80/20, Fact or Fiction?

I believe most of us would be in agreement on the 80/20 principle.
It states that 80% of our results come from 20% of our input.

I believe this particularly applies in the field of fitness and self development, though in different proportions.

For instance, someone who wants to lose weight and get fundamentally fit will find that 80% of their result for that particular goal will come from their use of food.

 People spend 80% of their time, walking, running, exercising, talking about exercising, experimenting with different exercises. They will associate the result with all their thinking and talking and practice they did with the exercise.

 But 80% of the result, which is the loss of excess weight, will have come from the food use. 

So, it will appear that 80% of the result came from 20% of the input; and 80% of the input will have accounted for 20% of the result.

The point of this is to become aware of what is really working for us in any endeavour,

If you are running, a business, 80% of the success will come from some particular activity like marketing, or selling, or networking.

If you’re a musician or an artist, 80% of your success will come from some particular insight, or practice, or some unique and individual factor. 

And then, like the business mentioned above, any commercial success will depend on some other activity, which will probably be a 70% or 80%or even 95% contribution.

The lesson for us all here, I believe, is to decide what is the main contributory factor to the success of our efforts, and apply ourselves to it.

This may sound simplistic, overstating the obvious.

But in my experience over the years, it’s the most overlooked factor in getting results to be fit and healthy and well.

We tend to do what we want to do rather than what we need to do.

Most of us enjoy exercising in some form or other.

Very few of us want to curtail our eating and drinking habits. They’re far too enjoyable. However, once we take a firm decision and put that decision into action a lot of the difficulty disappears. Most of the difficulty we find in that particular area is not so much in changing the activity as it is in committing to the decision.

The decision needs to be firm. Not some pale, vague idea of something we must get around to sometime. 

Because we prefer to do the exercises than curtail our eating and drinking habits, we allow ourselves believe that the exercise will get the results in the weight loss and body shape.

 And of course though the exercise does help tone, shape and condition the body, and reinforce what we’re doing with the diet, the actual fat loss and internal condition is mainly brought about by how we use our food.

Once that initial target has been achieved, then we can maintain and improve the condition with attention to exercise technique and frequency, and by keeping an awareness of the significance of diet.

As a matter of interest, should you have any comments or observations to make on this, I’d be delighted to hear them and put them up for discussion in the Facebook group of Common Sense Wellness.


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