Pareto's Law of Fakework

Power laws show up everywhere. You may be familiar with Pareto effect - a small group of causes being responsible for a large portion of the effect (80/20 rule).

These laws explain so many natural socioeconomic phenomena - the size of cities, companies, wealth distribution - pretty much any complex adaptive system.

They also seem to explain personal effectiveness and habits and productivity in many interesting ways, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

In finance, the Pareto principle is stark - compound interest does most of the heavy lifting. A few things have most of the affect - if you live within your means, invest, diversify, dont take on too much leverage, you’re 80% of the way there. Yet most people get distracted by get-rich-quick gambles like daytrading / shitcoins / sportsbetting and end up losing money.

Same goes for health - the answer to living a long happy life is generally not custom supplementation, biohacking, cosmetic surgery. 80%+ of it really is just basic sleep hygiene, moving a little each day, not eating shit, avoiding drugs. Can it really be that simple?

I think yes - yet most of us love a get rich quick / lose 40lbs in 1 week scheme because the big important things feel boring and tedious and repetitive. Humans like shiny objects. Really, it’s really hard to stay disciplined. I think of this tweet:

And I realize that these same principles of discipline and effectiveness apply to day jobs. They certainly apply to being a founder/CEO.

Like when it comes to running a company really only a few things matter, and time should probably just be allocated in the following order: 1) sales 2) content 3) building product. Everything else is noise.

Most of us end up spending an enormous amount of time on fakework. Organizing bookmark folders, researching productivity apps, attending important-sounding conferences that generate no leads. Scrolling twitter (to stay up to date!)

Might I propose the pareto law of fakework: 20% of founder time spent produces 80% of the outcome. 80% of time is fakework,

The real value of course is in the trenches. Prospecting, calling, shipping prototypes, thought leadership. In reality 40% of an early stage founder’s time should be spent on sales (in reality its usually more like 10-15%)

I wonder why this happens?

Probably because fakework feels productive. High impact things feel boring and uncomfortable and anxious. Cold outreach is a lot of rejection. Prototyping is facing a lot of technical challenges. Thought leadership feels cringe.

I used to subscribe to Marc Andreessen’s advice about procrastination: "lean into it by doing the other things you've been putting off." This works to a point - productive procrastination beats unproductive procrastination. But it shouldn't be more than 5% of your time.

You should simply sit down in the morning and decide the top 1-3 most impactful things you could spend time, and allocate most of your day to those things.

The silver lining of fakework is that if you’re able to master doing those big boring repetitive things in a world like this, it becomes a competitive advantage. The winners will be those who avoid the fakework and lean into the hard parts.

If cold calling wasn’t brutal it wouldn’t be a moat. If content creation was easy and fun everyone would write a blog a day. It's about accepting that a few unglamorous activities will determine most of your success.

You gotta fall in love with the tedium.

An old friend calls this chopping the wood and carrying the water. This is most of what effectiveness really is.

Lean in!
Ramsey