Well as it turns out, there are a bunch of factors working against us: Studies have shown people to be generally bad, when single, at predicting what later turn out to be their actual relationship preferences.

The Pareto principle has also been applied to training, where roughly 20% of the exercises and habits have 80% of the impact and the trainee should not focus so much on a varied training.

Modifications of existing theories make many fewer new unique predictions, increasing the risk that the few predictions remaining will be very expensive to test.

It is said that about 20% of sportsmen participate in 80% of big competitions and out of them, 20% win 80% of the awards.

It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients." Mathematically, the 80/20 rule is roughly followed by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters, and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution.

He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.