The 80/20 Principle tells us that in any population, some things are likely to be much more important than others. A good benchmark or hypothesis is that 80 per cent of results or outputs flow from 20 per cent of causes, and sometimes from a much smaller proportion of powerful forces.Everyday language is a good illustration. Sir Isaac Pitman, who invented shorthand, discovered that just 700 common words make up two-thirds of our conversation. Including the derivatives of these words, Pitman found that these words account for 80 per cent of common speech. In this case, fewer than I per cent of words (the New Oxford Shorter Oxford English Dictionary lists over half a million words) are used 80 per cent of the time.
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