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I really don’t like it when marketers list their price as “a measly $XX.”  You may have seen these sales letters selling whatever for a “measly $77.”  I’m sorry, it may be a measly amount of money to you, but $47, $77, $97 or however many is a significant amount of money to me.  I even saw something for sale for a “measly $197.”

I understand that they are trying to convey the value of what your are purchasing with the “measly” amount of money.  The thing is, I know what I have to do to earn that “measly” sum of money, and I do not consider my time and efforts to be measly.  Pretty much anytime I see something listed for sale at a “measly” price, I skip right over it.  It just seems disrespectful of my efforts to earn my money.  But then again, that’s just my opinion.

I just saw a commercial for western union on the TV.

I have to wonder, with the advent of paypal and other electronic services, how is Western Union still in business?  Have y’all ever tried to send anyone money using WU?  It costs you, the sender, about $9 to send the money.  Then, the recipient has to go to a WU station to collect the money.  Why would anyone do that when you can just paypal the money over?

Seriously, you can send the money to whomever’s paypal account, then they can transfer it to their own bank account, or pay whatever bill they have to pay straight from the paypal account all for FREE!  Why pay for that same service?

Anyway, I guess that’s a story for another day.

I’ve come to find out that there are several iterations of this rule. Some people also refer to it as the 80/20 principle. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the rule that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. Another version says that 80% of your results come from 20% of you efforts and so on and so forth. But, did you also know that the 80/20 rule also applies to your desire to drive a project to completion?

I was talking with one of my co-workers and he was telling me that he’s about 80% done with this one big project he’s been working on for the last few months. He’s a programmer, and he was telling me about the milestones that he’s met along the way, the evolution of the project etc. He was telling me that most of the functionality, the back ends, etc. is all done. The project is at a point where users have started the period called UAT (User Acceptance Testing).

Now that the project is in UAT, and at 80% completion, he no longer wants to work on it. The end users are mostly happy with the program. The change requests have been limited to very minor things, most of them cosmetic which fall into the designer’s lap instead of the programmer’s lap. Even with that, he just can’t be bothered to finish out the remaining 20%.

That’s when he told me that he had “80/20 syndrome.” Now that only 20% of the project is left, he wants to move on to the next big thing, but can’t do so until he finishes this one. That last 20% is the hardest one.

This story reminds me of when I was training for my first marathon. A full blown marathon is 26.2 miles in length, which you cover in a “single sitting.” While we were preparing for the race, the coach told the group that the marathon was essentially a 20 mile run, followed by a 10k (6.2 miles). That’s roughly an 80/20 split. I felt a greater sense of relief after I passed that 20 mile mark than I did when I passed the 13.1 mile mark.

I think that I’m in the grips of 80/20 syndrome myself. I have a project that is about 80% complete, but getting to the motivation to push it over that last little hump and drive the project to completion is eluding me. I keep finding other, much more fun things that I would rather do.

When you’re running a marathon, to cover the last 20%, all you have to do is put one foot in front of the other and repeat. But, how do you overcome that last 20% in business?

Do you suffer from 80/20 syndrome? How do you overcome it?

I’ve been trying to settle down on what market to target.  As I mentioned in my “About me” page, or maybe I talked about it on my Squidoo page.  Anyway, I used to be the #2 SEO at a boutique SEO firm here in Austin, TX.  I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of SEO.

For the uninitiated, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  It’s the art and science of optimizing a web page to make it easy to find in search engine rankings.  I didn’t even realize that the product that I was promoting, the 30 minute backlinks product is an SEO tool.  I knew that it was an SEO product, it just didn’t register in my conscious mind that it was an SEO product.  How’s that for a non answer?

Anyway, until I can get my SEO firm off the ground, I’m going to try my hand at something called Adwords Arbitrage.  I’ll post my results on here so you can see how it’s coming along for me.

Cheers,

Rafael

My second article got published today.  It is so awesome that another one of my articles got published.  I was telling my girlfriend about it and she encouraged me to keep writing and reminded me about a different writing project that’s been sitting collecting digital dust.  She encouraged me to take it off the shelf and work on it.  I may be able to turn things around just yet folks.  Come along for the ride!

Rafael

Here’s the link to my other article:

Speedo FastSkin LZR Racer Swim Suit, Looks Cool but is it effective? 

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