The 80/20 Rule

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the 80/20 rule but for those of you unfamiliar with it, I’ll explain. The 80/20 is simply the percentile of positive and negative in any given area. Of late I’ve been thinking about just how true it is for all aspects of my life. It applies fairly accurately to my marriage, relationships, business, painting and writing.

In relationships and marriage it is usually defined that if you have a good relationship with someone it is 80% good and 20% you’d like to see changed. The reason many people get divorced is they think they can’t live without that extra 20%. The truth is no relationship is 100% and so they just exchange this person for that person, but the equation stays the same.

Since I’m not one to talk about relationships on my blog I’ll focus on how the 80/20 rule applies to art and writing.

With art the 80/20 split quantifies the balance of successful to not successful. So using my squidoo lenses as an example approximately 80% earn .00 to .35 cents each per month. While 20 percent earn $15-$50 each per month.

This rule also applies to my art in a couple of ways. First 80% of my work is mediocre to crap. While 20% is good to brilliant. 80% makes me little in print sales while 20% is the cash cow. Food for thought Mind you great art does not equal high selling.

In business 80% of my customer base will be new people while 20% will be repeats. Often those 20% will make up 80% of the overall sales. So take note if you have a good patron respect and honor that relationship. They may keep you afloat.

The trick is trying to figure out how to get more than 20% to be high performing. Of course the point of calling it a rule is that it means you can’t. You need to create that 80% in order to achieve the 20. You can of course learn techniques to improve your skill and your sales but for some reason the math seems to stay the same.

Does anyone have any thoughts on your own experiences with the 80/20 rule. Has anyone managed to avoid this rule successfully and made the bulk of their art or sales high performing, I’d love to hear about it.