The 80/20 Rule

I'm a passionate advocate of the 80/20 rule, which says 80 percent of your sales come from 20 percent of your customers. It applies to most other aspects of business and life as well, like how you spend your time.

I've discovered that your inner procrastinator -- if you pay close attention to him -- tells you exactly what you should be doing.

The top 20 percent activities that produce 80 percent of your results are the very same things that trigger you to procrastinate -- to delete old emails or water plants instead.

Eventually I had to cloister myself in a library with no Internet to craft the marketing for a business move that scared me deep down. Those demons inside my head knew it was a good idea, so I decided to harken unto them.

Whenever my inner procrastinator tells me to check Twitter or iron my shirts, instead of what I've planned, I know I'm on to something good. I switch it around.

It's not that we don't want to work. It's that we're afraid of doing work that will move the needle. Most of us are afraid of success.

Here are tips on how to direct your inner procrastinator to your advantage:

Flip your daily to-do list. You wake up and list the 10 things you need to do today. Odds are, one item is worth 10 times more than the rest. Our natural human tendency is to put it off until later, diverting into mundane tasks like Facebook. We invent devilishly clever reasons not to get that one thing done.

Check your gut and do it. Now. (Or at least after you finish reading this article.)

The 'procrastination demon opportunity detector' works for big-picture projects, too. If you're all-consumed with $10 per hour busy work, you have no time to stop and ask yourself, "What salvo should I launch next week that will double sales next year?"

That question makes you squirm. The more disconcerting, the better. It challenges the status quo. Whatever gives you that queasy, familiar feeling of asking for a big check -- or for dad's car keys at 11 at night -- that plan probably belongs on the top of the stack.

Make constructive use of the time you liberate. I urge entrepreneurs to hire house cleaners and personal assistants to free themselves up from mundane activities. What do you do with the extra two hours a day you free up? You could fritter it away - or go nuclear on your business strategy.

Perfectionism is the root of all evil.  Most of us soothe our anxieties and stay mediocre by perfecting things that don't need to be perfect at all. You spend 15 minutes editing that email before you press send. You clean out your car twice a week.

Most procrastination isn't doing nothing, it's doing what's comfortable and mediocre.

Put 'Do Nothing' on your to-do list. I'm a huge advocate of Sabbath -- taking Saturdays or Sundays off. Instead of wasting time on busy work such as checking email, everyone should create space where they pray or meditate -- or simply do nothing. Your best business ideas will come when you're not working. When you're having fun doing what you enjoy doing, whether it's reading novels or tossing a baseball with your kids, that feeds your creativity.

I learned this the hard way. I spent years with the pedal to the metal, working seven days a week. It got me nowhere because I was not doing what I needed to do most.

Harken unto your "procrastination demon opportunity detector." Choose the thing that makes you most anxious. Then head straight into the wind, because those anxieties are merely birth pangs of a larger success.

Three Ways of Learning

Three Ways of Learning

There are three distinct ways of learning. Good teaching should incorporate all three as much as possible.

Research shows that people acquire knowledge in three different ways. All learning, may that be social or scientific, is done through one or a combination of three ways. Here is a brief description of these three learning avenues.

First is auditory. That mean we learn by listening. We hear other talk and explain and we learn by making sense of what others have to say. It is one of the most basic methods of learning, something that a child starts doing while still in the womb of her mother.

Before the coming of printing press, lots of tradition and instructions were delivered through listening. Elders as well as the wise spoke as the audience listened. Teachers in a traditional classroom rely on this method a lot.

The second way of learning is visual. That’s learning by observing. A learner can adopt a behavior or acquire a certain skill by looking someone perform the said behavior or skill. It is learning through coping, again something all of us do many times a day.

The third way of learning is kinesthetic. It is learning by doing. That means hands on experience, where a learner has to do something to learn something. This kind of learning involves our hands and senses.

People usually learn by making a good use of all three ways of learning. A good understanding should incorporate all three ways of learning. Subtraction, for example: can be learned by listening to a teacher explain how it’s done. The other way is to see it done on the board, and the third way is to have children use material to learn how to subtract.

Learning phonics also needs the use of all three ways of learning. Children hear a certain sound, then they see the alphabet written on the board and then they match the sound to the word starting with that sound on a worksheet.

All three ways of learning are equally important, it’s just that we prefer one way of learning on another and that’s natural. For example: some people learning more by doing rather than looking or listening. Others prefer listening than actually doing or observing. Yet there are people who sit in a corner observing an action instead of doing the same thing or listening to teachers how it’s done.

A child will be at great loss if his or her preferred method of learning is seeing and teacher doesn’t show something related to the concept in the class. Similarly, a child who likes to learn by doing will not learning properly if teacher only speak and then shows something related to that concept or skill in the classroom.

It would be difficult to give equal time to each learning style when teaching a concept but an effort should be made to do the best we can in order to incorporate these styles.

Here are some examples of things we can do to cater to each learning style while teaching young children.

Auditory
• Singing poems
• Telling stories
• Giving instructions
• Telling jokes
• Singing rhymes
• Telling picture stories

Visual
• Showing pictures
• Showing real objects
• Taking out to trips
• Showing animals
• Showing flash cards
• Writing and drawing on the board

Kinesthetic
• Cutting
• Drawing
• Molding
• Pasting
• Colouring
• Pushing
• And many more

A good lesson plan should incorporate some of each and then ample time for each way of learning should be provided in the classroom. However, we should keep in mind that auditory take less amount of time. There should be more time given to Visual learning than auditory and maximum time is to be allocated to kinesthetic learning.

But long before we do our lesson planning around the three ways of learning, the books and workbooks should be developed around all three ways of learning. A concept, when explained in a book, should incorporate auditory, visual as well as kinesthetic ways of learning.

Let’s take Phonics for an example. When introducing a beginning sound, the book should have a story around the words starting with the targeted beginning sound. The beginning sound ‘a’ can be introduced through a story around ant, apple, ambulance, alligator, and arrow. The story can go like this:

Ant was sitting on an apple. She was playing with the alligator. Alligator hit the apple with an arrow. Ant fell down and broke her arm. Ambulance came to take ant to the hospital. Alligator followed the ambulance to the hospital. Doctor treated ant. Alligator said sorry to ant. Both were happy.

This will cater to the auditory way of learning. There can also be a poem around the same concept as it will add to the auditory activity.

For visual activity, there can be a picture story developed with the help of words starting with the targeted beginning sound. So for the beginning sound ‘a’ picture can show an ant sitting on an apple while alligator is shown throwing an arrow at the apple. Teacher can then show the picture to the children and discuss the objects visible there.

As for the kinesthetic, there can be a worksheet that will provide children with a matching activity. For example: there can be a worksheet with four pictures (three of objects starting with the beginning sound ‘a’ and one object not starting with this sound) and children can look and match the sound ‘a’ with the objects starting with this sound.

The three ways of learning provide children with maximum opportunities to acquire knowledge. These three ways makes learning dynamic and wholesome. Conceptual development becomes strong when it is done through these three ways. All books, workbooks, and other teaching materials, therefore, should be developed keeping these three ways in mind.