80/20: The Subconscious

Part 4 — The 80/20 Series

The most extreme imbalance in this whole series sits inside your own head. It does trillions of things at once, never tires, and almost nobody uses it on purpose.

The 80/20 Series · from Richard Koch’s The 80/20 Principle

Part 1

80/20: The Unbalanced Universe

Part 2

80/20: The Business

Part 3

80/20: For Life

Part 4

80/20: The Subconscious (you are here)

We have spent three parts looking outward

Profit, customers, markets, money, time, friendship. Each one turned out to be unbalanced, and inside each one sat a vital few hidden among a trivial many. The principle held everywhere we pointed it.

This last part turns the lens around and points it at the one place almost nobody thinks to look. Your own head.

There is a lever inside it that almost no one pulls. It is the largest, fastest and least tiring instrument you will ever own, and most people go a whole lifetime without using it on purpose.

The most perfect 80/20 of all

Koch saves his strangest chapter for the mind, and the figures in it read like a parody of the principle. They happen to be real.

Your subconscious makes up an estimated 92 percent of your brain. It runs trillions of operations at once. It never tires and it works away in the background while you sleep. And fewer than one person in a hundred uses it deliberately — the tiny fraction who do go on to achieve a disproportionate share of the results.

92%

of your brain is subconscious

<1%

of people use it on purpose

∞

near-unlimited memory, always on

The most extreme split in the series, and it sits inside your own head.

Key Insight: The same imbalance that governs markets and profit governs the mind. The most powerful unbalanced lever in your life sits between your ears, and it is switched off by default.

Two minds, doing very different jobs

You run on two systems. They are built so differently that it helps to set them side by side.

The conscious mind

One thing at a time
Limited memory
Effortful — thinking almost hurts, which is why most people avoid it
Reason and logic
The director

The subconscious mind

Trillions of operations at once
Near-unlimited memory
Effortless — it runs in the background, always
Pictures and emotions
The engine

The conscious mind is the part you think of as “you”: the voice reasoning its way through this sentence. It is also the small one, and the slow one. The subconscious is enormous, quick and tireless, and it is doing almost all of the work you never notice.

Two systems, built so differently it helps to set them side by side.

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, of what we say we feel — below the stream, as light, of what we think we feel — there flows with noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, the central stream of what we feel indeed.

— Matthew Arnold

The subconscious takes everything literally

Here is the catch, and it matters more than anything else on this page.

The subconscious has no filter. It does not weigh whether a thing is true before it files the thing away. It works like a weighing machine, registering how forcefully and how often a view arrives. Feed it a belief often enough, with enough feeling behind it, and it accepts the belief as fact and starts acting on it.

So the question becomes practical. When two beliefs contradict each other — I am a strong person against I am a weak one — which one wins? Koch’s answer is a model worth memorising. Three forces decide it.

01

Intensity

How strongly a view is held, and how much emotion rides on it. When you genuinely care about something, that gets through.

02

Recency

How recent the view is. Current beliefs sit on top of the pile, the same way they do in conscious memory.

03

Frequency

How often a view is repeated against its rivals. The subconscious is moved by sheer repetition.

The reason advertising works: A television advert carries almost no real information about a product, and you know it. It still works, because it speaks straight past the part of you that reasons to the part that responds to a picture, an emotion and endless repetition. Intensity, recency and frequency, bought by the gross. The advertiser understood your subconscious long before you did.

When two beliefs contradict, three forces decide which one the engine keeps.

The same three levers are available to you, free, pointed at yourself instead of at a brand of soft drink.

Three things it can do for you

Koch names three cardinal uses, and they cover most of what a person actually wants out of a mind.

Creative solutions. The answers that arrive in the shower, on the walk, in the half-light before you wake. The subconscious is the source of these, and it is at its best on problems the conscious mind has wrestled with and lost.
Personal goals. People who write their goals down and revisit them often are far more likely to reach them. That is the subconscious quietly steering towards a target you have made vivid and specific.
Serenity. Peace of mind is a near-universal want, and it is largely a subconscious setting. A mind fed kind, calm material runs calm.

Notes from Barnaby

I find the third use the hardest to take seriously and, on reflection, the most valuable. We tend to treat calm as a mood that happens to us, weather we have no say in. Koch’s claim is that it is closer to a habit you install. Feed the engine better material and it gives you a steadier ride. I was sceptical. I have come round.

The method — how to actually use it

This is the payload of the whole chapter, and it is gloriously simple. Three stages.

