Your Unique Abilities

How to build an unfair advantage for you and your firm

We are going through a renaissance inside our firm. Aaron has written about in the past few weeks, but I wanted to present another perspective on it.

I've come to the realization that like with everything else, the 80/20 rule is always working either for us or against us.

We've heard the old adage: 80% of outputs can be attributed to 20% of inputs.

That means 20% of your clients account for 80% of your revenues.

That means 20% of your clients give you 80% of your headaches.

But this is also infinitely fractal. It means that 4% (20% of 20%) of inputs can account for 64% of outputs (80% of 80%).

The numbers themselves are unimportant. What is important to grasp is that there is an unequal input to output ratio possible.

What's most important is that this applies really well to not just matters of finance and operations, but also your life as well.

• 20% of people cause 80% of your happiness in life.

• 20% of your work causes 80% of your work satisfaction.

• 20% of your unique abilities causes 80% of the results in your life.

There is an unequal distribution here at play.

Unfortunately, too many of us are spending our time trying to improve the 80% of our skills, abilities, etc that are not really doing much for us.

I've come to the realization that all success, happiness, peace, and joy comes down to us finding our 20% and doubling down on that over and over again.

We understand this idea at a high level, but how often do we really stop everything and make it into a conscious thing to do this every month, every quarter, every year!

I think this is really uncomfortable to many of us. To me, it represented admitting "defeat" in the 80% of things I was working to improve my skills and abilities on.

Unfortunately, it made me burned out, tired, and discouraged. It was a fight with the ego to say, "no, you aren't meant to do this."

We have instead taken on a radically different approach. We are asking ourselves, "what would happen if we helped people really unleash their 20%, their unfair advantage, to the world?"

We are becoming relentless about helping people climb up to their personal sharp edge. That means hiring new people (or outsourcing) in some cases. In other cases, it means automating or eliminating some work that didn't need doing.

The result? People showing up to work doing what they love doing. It's about people working with their unfair advantage.

When people live to their unfair advantage, the firm itself starts to develop its own unfair advantage.

What is your unfair advantage? Do you get to show up with your unfair advantage at work? How?

Share your story with us!