How the 80/20 Rule and E.L.F. Can Help You Figure Out What Matters

The following is adapted from Freedom Street.

It’s sometimes difficult to know exactly what you dislike or what you love about a job, especially when you’re first starting out. But as you progress in your career, it’s nice to be able to do less of what you dislike and more of what you love—assuming you know the difference.

For me, it took a concerted effort, soul-searching, and talking to people who know me best (like my wife) to even figure out what brings me joy and where I wanted to invest my time.

To be the best financial advisor you can be—which I define as serving your clients’ highest good and helping them achieve their dreams and goals while you’re doing it—you need to have joy. But if you’re like me, joy actually needs to be prioritized. Allow me to share two methods of figuring out what brings you joy (what matters, in other words), so you can level up your life, relationships, and business.

The 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 Rule, or Pareto Principle, is a great tool to consider how you’re spending your time and where you want to put your energy. I’m sure you’ve heard of it: it states “80 percent of consequences come from 20 percent of causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs.” Simply put, your 20 percent counts for a lot more than your 80 percent.

I live by this principle, asking myself things like, “Where does 80 percent of my time go? Are the top 20 percent of my relationships getting the attention they need and deserve?”

I’ve even broken down the top 20 percent of activities that make up my work and the top 20 percent of my clients into 20 percent and 80 percent segments, to figure out if I’m spending enough time on what and who needs the most attention. 

Doing Things You Enjoy With People You Love

You don’t have to go that far, but consider this: where you invest your love, you invest your time, and where you invest your time, you invest your love. However, when we do this automatically, without actually thinking about it—like we often do in our twenties—we can end up investing all our time into people and work that we don’t actually care about. 

Think about it: Do you love the people you spend the most time with? And what about the people you love the most—how much time do they get with you? What about your job? Do you love what you do, or do you spend most of your workday doing things you hate?

My goal was to spend 20 percent of my time doing what I had to and being disciplined enough about it to make it count. That left 80 percent of my time to do what I loved doing, with people I enjoyed being around. Can you imagine spending 80 percent of your workday doing what you love and excel at, with people you really want to be around? You can do that. But you’ll have to consider your own personality--and figure out what it is that you actually love.

The E.L.F. Method: What’s Easy, Lucrative, and Fun?

Author and marketing executive Joe Polish runs a group called Genius Network, where business leaders network and share their insights. Everything Joe teaches comes back to figuring out what is easy, lucrative, and fun (ELF™) for you. On the other hand, there are things that are hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating (or HALF). In Joe’s exercise, you write everything you do in a two-column list, with the ELF™ work in the first column and everything else in the second.

The first column will show you what you truly enjoy and are probably really good at. It’s the work that makes you money, too, and you should be doing more of it and less of all that other stuff.

Beyond work, ELF™ also works for our relationships. Think about the people you deal with on a day-to-day basis. If you get nausea butterflies in your stomach (the bad kind, not the love kind) every time a certain client calls, stop serving them. Literally, fire them as clients.

We advisors think we have to serve everyone who needs our help, especially lucrative clients, but we absolutely do not. Clients (and people) like that suck the life out of you--and then you have nothing left to give the clients who are easy, lucrative, and fun. Liberate yourself from the HALF people and things in your life—you and your time are too valuable to waste on them. 

Evaluating What Matters

What do you like to do and do well? Who are the people that will complement that work with their own unique skills and talents? Are you outgoing? Do you like to be the rainmaker in the business? Do you want to talk to clients all the time? These questions come down to drive.

What drives you? It’s not motivation, which is fleeting and dies quickly. You’re motivated to do something and once it’s accomplished, you move on. Drive has depth and passion behind it. 

I want you to really think about who you are and what makes you happy, and then use the 80/20 rule to envision a life more filled with joy. Figuring out what makes you happy can be harder than it sounds, but the ELF™ principle is a good place to start. You can get lost in the company you’re at and the company you keep. I did. For years, I told myself I loved what I was doing, but in truth, I was really starting to resent it. Being productive feels good, but it’s temporary and shallow if you’re not happy in the moment, doing what you love with people you enjoy.

For more advice on figuring out what matters to you in life and in business, you can find Freedom Street on Amazon.

Scott Danner is the CEO of Freedom Street Partners, a practice that supports financial advisors in their next career step and helps them explore all available paths to secure a fulfilling future. After fifteen years practicing on an employee platform, Scott founded Freedom Street and took it from $0 to $2 billion in assets under management in just five years. Scott is the co-founder of the Chesapeake Virginia Wine Festival and enjoys traveling the country with his wife to watch their two sons play soccer.