You’ve heard of the 80:20 rule. 80% of the time focus on your strict diet and exercise routine and 20% of the time, don’t worry about it. And the 80%, it’s usually filled with lots of difficult to follow and remember rules, and generally includes a fair bit of sacrifice and restriction.
Well I’ve got a different ratio to sell you on today. It’s the 95:5 ratio, and if you follow it, you can ignore every new fad diet, every well-intentioned friendly lifestyle zealot, and every supplement huckster out there.
Here goes:
Focus 95% of your healthy living energies on:
– Cooking your meals from fresh whole ingredients while minimizing restaurant meals and ultra-processed foods (and remember too “minimize”
is a relative term and one that you can continually improve upon but need
not start at awesome), and then eating those meals free from distractions and ideally with friends or family.
– Exercising as often and as much as you can enjoy, and ideally more days of the week than not, while still remembering if all you can find are short bursts, they’re good too.
– Not smoking
– Cultivating good night sleeps (dark, cool and quiet rooms, no screens right before bed, set sleep times, no caffeine past noon, rare alcohol within 3 hours of bed time would be a good start)
– When indulging, asking first if it’s worth it, and second what’s the smallest amount you need to be happy?
– Drinking alcohol only in moderation (1 daily for women, 2 for men)
Nurturing your friendships and relationships.
As to what makes up the remaining 5%? Well it’s everything else. It’s stuff like “best” diets, “right” exercises, organic fruits and vegetables, grass-fed meats, ancient grains, supplements, cleanses, and all that other minutiae that people spend so much time agonizing over despite the very real likelihood that even were all those things scientifically, demonstrably, useful (most aren’t), in a best case scenario, when compared with the impact of the 95%, that 5% might increase a person’s quantity of life by a few days or weeks, while agonizing over that 5% would definitely suck away a whole pile of quality.
Life’s too short to worry about the minutiae of healthful living and if you’re looking for the best bang for your healthful living buck, look to the unsexy,
but incredibly beneficial, 95%.
Eating local: Is it really better for the environment? (msn.com)
I SEE IT KILL DEALS ALL THE TIME.
A Euphemism for your awful life? – Bing video
It is human nature, nothing magical about it, just something we all do in life. We do it with our jobs, our family, our intimate relationships, we just can’t seem to help ourselves. Finding fault is not a virtue, it is a deal killer. Making people do something or into someone they are NOT. “I WOULD hate sitting in so many meetings, I don’t like writing status reports, I miss my friends BUT NOT MY OLD BOSS back at such and such company” and on and on.
Right now we are doing less and less of this at work ‘TALKING’ if we are
lucky enough to still have a job, so there is a silver lining in all this economic devastation. SO NOW We are finally focusing on what is right about our job or our company or our colleagues because we are so thankful to have them. The 95/5 rule is adjacent to any state, county or group of people and in people themselves. Los Angeles County has the same proportional problems as most smaller counties.
It’s just that their proportional amount of bad people are on a grander scale than a smaller county (we have the same problems as they have.) Five percent of a smaller county isn’t as many. Then when you look at people nobody is perfect and 95% of the time they are good people with that other 5% of the time not so perfect (we all make mistakes.) Relationships are an even juicier outlet for the 95/5 rule. In the beginning our future soulmate is everything we ever dreamed of and more.
And the reason this happens is that we have no idea who they are, so they can be whatever we want them to be. We project all of our dreams and fantasies into the knowledge void we have about who this person really is. But then over time the void starts being populated with facts and experiences that are attributed to the real person and we start to pick them apart, finding all of the things about them that are wrong. But the problem with this approach is that we completely miss the 95% of the person and relationship that is absolutely right.
Now of course no one is going to be 100% our dream but in reality,
I’m not that great at dreaming and usually the person I’m with turns out to be better than my wildest dreams, which is the case with my wife Toni. For me to find relationship joy I need to be open to asking for what I want in life and adding at the end of my endless list of demands the statement, “this or something better.” Because the person we are in a relationship with may not match up exactly to our expectations causing us to become fixated on all of the ways they aren’t our perfect match, totally missing how they may in fact be better than we imagined.
