You can’t choose your family members, but you have the power to choose every other person you hang around. It's in your power to choose your significant other, best friends, professional allies, neighbors, and so on. Make it count.

You can be friends with as many people as you want, but you can only be close friends with very few people. These few people account for 20% or so of your overall relationships, but they make for more or less 80% of the value you get from relationships.

People may look up to tens of seniors, but only one to three will truly be their mentors. It is just how we're wired. Since we have limited capacities for close and meaningful relationships, wisdom demands that you fill your spaces.

• One or two with someone you admire • Up to three relationships with reliable peers • One or two relationships with mentees you'll pour your life into.

Develop Six Or Seven Professional Relationships

For every relationship you form, five attributes determine if the relationship will work or not. They include mutual enjoyment of each other’s company, respect, shared experience, reciprocity, and trust.

5 Attributes

Be more effective with less effort by learning how to identify and leverage the 80/20 principle: that 80 percent of all our results in business and in life stem from a mere 20 percent of our efforts. The 80/20 principle is one of the great secrets of highly effective people and organizations. Did you know, for example, that 20 percent of customers account for 80 percent of revenues? That 20 percent of our time accounts for 80 percent of the work we accomplish? The 80/20 Principle shows how we can achieve much more with much less effort, time, and resources, simply by identifying and focusing our efforts on the 20 percent that really counts. Although the 80/20 principle has long influenced today's business world, author Richard Koch reveals how the principle works and shows how we can use it in a systematic and practical way to vastly increase our effectiveness, and improve our careers and our companies. The unspoken corollary to the 80/20 principle is that little of what we spend our time on actually counts. But by concentrating on those things that do, we can unlock the enormous potential of the magic 20 percent, and transform our effectiveness in our jobs, our careers, our businesses, and our lives.

The 80/20 Principle, Third Edition

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