90 10 Principle

90/10 Principle, are you familiar with this? Perhaps, but if you are familiar can you correlate it to your daily life? Is it happening to you as well? Before discussing its implications let’s have a short discussion on, what actually 90/10 principle is? What does it imply and what is so special about it?

According to this principle, ninety percent of the things occur in your daily life are not under your control. And are influenced by those 10% things you do. More or less, this is a summary of your life in just two sentences. Definitely, merely stating it will not cause any firework, thus explaining it with an example will be the best thing.

Case 1

Say, you are in an IT department and you receive a call, user reports that his system is not working. You asked him for details and user replied, it is just not working, come soon and fix it because they have very urgent task to do. This raised your hackle and you tread heavily to user’s work station. There you found, a cleaner has dislodged the cable by mistake. You berated user for ten minutes, why he has not checked and told you what has gone wrong exactly. You blamed him for wasting your time on unproductive task.

The user could not accomplish his urgent task on time and was very upset due to that incident. User narrated whole incident to incharge personnel, he investigated and found you guilty for terminal offense and terminated your services. You started looking job somewhere else, there they inquired about your past work experience and behavior. On inquiring they came to know, you were fired due to lose temper. And it becomes difficult to find work anywhere else. Or you have to manage in sterling company with low salary.

Case 2

You are in an IT department and you receive a call, user reports that his system is not working. You asked him for details and user replied it is just not working, come soon and fix it because they have very urgent task to do. You understand user is not from computer backgrounds, you immediately reached user’s workstation. You found dislodged network connection by someone or by cleaners. You showed user there is a picture with Red Cross means network is not connected; cable is required to be plugged in and even then if it does not work then to call. User thanked you and manages to finish his work on time. And at the time of periodic evaluation people would favorably report personnel for your positive attitude and work practices. General manger on hearing this would have raised your salary. You would have earned a lot of respect and regard. And you may even rise up to senior position with dignity.

Conclusion

Both cases start with same situation and players. The difference is in your reaction on that situation. Here 90 percent of situation is out of your control and was affected by that 10 percent, your reaction on that situation.

So, you must endeavor to live by this 90/10 principle.

In Presentations, usually the 90/10 principle can be represented by visualization tools like pictures and the iceberg in the picture above is an example of this kind of visualizations that helps to understand the concept. As you can see, the top part of the iceberg has the 10% while the bottom part (not visible) has the other 90%.