Sometimes I burn myself out by worrying too much.
I worry that I’m not doing enough. I worry I haven’t achieved anything.
My to do list grows and grows, and never seems to get any shorter.
So I push myself to work harder, but end up doing too much. While also not achieving anything. (How is this even possible?!)
Once I get stuck in this mindset, this horrible feeling spirals.
I then worry I’m not giving my friendships or relationships the attention they deserve.
Then I start to worry that people hate me.
Then I’ll overcompensate and spread myself too thin, try to do too many things, and burn myself out.
This is the People Pleasing Paradox at its finest - wanting to please everyone all the time and ending up pleasing no one at all.
Can you relate to this?
When this happens the pain of letting people down will sit with me for days. And I’ll get frustrated with myself because it was definitely avoidable.
This is classic people pleasing behaviour: Overthinking, which leads to over committing, which leads to burnout.
This cycle repeats itself over and over again every couple of months. Not that helpful for your productivity, and definitely not helpful for your mental health.
As you can imagine, carrying on this way certainly isn’t sustainable. But what can we do about it?
Well, recently I stumbled across a new way of thinking that helps you prioritise better and get more results with less effort.
It’s called the Pareto Principle. Also known as Pareto’s Law (although it’s not actually a law). But it’s probably best known as the 80/20 principle.
Who and What is a Pareto? And why do they have a principle?
The Pareto principle is an observation that, in general, 20% of the effort leads to 80% of the results.
And when you take a look around you it becomes clear how often this principle comes true.
For example, when a small group of people do the majority of the work, while the rest take up the slack (anyone that’s ever done a school project will understand this…).
Pareto's Law just quantifies it in a more specific way.
This principle was discovered by Italian economist, engineer, and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto who got his doctorate in 1869 from the University of Turin.
Old mate Vilfredo was out in his garden one day when he noticed that only 20% of his crops were producing 80% of the usable produce.
As an academic and a deep thinker, he wondered if this could apply elsewhere in life.
An economist by trade, he started looking at wealth distribution in Italy.
And do you know what he discovered?
80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population. Not necessarily a very positive example, but it’s actually a pretty useful principle when you apply it to real life.
When you do a self-assessment of the tasks on your to-do list, you’ll likely notice that 80% of your results do actually come from 20% of your effort.
Now I’m not saying it’s a hard and fast 80/20 split across everything in your life, but when you start to look around you, it’s pretty clear how often this imbalance of effort to reward comes up.
Pareto’s principle in action.
I first heard about Pareto’s law from Tim Ferriss, who famously wrote about it in his revolutionary book, The 4-hour workweek.
To quickly summarise Tim’s story, his nutritional supplement company, BrainQUICKEN, was absolutely flying and by traditional standards he was arguably a raging success - making over $40,000 a month!
However, he was also working his ass off 12+ hours a day, almost 7-days a week and running a super inefficient business model.
At this point Tim was on the verge of a full blown “Menty B” and completely burning out. Right before this happened, he forced himself to take a step back and reevaluate what the hell was going on.
He looked at his business model and quickly realised he was wasting a lot of valuable energy on tasks and clients that weren’t producing anywhere near the results they should be for the effort he was putting in.
Once he realised this, Tim automated a load of processes and focused his effort onto the things that were actually moving the dial - focusing on the 20% of inputs that were creating 80% of the outputs. A.k.a. Pareto’s Law.
This freed up a significant amount of time, completely changed his life forever, and meant he could work the coveted “4-hour work week” (then go on to write an epic book selling millions of copies all about it).
Now I’d argue, Tim’s story is a pretty extreme case of Pareto’s Principle, but he teaches us a pretty valuable lesson in prioritisation.
And what I take from this is that not all tasks are created equal.
In a business sense, it’s likely that around 80% of sales come from 20% of your clients. Or 80% of your profits come from 20% of your products/services. Or 80% of your workload can be wiped out with 20% of your effort.
Or in my case, 20% of my blog posts have 80% of the views!
