People often expect the world to be in balance, but in reality, imbalance is the natural state of things. To understand this, let’s look at linguistics. Sir Isaac Pitman found that roughly 700 common words make up two-thirds of our everyday conversations. When you add their related words, this figure rises to 80 percent. So, less than one percent of all English words make up more than 80 percent of what we say.

Now, where do these imbalances come from? They emerge from feedback loops that magnify even small differences. For example, think of goldfish in a pond. If you have several goldfish of almost the same size, they will eventually grow into very different-sized fish. Why? Some are just slightly larger and catch a bit more food, so they grow faster than the smaller ones. This advantage keeps increasing, allowing them to catch even more food. With each loop, the difference in size becomes substantial.

These imbalances occur naturally, but many consider them unfair. For instance, when 20 percent of the population owns 80 percent of all wealth, we call it social injustice. This perception of unfairness arises because people expect work and reward to have a 1:1 ratio, meaning equal effort should result in equal reward. However, the 80/20 principle shows that not all work produces the same reward, challenging this assumption. As we won’t be able to change this 80/20 rule; why not to learn and use this to our advantage?