I find that this fixation on the 5% starts to consume us, to get on our last nerve as the focus magnifies the differences and makes them take on a life of their own. All of the endearing qualities that our soul mate had in the first months of the relationship now drive us crazy with frustration, but how could they have changed so much?
Well the truth is, they didn’t. It is just that we know them better now and they aren’t the person in our dreams, they are a real person in flesh and blood. And given the chance to interact with my dreams and a real person, the real person wins hands down (no pun intended).
So if your goal is a lasting and beautiful relationship that is better than anything you could have imagined, my advice to you is to mindfully turn your focus each and every time one of those 5% issues rears its ugly head, to one of the many things about the person you love, to the 95% that is right.
And before you know it, that 5% will lose its grip on your attention and most likely you will grow out of your need to have everything in life delivered exactly to your specifications. Relationships that last tend to grow deeper into wonderful things that we can hardly imagine but changing our focus is the only way to get to this deeper place.
The 95/5 Rule: Most Change Looks Evolutionary.
The reason the evolutionist, chaos, and random accident perspectives have been so dominant in society for so long, in my estimation, is because of a fundamental property of evo-devo systems that we will now consider. Nearly all, or roughly 95%, to a first approximation, of the pathways, decisions or events that occur in complex systems in our environment are bottom-up, evolutionary processes that, though they may probabilistically predictable with respect to the next path, decision, or event, are so contingent and creative that they rapidly become unpredictable in the medium and longer term. Only a critical subset, 5% or less, are top-down, hierarchical, developmental processes. These processes, by contrast, are convergent and conservative, and intrinsically future predictable, even over the long term. We can call this a 95/5 (or 97/3, 99/1, or other similar) rule, for different processes. We will stick with the name 95/5 rule for now, until evo devo processes have been much better measured and quantified in a variety of complex systems.
The “Foresight Iceberg”
(The 95/5 Rule)
Why the 95/5 rule exists is obvious, if you think about how evolution and development work as we have defined them. Evolutionary processes constantly branch, or fan out, in a “bottom-up” way, as each species/system tries to adapt by trying lots of local creative experiments, which are often generated based on their local contexts.
Think of all the things you do in a typical day that happen only because of the environment you find yourself in, or the information you’ve just seen or heard. Only a few of these evolutionary experiments are destined to fall into funnels, special configurations that will predictably reach higher levels of complexity.
These special branches are guided “top-down” to these higher levels due to the special initial conditions and laws of the universal environment, and the way those conditions and laws have been tuned for future-specific form and function via many previous cycling of the system (in living systems and the universe as a system).
A good way to remember this rule is the Foresight Iceberg schematic, pictured at right.
In evo devo systems, only a small percent of change can be long-term “visible” to foresight professionals, in that it is intrinsically predictable, convergent, and constrained or driven top-down by a few fundamental rules and actors.
The vast majority of change is submerged, and significantly harder to predict, except in the short term, or in broad statistical ways, because it happens bottom-up and collectively via the creative action of a vast number of local actors, in interacting in contingent and increasingly divergent ways.
We can see this 95/5 rule operating in complex systems of all types.
A few examples:
Almost all the genes in an organism are evolutionary.
They recombine unpredictably in offspring to make new variety (phenotypes). But approximately, 3-5% of the genes are instead developmental (the developmental-genetic toolkit). They funnel the organism to one predictable phenotype. To be more precise, roughly 50% of human genes are expressed at some point during complex activities like organogenesis (Yi et al. 2010). But less than 10% of our genome is highly regulated during organogenesis, and only 5% of our DNA is ‘ultra-conserved’ across complex species (eg. human, mouse, rat) (Wagman and Stephens 2004). Preliminary work has shown that this ultra-conserved DNA can no longer undergo change without terminating or seriously damaging developmental processes. It is the core set of “top down” instructions for creating the organism. I would also bet that of the 10% of our genome that is highly regulated during organogenesis, more than half of these genes are evolutionary (still capable of creative, bottom-up change without deleterious effects to the organism). The rest are part of the core “developmental toolkit”. They conserve and funnel biological events into critical and predictable top-down choices and processes in the emergence of modularity, hierarchy, and life cycle for the organism.
