Sunday, January 27, 2013

Rule of 80/20 in Life

I read somewhere about a management principle that governs every ones life in some way or other - that is the rule of 80/20. This rule means that 80% of your efforts will yield you 20% of your total result and 20% of your effort will give you 80% of your result. Think about it. If you look back you will find the paper you have worked very hard on has not given you the score you expected but surprisingly you get good scores from another paper that you spend least time on. This may not be the right example, since more or less I get what I expect from my work exam wise. But overall in life exams and scores don't define everything as such. In my work life, I have experienced this a lot. I spend a lot of time in a paper or a collaboration which fails to bear any result, but all of a sudden out of no way some collaboration that I most desire happen just like that effortlessly that is much more rewarding than the ones I was chasing after.

Look around and you must have met someone whom you think is quite lucky in life, just gets everything so easily. In this case, we just see the 80% of his/her reward out of his 20% of work. But we don't see the 80% of the effort they must have spent that would have just yielded 20% of output. Life is fair after all.

I have tried to collaborate with A, B, C, D and most of them failed one after the other. But there comes this collaborator X and Y that I would have chased after all, and there you go, they come forward and extended their hand without my own initiation. I am in a happy position now after knowing this 80/20 principle of life.

Our recent Ramalingaswamy conclave meeting was a very successful one for me. I met a number of people that I always would like to work with and I want to make it happen... More on this meeting is on my lab blog: http://computationalgenomicsiicb.blogspot.in/2013/01/second-ramalingaswamy-conclave-in-gods.html 

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