Before you doubt that the back half of this works, recall a small everyday miracle. You set an alarm for seven, and you wake at one minute to seven, just ahead of it. Some part of you kept time all night while you slept. That part is ready to do more demanding work, if you ask it properly.

Conscious thought — set the request

Pick one issue at a time, so the request is clean. It must be something you genuinely care about resolving, often something your conscious mind has already tried and failed to crack.

Most of the time it takes the shape of a “how to”: how to make this product better and cheaper, how to find the words for the song, how to stop the same argument with the same person. Aim for a solution that is good for everyone involved, not only for you.

Input — hand it over

Now pass the request to the subconscious, in the relaxed states where it listens. Relax and daydream somewhere quiet and private, ideally outdoors. Empty your head of everything except the message, then send it — silently is fine, aloud is better.

Repeat it during automatic exercise, a familiar walk or cycle ride you can do without thinking. And say it once more in the drowsy minute or two before you drop off, the last thing you think.

Receive — and write it down

The answer tends to arrive at night, or in that hour of half-sleep before you fully wake. It is also fragile. It will dissolve in seconds if you let it.

Keep a notebook and a pen on the bedside table. Catch the thought before it goes. If a problem is genuinely knotty, do the oldest trick in the book and sleep on it.

The power to move the world is in your subconscious mind.

— William James, pioneering American psychologist

On affirmations, and the British problem with them

For serenity, Koch recommends the part that makes my countrymen wince: positive “I am…” statements. I am thankful for. I am creative because. I have good friends I can count on. Said and believed often enough, they register, and the engine starts treating them as the baseline.

Notes from Barnaby

I am British, so my instinct on first reading this was to put the book down. It sounds brazen. It sounds like the sort of thing said in an American car park before a sales conference. And yet the mechanism is exactly the one that sells you fizzy drinks you don’t need — intensity, recency, frequency — only now you are the advertiser and the product is a calmer, more capable version of yourself. The squeamishness is real, and it is also beside the point. The technique works whether or not you find it embarrassing, and the embarrassment costs you nothing to ignore.

Think of yourself as you want to be.

— Harry Carpenter

A few small daily habits

The method above is the heavy machinery. Around it, Koch keeps a handful of light daily habits that keep the engine well fed.

Think freely, every day.

Set aside time to let the mind wander with no agenda at all, connecting things that were never connected before. Koch does his on a familiar bike route. The trick is to want nothing from it, then to remember what surfaces. It is the most 80/20 way of having a good idea, because it costs no effort and pays you in fitness or calm on the side.

Sleep properly.

Go to bed and wake at the same times. Wind down with calm music or a book that does not tax you. A hot bath just before bed helps, and so, oddly, does a sliced kiwifruit. Keep the late evening clear of anything stressful or caffeinated. A rested mind finds answers a frayed one walks straight past.

Tell yourself a kind story.

Construct the most positive narrative of your own life that is still plausible — one that is honest, and also generous to you. You are feeding the weighing machine either way. You may as well feed it something worth becoming.

Closing the series

We began with a simple, uncomfortable claim: the universe is unbalanced. A few causes drive most effects. A few products carry most of the profit, a few clients most of the value, a few hours most of what you achieve, a few friendships most of your happiness.

The thread running through all four parts is that the inputs that matter most are usually the ones hardest to see. They are quiet, they are easy to neglect, and they are wildly out of proportion to the noise around them.

The most powerful of all of them sits inside your own head, doing trillions of things at once, asking nothing, waiting to be given an instruction it almost never receives.

The universe is not on your side, but it is not against you either. It is merely unbalanced. The greatest lever it left you is the one you were never taught to pull.

— The 80/20 Series

A forward-looking coda: from 80/20 to 99/1

Koch ends the book by pointing at where the imbalance is heading, and it is worth a glance.

Networks bend the principle further than anything before them. A network grows more valuable as it grows larger, and the growth in value is geometric rather than linear. That is why Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Uber became so valuable so fast, and why no business built on a pipeline has ever matched the pace. Where the old world ran on 80/20, the strongest networks slide to 90/10, and then to 99/1 — a handful of winners taking very nearly everything.

Where the imbalance is heading: the navy bar is the share captured by the few.

80/20

Ordinary markets and most of life

90/10

Businesses with real network effects

99/1

Winner-take-all networks

As the world connects up, the asymmetry only sharpens. Which raises the stakes on knowing where your own vital few sit, in your business, in your life, and in the largest, quietest instrument you own.