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Martinis and the Meaning of Life

Last night my friend Stacey and I figured out the meaning of life. We had help mind you; our Martini’s were fantastic. Alas we forgot to write it down, but it goes something like this:

People find personal validation through self-induced hardship. That last part doesn’t sound like fun, but maybe that’s just a product of being productive. Or not.

Tim Ferriss (who’s book, The Four Hour Work Week, I highly recommend) would argue otherwise. In fact, his book is all about how to implement the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) to be productive by cutting out all the crap in your life. The idea is that 80% of your output comes from 20% of your input. Identify the 20% of your input that actually matters, focus on that, cut out the rest, and all of a sudden you’ve achieved Stacey-Sell life significance.

So to rephrase, people are happier when they’re most productive. You can be productive by busting your ass and working really hard (killing yourself with happiness) or you can cut out the clutter and focus on the few things that actually matter. I could have probably said all this with something simple like, work smarter not harder, but that would have been far too smart.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Books, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.