Serendipity & Pareto's Principle

 

Yesterday while out for a morning walk I suddenly remembered that  the last five months I have passed with just three pairs of clothing. Of course this had to do with the corona pandemic and my being a senior citizen above 70 years of age. When I started looking back I realized that during the last two years I have only used about 20 to 25% of the clothes available in my wardrobe and the rest were just lying unused. Out of three suits which I own I have not used two of them for the last five years and the one used was once about 2 years back only. After coming back I decided to go through my other things and found the same to be true for my mobile phone, remote for TV, other electronic goods and even my shoes. My better half also quipped in by saying that a vast majority of things available in the kitchen have hardly been used and she does not remember when she used them last.

After pondering over all this it suddenly dawned on me that subconsciously I have reaffirmed two concepts widely known as concept of serendipity and the Pareto’s 80/20 principle. One may ask as to what is the relation between these two concepts. The relationship between the two lies in the fact as to how the Pareto’s principle was discovered using the concept of serendipity.

The concept of serendipity was created by British nobleman in 1700 from an ancient Persian fairy tale. It refers to the fact of finding interesting things by chance or when you are not thinking about it. It can be called an unplanned fortunate discovery. It is common occurrence throughout the history of product invention and scientific discovery. Some typical examples are Velcro the magic fastener, corn flakes, radium, laws of gravitation and so on, the examples are numerous and endless.

The Pareto’s 80/20 principle was visualized in 1848 by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto when he noticed that in his kitchen garden that   20% of pea plants generated 80% of healthy pea pods. Further investigation revealed that in Italy 80% of the land was owned by just 20% of the population. He investigated different industries and realized that 80% of the production comes from just 20% of the companies. The generalization thus became what is known as Pareto’s 80/20 principle.-

“80% of the results will come from just 20%of the action.”.

This came to be known later as Pareto’s famous 80/20 principle which is now very widely applied to a wide variety of situations whether it is business, production, sales, and government department and for that matter any given situation. It is just a concept and not a mathematical certainty hence 80/20 are not exact values but just approximations to express a concept that suggests that 20% of your actions will account for 80% of your results. It also suggests that 2 out of 10 persons in any organizations will turn out to be more productive than the rest 8 persons put together.