2026 February 3 Don't be too efficient

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about the 20% that makes you, you. So let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, send me a message.

This week we're going to talk about what really defines you, especially in terms of much of the productivity hacking that you may hear. You may have heard of the Pareto principle, better known as the 80/20 rule and named after Vilfredo Pareto, who wrote about it in 1906.

It's actually a special case of the Pareto distribution. Whole different story, but the common 80/20 breakdown is what we normally hear about. Basically it's that 20% of something causes 80% of something else. So 20% of your friends cause you 80% of your joy, or a different 20% of your friends bring you 80% of your troubles, or 20% of your efforts make you 80% of your money. Or in reverse, 80% of your time is spent doing unimportant things.

Now, this sounds really empowering and you'll hear many life coaches and productivity gurus telling you to focus on the 20% of life that matters and mercilessly clear away the other 80%. And this includes professional friendships and some would even say personal friendships.

And you see a lot of this these days. I follow finances. Not that I have any investments, but it's just always interesting to see how businesses operate. You see activist investors take over a company to make it more efficient. What they're really doing is they're trying to manage out the bottom 20% of something or 10% of something.

I've been affected by this a few times, and usually one of the first things they do is they start cutting out the bottom 10 or 20% of the product line and focus on the more profitable items. Well, I'm often one of those customers of those oddball products. Sugar-free cornflakes comes to mind. When they cut that product out of the lineup, they lost a customer because I can buy sugary cereal anywhere. But there was exactly one at the time, maker of sugar-free cornflakes in the US. So they inadvertently lost their unique value proposition in the marketplace.

But that's all in business. What's that got to do with us real people? Well, like I just mentioned, there's this whole genre of people saying you become like the five people you most associate with. That was originated by Jim Rohn, a great life coach overall. But they'd say that you should even pick your friends, your personal friends, according to the value in your life. And while that superficially seems good and there's some good underlying intentions in that, the reality is that it often underestimates the value of the unimportant people in our lives.

I've talked about my long past friend Morty before. He and I were polar opposites in our approach to life. We'd regularly have multi-day friendly arguments on some topic or another. To the external person, they'd likely say we're both wasting our time because we approach life so differently. So we should have each considered the other one of those non-productive people and not been speaking with each other.

Those discussions really made both of us think and reexamine our beliefs and our rationales to the point that now, probably 20 years later, or maybe even longer, I still think about our discussions very often actually, and the effect they've had upon me in the long term. That's the risk of efficiency. By definition, efficiency can only be measured in the moment, but only kind of approximated into the future by taking a risk based upon our gut feelings. We were both learning about each other and life. We both gained more insights than we otherwise wouldn't have.

When you think about yourself, you're likely thinking about the public part of you, for lack of a better term. That part that the rest of the world sees. You're a gender, you're an age, you have some experience, perhaps a profession or a set of skills, perhaps some hobbies. Perhaps you're a housewife. Perhaps you're a professional mom. Maybe you have a religion or a spirituality, a certain size, a hair color, a certain income or wealth level, and a bunch more characteristics.

That's the 80%. You always see it in demographics and statistics, marketing labels like Baby Boomer or Gen whatever. Those are the easy things to identify, but they really aren't you. The 80% of the picture actually contains almost nothing that defines you in meaningful terms.

How you feel towards others in need, how you treat other people who are close to you, how you act in a relationship, how you look at your friendships, how you behave when you think no one is looking or knows what you're doing, and so much more that isn't clearly physically visible nor easily measured—yet that's what really makes you, you. Everything else could be any of a number of doppelgangers who probably exist in the world who might trick somebody looking at a photograph. But they wouldn't be you in any meaningful way and they wouldn't fool any of your friends.

And that's the downfall of trying to manage a close circle of friends for advancement. True friends are people who have value to you in meaningful ways. Perhaps they support you, they may challenge you, they may make you laugh, or perhaps they make you think like my friend Morty did for me. But they bring an intangible value into your life. The disconnect with the influencer's advice is that it misses the differentiation between types of value.

Your qualities, your quirks, your talents, your personality, all those non-tangible traits—those are the things that make you weird perhaps, but they make you exactly who you should be. But society doesn't like weird or different. It likes conformity. Color inside the lines, stay on the sidewalk, never question your teacher, and so much more. In these days, some of those things are even being taught, one might say indoctrinated, starting at the age of two or even earlier. Small wonder you think that all important 20% of you is just weird because you've been told that for decades.

Besides being important to be aware of and proud of when you're younger, those things are necessary. They're important, but it becomes critically important as we age because this is when the full force of ageism really starts to be applied. How dare that old lady dye her hair green and go surfing at her age? Why is old Smith still working when young people need a job? What can I do now that I'm retired or laid off, or any other change in life situation?

These are all attacks on the 20% of your unique wonderfulness. Some are more subtle than others, but the result's the same. They're trying to define you by the unimportant but visible 80% of your characteristics and completely ignoring that wonderful 20% that truly defines the real you.

This actually is the core of why 7EveryMinute even exists. It's to give you and those you care about tools to help you remember or rediscover that you're still you, despite a socially defined label based upon arbitrary and very out of date age numbers or targeting personal characteristics that really don't define the essential you at all. So take that, social planners.

We'll come back to this in more detail, but this is the start of how we should be thinking of ourselves. Ignore the marketing cohort labels. Ignore the calendar and look into yourself for your own value. If you want to surf, skateboard, play rock and roll, whatever—if you're up for it and physically able, and we're going to talk about that, that's a whole different discussion, a huge discussion we're going to be having over the next few weeks—then go for it.

What defines you is that non-physical 20% of characteristics that are rarely talked about and almost never emphasized, but that's what really makes you, you. Celebrate it, embrace it, and be you.

That's it for the evening. Your homework is to think about the core characteristics, besides all those external and physical ones we normally think about, that really make you unique and really define you. Ask your friends. They may have more insight than you expect. Extra points if you write it down, and then think about how you can use these different characteristics to make life more enjoyable and fulfilling. Good luck.

Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. Please check out UKR7.com for links to ways you can help the people of Ukraine, and WCK.org, which is World Central Kitchen. They work in disaster areas throughout the world. Those are two international sites. Local charities are always looking for people to help out. And even just a simple smile to someone you meet on the street can change their day in ways that you might not even imagine. It can just make their whole life a little better.

So as always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along, please subscribe and hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.