The 80/20 principle suggests that a small share of your effort, often around 20 percent, produces most of your results. The useful question is not whether the ratio is exactly right, but where that decisive 20 percent sits in your own work.
In the Enactus program in Morocco’s South Region, the goal was reaching 400 young people with limited resources. Spreading effort evenly across every activity would have left us far short of that target. What worked was concentrating on a handful of local partners who already had wide networks, instead of trying to build new relationships from scratch with every organization we encountered.
The exercise is not calculating a precise percentage. It is asking yourself, honestly: if I stopped everything except a few activities, which few would still produce most of what I care about? Then notice how much of your current time goes to those few, and how much goes to everything else.
That gap is usually where the opportunity is.
