Recursive Pareto inspired by Munger
Firstly, thank you for stopping by. I have deep admiration for all readers, particularly those who nourish my narcissism. Today, let’s delve into the multidisciplinary world of Munger!
Over the weekend, I conducted a poll on Instagram, asking what content people would like to see. Let’s just say I was greeted by an eclectic bunch of responses, but one in particular stood out, leading us to today’s discussion.
For the uninitiated, if you’re unfamiliar with Munger, I highly recommend researching him. A good starting point is his speech, “The Psychology of Human Misjudgement.” According to Munger, gaining a small amount of wisdom each day gives you a substantial advantage in life. His teachings, affectionately dubbed ‘Mungerisms,’ advocate for a multidisciplinary approach to life, which involves reading widely across various topics and allowing these ideas to cross-pollinate. This concept segues into our exploration of recursive Pareto.
What is recursion? For tech-savvy folks, recursion is a fundamental concept, so feel free to skip ahead. For others, have you seen the movie Inception? The premise involves entering a dream within a dream…a real mind-bender! In essence, if we equate Inception to “entering a dream,” then recursion can be represented as a repetition of this function, or f(f(f(Inception))). This can continue indefinitely, up until the point where our human or computer memory capacities reach their limit!
What is pareto? Vilfredo Pareto, informally referred to as the Italian Wilfred, was a pizza-loving, rash horse rider who looked like he could have used some contemporary grooming products. This intellectual powerhouse observed that about 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the population. This ratio, widely known as the 80–20 rule, has been identified across fields like healthcare, medicine, and workplace productivity.
Here’s an application of the Pareto principle: consider knowing 1000 people. Engage with 100 if you’re American, 10 if you’re an American male. You’ll find that around 80% contribute minimally. It’s the same with 1000 tweets, TV episodes, swipes, weekends, texts, calls, or work hours — approximately 80% of them are nearly inconsequential. Your best move? Discard, avoid, ignore them. But note that 20% of 1000 is still a significant number: 200. Apply the Pareto function again, and you’ll be left with 40, then 8, and finally 2. This narrows down to a handful of meaningful texts, calls, tweets, books, shows, movies, weekends, and moments. Make these meaningful interactions your life’s baseline. In doing so, you may find yourself in the fortunate 20% that owns 80%. In fact, I suspect that many of my blog readers are already at level one of this recursion. Are you ready to level up?
Thank you again for reading. You could have spent this Sunday outsourcing morality to fiction, outsourcing happiness to fictional creatures, sleep to pills, and entertainment to pixels. But instead, you chose to be here, to read, to think, and to question my work. For that, I am grateful. Do let me know what (or who) you’ve decided to eliminate.More from bubbykin here. You may also like some of these popular posts:
