STORIES

The Pareto principle—or 80/20 rule—asserts that a small amount of input or effort leads to the majority of results. So, most companies understand that 80% of their profits or revenue are generated by 20% of their clients. It also holds that a smaller amount of employees carry the larger burden for progress. The moral to the story for any business, organization or team would be to nurture and mimic the few—The Twenty—that get it right and then try to share it with others and multiply the effect.

Ignorance is not always blissful. I, for one, think that we could use a healthy dose of ignorance. I don’t subscribe to the need to know every little thing that happens in the world at a moment’s notice. In fact, if you turned off all of the digital noise for a couple of days, I suspect you would still know if anything really important occurred. Since when did it become everybody’s business to know everybody else’s business? It just seems like we simply know too much . And yet it is possible that we are more ignorant than we have ever been.

We are hearing a great deal about cancel culture these days. I hate that people are trying to cancel others. And while there may be some legitimate reasons in some cases, my hope is that kindness becomes the new order of the day. The world may have changed forever due to this pandemic and we really don’t have a clear picture of how things will look. We can, however, choose to see things in a more creative way.

I’m not interested in writing about what a tough year this has been. There is too much “I can’t wait until 2020 is over” going on these days. The bottom line is that the turn of the year will not magically wipe away the virus or the political angst that has weighed us all down. We cannot simply flip a switch to happiness and joy.

In one of my recent podcasts, I had the pleasure to talk with Michelle Seiler Tucker, author of “Exit Rich” and founder of Seiler Tucker Inc. We discussed the mindset required to build a business worth selling but it was a little expression she shared that impacted me the most. In an effort to explain the difference between working in the business versus working on the business, she said “it is hard to read the label from inside the bottle.”

This pandemic sure has been a lot of fun, huh? It feels like we have been held hostage in our own homes and waterboarded with the negativity and venom spewing from every device. The heaviness of the moment is enough to crush our souls and destroy our resolve.

Note: I wrote this several months ago after Kobe Bryant’s death. The pandemic has taken a great many things away from us, including my ability to share these thoughts with you, but it cannot take away our independent will.

To be great at anything, it takes a remarkable amount of sacrifice and indescribable determination. In turn, the one unique gift that we all have is our independent will. We are not our emotions and we have the ability to choose our response in any situation. In fact, we have the ability to choose how we spend our time each and every day.

Over the years, we have written a great deal about engagement. We talked about how to engage with your clients and your community. But, maybe it is time to step back and disengage in order to re-engage our senses. In other words, we may want to let go in order to regain both our sanity and our humanness.

Back in 1999, I worked for a Dotcom that was going to disrupt the entire distribution business. We went from 15 to 115 people in the blink of an eye and we cut through millions of venture capital money like a hot knife through butter. Internally, people were super excited because they thought they were going to get filthy rich based on the innovative platform we had created. Unfortunately, we found out that having a relationship with the market actually mattered more than the fancy website and two years later, the doors closed.

With a great big spoonful of obviousness, it is clear that people are suffering—mentally, physically and economically. While a variety of surveys and data can confirm the level of stress in the country, it is equally as obvious that we don’t need a stupid poll to tell us what we already know. The good news, however, is that stress is usually rooted in worrying about what we cannot control. We just need to focus on the things on which we can have an impact.