success - Turbo Coach, achieve breakthroughs - Brian Tracy

Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage
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Application in Your Life
At the personal level, this is why, in our coaching program,
we stress the importance of determining your highest-value
tasks—the 20 percent of things you do that yield 80 percent
of your desired results—and then focusing on these highvalue
tasks while delegating (or even eliminating) the rest.
A second lens through which you have learned to view this
principle is your hourly rate. Anything you do for which you
would not pay someone your desired hourly rate leads to
a lost opportunity cost. As with Pareto’s Law—the 80–20
Rule—these tasks should be delegated or eliminated. You
have learned that the decision about whether to delegate or
eliminate can be based on the rigorous application of zerobased
thinking.
Perhaps the greatest challenge in delegating an important
task is holding the belief that no one else can do it as well, or
as economically, as you. In fact, you may be right. But this is
an example of your absolute advantage, just as in the case of
Portugal’s ability to produce wheat more cheaply than England.
The answer to maximizing the return on your efforts
is to capitalize on your understanding of Ricardo’s Law of
Comparative Advantage by focusing on those activities that
yield the highest return to you—in economic terms, the highest
net value per unit of work (i.e., your comparative advantage)—and
to allow others to do everything else.
This is the key to sound time management and to increasing
your productivity. Free up every minute possible for
doing those things that yield the highest return on your efforts.
Delegate everything that someone else can do at least
75 percent as well as you at a lower hourly rate than you