The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch: Issue 12 | April 2014

Examine your business and you're likely to find that 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your business—or if you have a slew of products for sale, that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your products. I find that this is true with my iPhone app sales.

The concept itself is easy to master, but applying the lesson properly only comes when you can honestly and accurately answer a key question: What do you want?

This book helped me to realize that to truly grow the areas that are important to me (not just income, but also my value to my audience, my effectiveness, etc.), I need to find what is working and focus on sustaining those practices. And while I still like to have a lot going on—as you know—and while I like to try new things as the “online business crash test dummy,” I can use this principle to run more targeted experiments.