Friday, November 02, 2007

The Seventy Percent Rule

"He is the Technical Manager at Satyam and an alumnus of our college", with these words our professor introduced a class of 15 people to the 30 something person standing with the professor. He talked about in length about various topics around IT industry and then he talked about the most important thing which was my takeaway from the talk, "The Seventy percent rule". He said that he followed this rule all his life and he is more than satisfied with what he has achieved with this rule.

His idea is simple, people are always surrounded by opportunities but hesitate to grab one. The reason for reluctance in making choices lies in the greediness for the better opportunity. The counter argument, what is the guarantee that the next opportunity will be better than the current, and what if you keep loosing opportunities waiting for the better ones? The rule is simple; if the current opportunity is as good as at least 70% of your dream opportunity, then grab it otherwise leave it. This rule applies to every aspect of your life, job, career, girlfriend, money and what not.

3 comments:

poloolop said...

70% is hard to measure. Life is not that objective. Mostly the choice of opportunities is purely a subjective matter.

In my opinion the best opportunities are the ones we create opportunities for ourselves rather than the ones that come our way randomly. So there is really no need to choose from opportunities. You take the ones you create as they are the best ones. Any other choice would be a compromise.

I have written extensively on happiness, in which I state that in the end everything is merely an illusion - which our minds perceive. In my perception I can be the most successfull person in the world even when I have left 100% of all opportunities that came my way :-)
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Mj said...

Its not that hard to measure 70% percent,its an approximate figure, although its subjective.
The opportunities we create can be several, you may like to work in several projects but you wait for the best project to come by, that it loosing the opportunity.
Happiness it something which is very very specific and cannot be related in this context. Since if you come across your dream project later on after choosing some other project...then you might not be happy.

poloolop said...

Choice is indeed difficult. The more you have it the worse. The best scenarios are when you have NO choice :-).