Pareto Principle

There is a cost to pursuing any strategy, whether it's in Time, Finances, Focus, etc. Most strategies have diminishing returns, meaning that, as you keep at them, you get less and less out of an additional marginal bit of effort.

The Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule states that eighty percent of the results come from twenty percent of the effort. Early gains tend to be the largest and most of strategies eventually stops being worthwhile.

There is usually a clever hack. The world is not fair. Effort is not distributed as it should be. And this isn't because people are dumb, or not trying. This is the default state of the world. There's lots of slack all around us. Allocating your effort efficiently is hard. And this is the default state of the world for you.

We spend most of our lives stuck in bad local optima. We have a set of default actions, standards ways of doing things and solving problems we come across. And these are way better than nothing, but nowhere near optimal.

To get out of a local optima, you need to develop the skill of noticing when you're in one, being creative to find a better way (Experimentation), and implementing that to move to a better one.