Answer to Life

Prehistory

I studied in the first year, when a friend of mine shared with me the secret of how to skip pairs without any problems. The idea was that it was necessary to attend only those items that were “important” in terms of passing the session. As a result, couples could easily walk without fear of being expelled. This idea seemed useless to me, since I did not strive to skip classes and considered it my duty to use all the opportunities that the university offered.

Later, watching this method in practice, I had to change my point of view. Comparing my knowledge with those who skipped classes at the end of the session, I usually expected to see what I know and can do more. However, this was not always the case. I remember being really disappointed when I learned that while we were writing lectures on numerical optimization methods, one of my classmates managed to get a job where he was engaged not only in applying these methods in practice, but also in earning real money. money. As a result, he knew how and knew more than we, although he skipped classes. This taught me an important rule: the most difficult path does not always lead to the best result. At first it seemed to me strange and even dishonest, until I began to use this rule myself.

Having mastered this rule, I always tried to look for an easier way to solve any problem, while obtaining the best result. So, for example, then I learned that by intensively studying lectures for three days before the exam, I could achieve the same result as the person who wrote these lectures during the entire semester. Moreover, unlike him, I always passed the exam for “excellent”, which created another reason for the envy of those who lent me lectures. As a result of absenteeism by the time of graduation, I had not only a red diploma, but real work experience in several companies and several projects of my own.
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Relative importance

Already after university I learned about the Pareto rule. Today, almost everyone knows about this rule. My acquaintance with him began with the phrase that 20% of all people consume 80% of all beer, although in the original formulation the rule sounded different: 20% of efforts give 80% of the result. Today, this rule is used in almost any field, ranging from economics, marketing and ending with the development of microprocessors. When using it, it is important to remember its empirical nature, since the result is not an exact value, but its empirical distribution.

Applying the rule to my own studies at the university, I realized that 20% of all the subjects I chose to visit ended up with 80% of the total. I made the choice intuitively, guided by an internal understanding of importance. Later, the concept of "importance" became for me central to the Pareto rule.

If we discard the numbers, we get the main consequence of the Pareto rule: within the framework of a specific result, some of the actions are more important than others. This formulation makes it possible to see that importance is a relative concept. Each of the actions may be important in relation to one result, but unimportant to the other. For example, items important to a microprocessor developer will not be important to a testing engineer, and vice versa.

Relative importance ^ 2

As a rule, during his life, a person is constantly engaged in achieving some goals. This could be education, work, family, etc. If the achievement of goals is considered as a function of success, it can be said that success depends on how correctly important actions are chosen. In other words, only 20% of possible actions will bring 80% of the result.

Trying to determine the importance of what I did every day, I came to interesting results. Most of what I did was not only unimportant, but rather moved away from the result. This was due to the fact that the things I did were important, but not for those goals that were really important. This allowed me to understand why doing only the important things, you can, nevertheless, not a bit closer to the result.

Forrest Gump

The film Forest Gump, in my opinion, is well illustrated by the example of the main character. Forest is not like other people. I would even say it is strange. Strange from the point of view of a normal person, his actions seem strange. They are unimportant from the perspective of an ordinary person: he does not seek to become rich or be better. Nevertheless, he achieves everything one can dream of: he saves a friend's life; makes the girl she loves happy; gives birth to a son; becoming famous and rich. He does things that seem important to him. And then it turns out that they are really important.

We often strive for things that do not make us happy. From childhood we know what happiness is: love, being with a loved one, doing what you like. It seemed that we know what is really important, but we are not doing the things that bring us closer to these goals. Sometimes we think: some more money and I will be happy, I will buy a car and I will definitely be happy, it remains to buy an apartment and become happy, finally, I will get this post and absolutely I will definitely be happy. However, none of these goals is important in and of itself.

For the sake of experiment, let everyone think about their goals, do you have them? Do you think they will make you happy?

Could you live like Forest Gump?

The answer to the main question

And finally, in conclusion, I would like to touch on the practical part of the issue. As we have understood, any process depends on many factors. 20% of these factors are important. The result always depends on how well we choose these factors. If you think this is the only thing that determines the result. The correct assessment guarantees the solution of the problem in the simplest way.

Knowing this, we can formulate an algorithm for solving any problem:

First you need to understand which of the factors are important. Then each factor must be presented as a separate task. This is a recursive process, continuing until each factor is decomposed into a series of simplest ones.

As a result, we get a graph, which will be the solution. Thus, any most complex and non-deterministic task can be reduced to the simplest actions.