Jerry Seinfeld – “No one’s really that great.”

Shane Parrish quotes comedian Jerry Seinfeld on being great:

“No one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put tremendous amount of hours into it. It’s a game of tonnage.”

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Please forgive me in advance for quoting at length from a commentary I wrote long ago concerning a favorite album of mine and how it serves to illustrate The Pareto Effect.

The album in question has been a key test disc for me. It’s one that helped me dramatically improve the quality of our playback over the last 40-plus years.

The albums on the list linked to above do exactly what good test discs should do.

They can show you what your system is doing wrong, or poorly, and once you’ve fixed it, or made it better, they show you that it actually is better, maybe even right, or at least more right than it was before.

We audiophiles need records like these. They make us better listeners, and they force us to become good at building our audio systems. Because the amount of experimenting you do with your setup, components, room, electricity and the like is the only thing that can take you to the highest levels of audio.

The reality audiophiles must face in their journey to higher quality sound is that buying good equipment, regardless of price or quality, will not get you there.

You can only teach yourself — painstakingly, over the course of many, many years — how to tweak and tune your equipment, regardless of its cost or purported quality, in order to reach the highest levels of audio fidelity.

And learning how to tweak and tune your equipment has other, fundamentally more important benefits in addition to its original purpose.

It helps you become a better listener, so that you notice aspects of the sound you were not aware of on your records.

Breaking It Down

At most 20% of the sound of your stereo is what you bought.

At least 80% is what you’ve done with it.

Based on my experience I would put the number closer to 90%.

This is known as the Pareto Principle.

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule, The Law of the Vital Few and The Principle of Factor Sparsity, illustrates that 80% of effects arise from 20% of the causes – or in laymen’s terms – 20% of your actions/activities will account for 80% of your results/outcomes.

The Pareto Principle gets its name from the Italian-born economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), who observed that a relative few people held the majority of the wealth (20%) – back in 1895. Pareto developed logarithmic mathematical models to describe this non-uniform distribution of wealth and the mathematician M.O. Lorenz developed graphs to illustrate it.

Dr. Joseph Juran was the first to point out that what Pareto and others had observed was a “universal” principle—one that applied in an astounding variety of situations, not just economic activity, and appeared to hold without exception in problems of quality.

In the early 1950s, Juran noted the “universal” phenomenon that he has called the Pareto Principle: that in any group of factors contributing to a common effect, a relative few account for the bulk of the effect.

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