Okay, I was trying to get through this course on personal productivity without having to talk about the Pareto principle. But it's basically the law. If you're going to do a course on personal productivity, you have to talk about the Pareto principle. This is named after a famous Italian economist who stated that in many aspects of life 80% of the sales or the good fortune or the good stuff comes from 20% of the efforts or 20% of the clients represent 80% of sales. This is seen as sort of a magic number that's supposedly affecting every aspect of life. I do think it is valuable to think in broad terms of anything you do, of all the stuff I'm doing, what's getting the best results.
I do not find my own business in my own life that the Pareto principle of 8020 is very exact. So for example, I had 130 online courses 75% of all my sales come from just five courses. So that's dramatically lower than the 80 than the 20%. And it does make up almost 80% of my sales. So to me it's way off. But the basic concept I do think is valid.
Always be looking at everything you do and holding yourself to high standards and measuring it. When stuff doesn't work. Stop doing it. When stuff does work, do more of it. I used to make a lot of short courses one hour courses introductory courses didn't make much money from them. Now I make a really long comprehensive courses courses that earn the title of complete courses that have more content than anyone else putting out on that subject.
And that's what works. That's what generates tremendous sales for me. So that's what I want you to do is to think about of the activities you take in your place of business, your work for that matter, your hobbies. What gets the best results. You could apply this to your tennis game, whether it's a group lesson, hitting against a bank board, playing one on one with a coach or someone better than you. So a lot of different things you could do to improve your tennis game.
Really ask yourself what is having the biggest impact on your scores, your wins, for that matter, your enjoyment of the game, do more of that and try to do less of whether it's 80% or 95% of the stuff that isn't working. That is a valuable principle. But you don't need a fancy name like the Pareto principle. It's really just stating the obvious, which is do more of what works well do less of what isn't working. That's kind of my frustration with a lot of so called experts in this whole personal productivity niche, which is there's this temptation to always want to put a grand title and a grand packaging on it. A lot of it is common sense, but again, people don't commonly use common sense.
Don't make that mistake. things work, do more of it. Things don't work or don't work as well to less of it.