This book validates my personal work experience, where a small number of clients generate the most work and income for me, and I get the most amount of happiness and satisfaction from a smaller amount of personal relationships.
There is a way to relax, enjoy life, put loved ones first, express yourself to the max, also achieve your dreams. Happiness, Richard Koch says, flows from doing less, not striving more. No surprise there perhaps. But he also asserts that achievement and success can come from doing less. There is a free lunch after all. And the taste is out of this world.
The claim is based on his ground-breaking research into well-validated ’80-20 Principle’. Although is it not clear why, it is nearly always true that the great majority of results come from a small minority causes or effort, that 80% of results flow from just 20% of the causes. For example , 80% of sales usually come from less than 20% of customers, we send more than 80% of our emails to fewer than 20% of the people in our address book, and fewer than 20% of all motorists cause more than 80% of accidents.
Richard Koch’s business classic The 80/20 Principle is an extraordinarily successful and influential book around the world. Yet, although he wrote mainly about corporate success, it was the short third part of the book book applying the 80/20 principle to our personal lives that caused a great stir. In this new book, Living the 80/20 Way, Koch focuses exclusively on how to succeed personally as professionally, to make a good life as well as a living while doing less. The key, he says, is to work out the few things that are really important, and the the few methods that will give us what we really want, and to act on them, while ignoring the mass of trivia that normally engulfs our lives. It sounds simple, and it is…but nobody has explained the idea before in such a convincing way, nor based it so persuasively on a proven phenomenon.
The 80/20 Way shows you how to apply these lest is more and more with less ideas to your best 20 percent for success, money, relationships and the simple, good life, and will help you develop a personal action plan to transform your life.
The modern delusion is “more with more”— that to get more out of life, and succeed in what we want, we have to work harder, devote more time to our professional live, and make all kinds of sacrifices and trade-offs. Koch says No. He shows how, in all aspects “less is more”. We only live fully by subtraction. We make progress by stripping our activities, and concerns back to a small authentic core.
What makes this book different from the multitude of “self-help” manuals is the idea that success and relaxation, far from being incompatible, are really twin cherries on a single stalk. Koch demonstrates that success and happiness flow and from cutting out the parts of our lives that we don’t like. If we have the courage to go against conventional wisdom, we can work less, worry less, succeed more, enjoy more, and make the people who matter in our lives hugely happier.