Almost all of the cells in organisms are guided via bottom-up, contingent,
local interactions, to form stochastic structure and function. Their positions and fates aren’t predictable in advance, as they differentiate from totipotency based on contingent local cues. A small subset are fated to spatiotemporally predictable structural and functional outcomes, once they emerge. They form a top-down “environment” and “scaffolds” which constrain the way the other cells emerge. Example: Radial glial cells, which generate and direct the formation of neural architecture.
Almost all species on Earth evolve “randomly,” with some increasing in complexity-intelligence, and some decreasing (parasites, cul-de-sacs, etc.)
as they adapt. Only a small fraction of species (~1%?), those with social brains, language, and the ability to use tools to create niches, are caught in the “funneling” path to greater world- and self-modeling, environmental control, and intelligence development as they adapt. For more, see Conway Morris, Life’s Solution (2003).
Almost all the thoughts in a mind are unconscious, guiding the organism bottom-up, in contingent, unpredictable ways. A small fraction (1-5%?) are conscious, guiding the animal top-down as planned, convergent, optimization-seeking behavior. See Mlodinow, Subliminal (2013).
Almost all actions in an organization happen by workers acting in bottom-up, contingent, local, unpredictable ways. Management sets top-down policies, plans, and objectives for action, but management’s actions (1-5% of org. action?) create only the critical framework, or envelope, of acceptable behavior. For more, see Kelly, Out of Control (1995).
Almost all change in society is driven bottom-up by individuals acting in divergent, contingent, local, experimental ways (markets, democratic politics, other bottom-up behavior). A critical subset (1-5%?) Social change is a top-down, planned, optimization-seeking policy set by societal leaders (govt, institutions, corps, church, etc.). Whenever societies get too centrally planned, autocratic, or plutocratic, they lose power, productivity, and collective intelligence to more bottom-up ones. Whenever societies have insufficient top-down rules, planning, and institutions, they become chaotic and unstable (think of the historical transitions to anarchy), and again lose power, productivity, and intelligence to ones with stabler environments and smarter rulesets and institutions that allow for both individual initiative and large scale, coordinated collective action. Bottom-up and top-down societal management always seems to be in a rough 95/5 balance. See Acemoglu, Why Nations Fail (2012).
The generic value of a 95/5 rule in building and maintaining intelligent systems, if one exists, would explain why the vast majority of universal change appears to be bottom-up driven, evolutionary and unpredictable in complex systems, what systems theorist Kevin Kelly described as “out of control” in his prescient work Out of Control (1994). Yet a critical subset of events and processes in all these systems also appears to be top-down/systemically directed, developmental, and intrinsically predictable, if you have the right theory, computational resources, and data. Discovering that developmental subset, and differentiating it from the much larger evolutionary subset, will make our world vastly more understandable, and show how it is constrained to certain future destinies, even as creativity and experimentation keep growing within all the evolutionary domains.
Fortunately, as our science and computing abilities advance, theories of universal evolution and development will be deeply tested, and proven or falsified, by simulation. For now, you must use your own knowledge and intuition to ask whether the hypothesis makes sense. Science is a long way from being able to verify or refute it, or any alternative.
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We can only cite evidence and argument.
Wagman and Stephens (2004) Surprising ‘ultra-conserved regions discovered in human genome. UCSC Currents.
Yi, Hong et al. (2010) Gene expression atlas for human embryogenesis. FASEB Journal 24(9):3341-3350.
Sha’Carri Richardson, now America’s fastest woman, scorches her Olympic Trials final | NBC Sports
How To Use The 95/5 Rule To Focus On Your Strengths (While Also Improving Your Weaknesses)
Billionaire: Follow the 5% rule to succeed in business (cnbc.com)
What is 95/5 Rule | Explained in 2 min – YouTube
The Most Common City Names in the US (msn.com)
99 American places everyone should see once.
95/ 5 rule – Bing
where avalanches are common and snow towers over people (yahoo.com)