never killed anyone , but I figure, why take the chance?

Ronald Reagan

Remember the Woody Allen movie The Purple Rose of Cairo ? Mia Farrow is sitting in the audience, watching her favorite film. Suddenly actor Jeff Daniels, bored with reciting the same lines time and again, jumps from the movie into the cinema. He snatches Mia Farrow off, unleashing a fabulous love affair.

There, I think, lies the secret of success. I don t mean grabbing Mia Farrow, I mean the ability to switch between ordinary life and life as it could be. I mean having an idea, or a fantasy, or a passion ” and acting on it. Stepping out of a life of duty, where everything runs on predictable lines dictated by other people, into a life created by your own imagination . Forgetting about hard work and using the greatest of all human attributes, our ability to move between the world as it is and the world in our minds. Thinking, imagining , creating, enjoying.

Other animals can work hard, only humans can think hard. Other animals are programmed by evolution. People are too, but we can also program ourselves and change the world we find into a world we prefer. The whole edifice of modern civilization rests not on drudgery, muscle power, repetition, or long hours of work, but on insight, inspiration, inventiveness, originality, and enterprise. On moving between where we are now, in the real world, and the world we dream up in our minds and then make real.

What is true for humanity as a whole is also true for individuals. The most successful people change the world not through sweat and tears but through ideas and passion. It is not a matter of hard work or time on the job; it is having a different view, an original idea, something that expresses their individuality and creativity. Success comes from thinking, then acting on those thoughts.

So if you believe you have to work hard and do unpleasant things to be successful, think again. Do you imagine that Bill Gates, former college dropout and founder of Microsoft, became the world s richest man through hard graft ? Do you think that Warren Buffett, the master investor and world s second-richest person, works very hard? What about media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Rupert Murdoch? What s different about them? Devotion to hard slog or great new ideas?

What about Ronald Reagan? John F Kennedy? Winston Churchill? Albert Einstein? Charles Darwin? William Shakespeare? Christopher Columbus? Jesus Christ?

These giants weren t chained to their desks. What they all did was to spend time on what mattered to them, on a few essentials where they exerted leadership, and little or no time on the mass of trivia occupying their hard-working contemporaries.

There is the difficult way to success and there is the easier way.

The difficult way is to study hard and for a long time, work hard for 60 hours or more a week for several decades, worry about the impression you re giving, and claw your way up some organizational pyramid. Sacrifice a pleasant life now in the hope of a much more pleasant future life. Try to do extraordinary things, at extraordinary cost, to get extraordinary results.

The 80/20 Way is easier. It s open to everyone, including those who are far behind in the education and career stakes.

Make a great mental leap: dissociate effort from reward. Focus on the outcomes that you want and find the easiest way to them with least effort , least sacrifice , and most pleasure . Concentrate on what produces extraordinary results without extraordinary effort. Be efficient but relaxed . First, think results. Then get them with least energy:

• 20 percent of work, effort, and resources give over 80 percent of results. What gives us the 80 percent outcome for 20 percent effort ” or the 400 percent outcome for 100 percent effort? What s the ordinary way to extraordinary results?

• Over 80 percent of people struggle to achieve 20 percent of results. Fewer than 20 percent of people commandeer 80 percent of the goodies . In your area, who are they? What do they do differently?

• 80 percent of your value to other people comes from 20 percent or less of what you do. What are these few vital activities?

• 80 percent of your success derives from 20 percent or less of your skills and knowledge. What are the really valuable things that you do so much better than other people?

• 80 percent of your achievements arrive in 20 percent or fewer of the circumstances in which you find yourself. You shine at specific times, in particular ways, with certain people. When? Where? Why?

• 80 percent of what you want comes from 20 percent of the tactics or behavior that you adopt. What behavior has results out of all proportion to energy?

• For anything you attempt, one way of doing it is markedly superior : a route delivering 80 percent of results for 20 per cent of normal effort. Experiment until you ve found a way that is four times better than before.

Intelligent and lazy

German military chief General von Manstein said:

There are only four types of officers.

First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm.

Second, there are the hard-working intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered .

Third, there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace , and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody.

Finally, there are the intelligent lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.

Cultivate lazy intelligence. Do you lack smarts or lack laziness ?

If you think you re not so smart ” and to think this, you have to be quite intelligent after all ” work on your knowledge and expertise in a very narrow area, where extraordinary results are available for modest effort.

If you are smart, but not lazy, work on laziness. To do everything, simply because you can, lowers effectiveness. Concentrate on the really important things that get amazing results. Do only the few things with greatest benefit.

It s amazing how often people dispute this advice. A typical conversation runs like this:

Friend:	You must be joking when you say become lazier.
Me:	I m deadly serious. I can t focus well enough on the 20 percent if I m also trying to do everything else. Far better to spend twice as much time on the magic 20 percent, and far less on the rest. Bottom line: 60 percent more results for 60 percent less energy.
Friend:	Shouldn t we put 100 percent energy into the magic 20 percent and get four times more?
Me:	Fine in theory, and in practice eventually, but first slow down. Stop inessential things. There s a limit to how much time we can spend on the magic activities without diluting quality. Force ourselves to do less. Win time to find more vital areas to work on and more effective things to do.
Friend:	But you don t really believe in being lazy, do you?
Me:	There are lazy people, like Ronald Reagan, who achieved a great deal just by being focused on one or two objectives. And there are super-hard workers, like President Carter, who had too many objectives and failed frenetically. Still, there are excellent scientists or artists , obsessed with their work, who love it. I wouldn t tell them to become lazy. I m not really advocating laziness, but time to concentrate on what matters. If you don t like the word ˜lazy, try ˜relaxed. Do what you enjoy, do it calmly and without worries. A hard-working person is often too busy to spot what s really significant. A lazy person wants to do as little as possible and so concentrates only on the essentials. What s really productive is a lazy person who thinks new thoughts and is focused on making them happen. Thinking is often disturbing , sometimes even frightening. Burying ourselves in trivia is less threatening . For most of us, the only way to create something new and valuable is to slow down, do fewer things, chill out. If you really love what you re doing, you don t need to be lazy. If you re doing lots of things you don t enjoy, cut them, keeping just the valuable and enjoyable things.