#80 20 PRINCIPLE BOOK SUMMARY PDF#
#80 20 PRINCIPLE BOOK SUMMARY LICENSE#

But you can never undo a missed dance recital, a forgotten date or chronic back pain. You can always make another phone call, send another pitch, or catch up on yesterday’s work tomorrow. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.” – James Patterson But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. And you’re keeping all of them in the air. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. “Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. Lesson 3: Never sacrifice your personal life for your work. Try to reduce incoming requests and low-level distractions, so you won’t have to say no as often, and if you do, make sure you give people a time when they’ll have their answer. For example if employees bother you with the same questions, create an FAQ and direct people to that. The best way to make saying no easy is to make yourself unnecessary in the first place. Saying no to all your other seemingly important and urgent to-do’s is what’s hard.

But look at what the few Apple products we know today have become, and you’ll see he was right.Īsking the focusing question is the easy part. When he returned to Apple he cut the product lineup from 350 to 10.

At the 1997 WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), Steve said that “you’d think focus means saying yes, but it actually means to say no.” I wish I had a dime for every time anyone quoted Steve Jobs on something, because I’d probably be richer than the man himself was within a year. Lesson 2: Getting focused means learning to say no. One helps you figure out the direction of your life, the other the next action you have to take to get there. Once you have found the answer to the focusing question on a macro level, all you have to do whenever you find yourself in “what-should-I-do-next-land”, just ask it again on a micro level, and you’ll know what to do. “What’s the ONE thing I can do right now, such that…”, that would probably mean to sign up for flying lessons.

#80 20 PRINCIPLE BOOK SUMMARY LICENSE#

If your ultimate goal in life is to fly a plane across the Atlantic, then the answer to the focusing on a macro level would most likely be to get a pilot’s license – it will make actually flying a plane a lot easier.īut on a micro level, i.e. Keller suggests to ask this question on two levels: macro and micro. The beauty of the way this question is asked is that sets you up for focus on a single thing, while simultaneously picking the priority from the top of the food chain. Not all items on your to-do list are created equal, so in order to make the biggest leaps in the shortest amount of time, you’d be best off ruthlessly prioritizing them.

Much like Tim Ferriss, Keller is a big fan of the 80/20 or Pareto principle, where 20% of the input gives you 80% of the results. That’s what Keller calls the focusing question and it’s the core concept around which the entire book is built. “What’s the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary?” If you only take away a single sentence from this book, let it be this one:

#80 20 PRINCIPLE BOOK SUMMARY PDF#

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.ĭownload PDF Lesson 1: You only need one question to figure out your priorities, both long-term and short-term.

80 20 principle book summary