The Power of 6™
Several years ago, I had a Palm Vx PDA (personal digital assistant). One day, the battery went out. I had no idea that when the battery went out on a Palm Vx, the memory went with it. And not just until you got a new battery – the memory was lost forever.
Now wait a minute, you say. How about your laptop as back-up? You regularly synched your PDA with your laptop, didn’t you? Well, I thought so but, alas, my back-up didn’t back-up. I lost 3,000 names and contact info. I was sick.
Normally, something like this would have eaten me alive for weeks. Instead, I had a Jerry McGuire epiphany. I applied what I call the “Double Pareto Principle” to the problem and it didn’t seem so bad.
The Pareto Principle is the 20-80, or 80-20 rule. Developed by Wilfredo Pareto in 1906, the Pareto Principle is based on his well-known observation that 20% of the population owned 80% of the property in Italy. In 1937, Joseph Juran used the 20-80 rule to help millions of managers separate the “vital few” from the “useful many” in their activities. It’s more commonly known as the rule that 20% of our activities generate 80% of our results.
I had been using what I call the “Double Pareto Principle” (DPP) for years to categorize things, including people. In the case of the 3,000 lost contacts, I realized that I didn’t REALLY know most of them anyway – probably about 80% of them. Maybe I met some of them on an airplane, exchanged contact info or business cards and a promise to keep in touch, but haven’t spoken to them since. You get the picture. If I applied just the Pareto Principle alone, I’d account for 2,400 of the 3,000.
So now I’m left with 20%, or 600. I knew the 600 people at some level, but how many of them did I really know WELL? So I applied my Double Pareto Principle, and came up with 20% of the 20%, or 4% of the original 3,000 – a total of 120 people. That made me feel much better.
I apply the Double Pareto Principle to everything. It allows me to categorize people and things into three buckets: the 80% bucket, the 16% bucket, and the 4% bucket. The 4% is necessary; the 16% is nice; and the 80% is neither. I encourage you to do likewise in an effort to focus on the vital few, rather than the useful many (or not even useful in most cases).
Now let’s get back to the 120. It’s one thing to know 120 people well. It’s quite another thing to have meaningful relationships with them. You just can’t have meaningful relationships with that many people. The truth is, you can only have genuine quality relationships with a handful of people. To be exact, 6 people – at least in my mind.
How did I arrive at 6? Truthfully, it was a complete rectal extraction! I knew I had to give up quantity for quality. I knew it had to be manageable. I knew I had to keep it small in order to give completely of myself to the 6. 6 just felt right. After all, there’s the 6 Degrees of Separation philosophy; there’s 6 billion people in the world; there’s the three life sabbaticals I’ve taken that ended up taking 6 months each. Hell, beer comes in 6 packs, so who am I to argue with that? 6 it is. 6 genuine quality relationships – that’s plenty. You only need the Power of 6 to get anything you or they will ever want.
So, who are these 6? They are people that meet 6 critical, non-negotiable criteria.
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