|
|
Everyone's heard the old saw about the 80/20 rule (also known as the Pareto principle). You know, "80% of _____ comes from 20% of the ______". Richard Koch comes up with a way to apply it to life in general.
Businesses have known for a long time that they can improve their position enormously by concentrating on the key 20 percent of activities. But why can’t people do the same? It turns out that we can. We can make our lives enormously better by doing less. The secret is not to do less of everything, but to do less of the great majority of things we do that don’t work very well for us. And to do more of the very few things that do deliver what we want.
The answer is focus. In every area of our life, we can work out the few things that are really important to us, and the few methods that give us what we want. We can divide everything around us, and everything we do, into two piles.
There is the big pile, the 80 percent pile, that takes a lot of energy but delivers pitiful results, sometimes even making things worse. That is the mass of trivia that surrounds us and normally engulfs our life. We can call this big chuck of our lives the trivial many. Then, there is the small but vital 20 percent pile, which comprises the few things that work brilliantly.
The article dips into semi-useless self help blather, but there are some nuggets of worth there. And some of those can be directly applied to music.
Take a studio situation as an example (it's fresh on my mind right about now). Rather than spending lots and lots of time (and money) chasing that elusive single note, work on getting most things right (the first 80%). Once that's done, take a second round and improve the first 80% of what you find. Repeat until you can't take it anymore.
Posted by Casper at August 12, 2005 11:39 PM