Top 39 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Koch

The key is to work out the few things that are really important, and the few methods that will give us what we really want.

Conventional wisdom is not to put all of your eggs in one basket. 80/20 wisdom is to choose a basket carefully, load all your eggs into it, and then watch it like a hawk.

Most of us don't work out what we want. And most of us end up with lopsided lives as a result.

What could you achieve that would make you proud, that no one else could do with the same ease?

The 80/20 principle - that 80 percent of result flow from just 20 per cent of the causes - is the one true principle of highly effective people.

I make it a personal rule never to do anything that I don't really care about. It is surprising how much this cuts out.

Those who seize the day become seriously rich.

To get useful new ideas, we must go beyond our immediate circle and make contact with distant parts of the social system.

If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.

It may be that you will be happiest in the rat race; perhaps, like me, you are basically a rat.

Use all the willpower at your disposal to make yourself happy. Construct the right stories about yourself - and believe them!

If a species is diverse, it can survive and prosper. If a species is homogeneous, it is vulnerable.

There is no shortage of time. In fact, we are positively awash with it. We only make good use of 20 per cent of our time.... The 80/20 principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20% of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60 per cent more than now.

80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.

Celebrate exceptional productivity, rather than raise average efforts.

Laziness is the road to progress, but only when it is allied to intelligent thought and high ambition.

Creation occurs when ideas and individuals collide and collude.

In business the 80/20 principle is behind any innovation, any extra value. It is an entrepreneurial principle, a formula for value creation utilized not only by entrepreneurs, but by most managers and organizations.

Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.

The few things that work fantastically well should be identified, cultivated, nurtured, and multiplied.

Marketing, and the whole firm, should devote extraordinary endeavour towards delighting, keeping for ever and expanding the sales to the 20 per cent of customers who provide 80 per cent.

It is not shortage of time that should worry us, but the tendency for the majority of time to be spent in low-quality ways.

People think that creativity is largely a matter of talent, experience, or luck. They are wrong. Talent, experience, and luck are all key elements, but there is something more fundamental, accessible, and powerful that you can use to multiply your creative effect.

The 80/20 Principle, like the truth, can make you free. You can work less. At the same time, you can earn more and enjoy more. The only price is that you need to do some serious 80/20 thinking.

To be strategic is to concentrate on what is important, on those few objectives that can give us a comparative advantage, on what is important to us rather than others, and to plan and execute the resulting plan with determination and steadfastness.

Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we want lead to high returns.

Where a chunk of business is simple, the chances are that it is.

It is not that we are short of time....It is the way that we treat time, even the way that we think about it. A time revolution..is the fastest way to make a giant leap in both happiness and effectiveness.

Our current use of time is not rational. There is therefore no point in seeking marginal improvements in how we spend our time. We need to go back to the drawing board and overturn all our assumptions about time.

The road to hell is paved with the pursuit of volume. Volume leads to marginal products, marginal customers, and greatly increased managerial complexity.

Make the choice that you want to be happy. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to other people too.

We tend to think of innovation as difficult, but with the creative use of The 80/20 Principle innovation can be both easy and fun!

Instead of expending time to train yourself not to be afraid of snakes, avoid them altogether.

Progress is personal; it comes from individuals demanding more of themselves and everyone else.

Strive for excellence in few things, rather than good performance in many.

If we did realize the difference between the vital few and the trivial many in all aspects of our lives, and if we did something about it, we could multiply anything that we valued.

There is no rush. If we think intelligently about what we can achieve with our time, we can be relaxed, even lazy. In fact, being lazy - having plenty of time to think - may actually be a precondition for achieving a great deal.

Only do the thing we are best at doing and enjoy most.

Chose the niche that you enjoy, where you can excel and stand a chance of becoming and acknowledged leader.