Using the Pareto Principle to Change the World

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My husband is an architect.  He is 71 years old and still likes to design spaces by hand.  His office has several large drawing boards covered with paper that he uses.  You can find him most nights hunched over a board, mechanical pencil in hand, drawing and designing.

He has BIG (negative) feelings about computer software programs that do the designing and drawing for you.

Part of why architectural computer programs frustrate him so much is that he feels like they disconnect you from what you’re doing.  The ease of moving design elements and pushing buttons takes you out of the core essence of the design process and the physical experience of using a pencil to access more than just binary options.  Computer designing disconnects you from the impact of your creativity and your actions.  Computer design makes it easy to stop responding to the needs of your clients. 

I feel the same way about journaling with a pen versus writing with a computer.

If you look up the word “architect” on the internet, you’ll find that the term now applies more to the digital world than to the deliberate and conscious design of spaces in the material world.

To “architect” is a term now more commonly associated with software design than building physical places. The internet uses words like “site”, “space” and “place” as if there is a physical reality to software design when there is not.

The gap created between physical and virtual realms is the difference in the way we treat one another.  No reasonable and good human would communicate with another human the ways trolls treat each other online or with the ease at which we can text and email each other terrible things without much thought.

Physical reality grows from virtual reality. When we speak to each other in the physical world the way we speak to each other in the virtual world, we’ve crossed into a different reality where internet troll behavior sometimes becomes acceptable in the physical world. 

It’s easy to think that the virtual world represents physical reality and certainly in the past few years, as the stress of this transition we’re in has held us all firmly in its  claws, it seems that our outer world is a representation of the careless use of the influence of the virtual world.

And yet…

I’ve marveled over the past few years at how, when I go out into the physical world and actually connect with people, how people are, by far, overwhelmingly kind and loving towards each other. 

We recently purchased a house in a small farming town in Wisconsin.  It’s an unusual town, a mix of hippies, co-housing communities, food activists, organic farmers and climate refugees from California who coexist with traditional dairy farmers and the Amish. 

We bought a house here because it’s an incredible place that truly embodies the energy of “community.”  Even though I’ve met a lot of people who are nothing like me at all, I’ve been met with nothing but kindness, loving curiosity, and a desire to be good neighbors. 

My point is this.  A small percentage of the people in the world are affecting a large portion of what we are experiencing and our consequent perception of reality.

If we look at the world through the lens of math, 80% of the resources of the world are controlled by 20% of the people.  20 percent of your efforts in life net 80% of the results. 

This is called the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 Rule.  The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80