What Is Your 4%?

Recently I was connected with a new, fast friend named Brandon Fong. His initials are BF, my initials are BF, together we are BFFs. Brandon has dedicated his life to helping people discover and live within their 4%. 

Your 4% is your genius. It’s your greatest strength and truest calling. When you spend most of your time doing the things you’re best at, you generate a disproportionate return of impact and progress from the effort you invest into it.

Your 4% is derived from the 80 / 20 Rule where 80% of your results come from 20% of the activity. It’s called the Pareto Principle and is a distribution that can be found in many systems. The core point to all of this is that not all actions are made even and prioritizing activities that are higher leverage is your fastest way to create multiplied results. 

But Brandon takes it one step further. From that 20% he encourages you to run another 80 / 20. What are the 20% of the actions within your already leveraged actions that generate a disproportionate amount of the result?

When you do the math, this suggests that 4% of your activity is responsible for 64% of your results. Do some more math and you’ll see that if you invested 40% of your time doing those things, 10x as much as the 4% you’re currently doing,  then you’d achieve 10x the result. This is how you literally multiply your capacity. It’s not by increasing the quantity of what you do but by radically improving the quality of what you do.

That’s what leverage is: It’s a calculation of what you get out based on what you put in. You can put more quantity in and that will increase our output in linear proportion. That works to elevate results so long as you have the capacity to do more. But when you invest in quality, growth is exponential. The same unit of input generates an increased amount of output. Quality creates leverage in that you get more out for what you put in.

That’s what finding your 4% is all about. And if you want to hear Brandon’s process for it, you can listen to an episode he shared on his podcast about it here.

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