Top tip - Use Pareto’s principle to structure your days. Look closely at where you’re going to spend your time and effort. Start your day with the thing that’s going to make the biggest dent in your to-do list. And go from there.
But isn’t this a blog about People Pleasing? How is Pareto’s Principle relevant here?
Great question. Glad you asked.
Well, just like our work lives, our personal lives are filled with various tasks, responsibilities, and relationships.
And guess what?
Not all of them are created equal. Some contribute more to our happiness, and some require more effort.
Applying Pareto's principle to our personal lives shows us that a small portion of our efforts often give us the most significant results.
In the context of people pleasing, this means that a few key relationships and activities have a greater impact on our well-being than others.
But as people pleasers, we often default to the opposite - 80% effort (or spreading yourself too thin) for 20% output/results. When we try to please everyone, which is near impossible, we sacrifice doing a really good job on a few things for an average job across the board.
As you saw in the opening of this post, when I find myself constantly trying to make everyone around me happy, it is often at the expense of my own interests, and occasionally, my mental health.
This is generally when I end up overcompensating and spreading myself too thin. Agreeing to things that aren’t in my best interests, just to try to keep everyone happy.
By applying Pareto’s principle, it’s clear to see this isn’t a smart way to live - because not all relationships or tasks are equally important to my happiness and well-being.
A prime example of this in my own life happened this past weekend. My girlfriend and I went out for dinner with some friends of ours. At dinner we were reflecting on how easy it was to organise the dinner. It took almost zero effort and there were about 5 messages in total while organising the dinner.
“You guys want to go out for dinner soon?”
“Yeah, are you both free on Saturday 10th?”
“Yeah. Do you want to go to this Polish-Mexican place we want to try?”
“Sounds good, 8pm?”
“Perfect, I’ve booked it in. See you there.”
This is a great example of a friendship being 20% effort with 80% results - let’s call it a Pareto friendship. I’m pretty fortunate to have quite a few of these friendships in my life.
So where you can, try to look out for the Pareto friendships.
But as with everything in life, there’s always the opposite side too - those other relationships that require a lot more effort, with significantly less reward. Do you have any relationships that are causing you more effort than reward?
If you do identify any of these, consider starting to slowly distance yourself, instead of holding on. Give yourself some space, and claim back some of your time, space and mental health.
Surely it’s not that simple, right?
As with a lot of self-improvement advice, this is a very black and white way of looking at something when in reality life is full of grey areas.
So I’m not saying to brutally slice people out of your life (unless you really feel the need to) or just completely neglect the other 80% of tasks that get less results. You’re still allowed to dedicate time and effort to them, but maybe a bit less.
There’s no doubt that there are things that fall into the 80% that are absolutely necessary, and need to be done. But try to reduce the time spent doing or thinking about them.
The ultimate goal of the 80/20 rule is to identify the things that are potentially the most productive and make them the priority.
Stop agreeing to everything and spreading yourself too thin. There’s only so much of you to go around, so keep some for yourself.
So what have us People Pleasers learned from Vilfredo Pareto?
If you’re like me and get caught up in wanting to do everything and please everyone, remember that juggling too many things can lead to poor decision making, a serious lack of efficiency, and ultimately burn you out.
By applying Pareto’s 80/20 principle, we can zoom out and take stock of where we’re putting in our efforts and see what’s getting us the best results.
The best thing is that it can be used across so many different points in your life, from your career, to your relationships and even your wardrobe!
Top tip - look through your wardrobe and find the 20% of clothes you wear 80% of the time. Maybe consider donating the rest to charity?
While it’s not a hard and fast 80/20 split across everything in your life, the point is to be aware of which if your efforts are getting the most results - then focus on those to get more out of life.
Just think, if you don’t manage your time or your relationships efficiently, you’re likely to spend most of your time and energy on things that don’t get you the results you want. And who has time for that?!
If you’re tired of spreading yourself thinner than a piece of tracing paper, then give Pareto’s principle a try and let me know how you get on!
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