Pareto noticed that a tiny number of pea pods in his garden produced the majority of the peas.

approximately 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by just 20 percent of the people. Similar to the pea pods in his garden, most of the resources were controlled by a minority of the players.

The majority of rewards always seemed to accrue to a small percentage of people. This idea that a small number of things account for the majority of the results became known as the Pareto Principle or, more commonly, the 80/20 Rule.

In the 1950s, three percent of Guatemalans owned 70 percent of the land in Guatemala. In 2013, 8.4 percent of the world population controlled 83.3 percent of the world's wealth. In 2015, one search engine, Google, received 64 percent of search queries.

Imagine two plants growing side by side. Each day they will compete for sunlight and soil. If one plant can grow just a little bit faster than the other, then it can stretch taller, catch more sunlight, and soak up more rain.

Situations in which small differences in performance lead to outsized rewards are known as Winner-Take-All Effects.

Any decision that involves using a limited resource like time or money will naturally result in a winner-take-all situation.

The advantage of being a little bit better is not a little bit more reward, but the entire reward. The winner gets one and the rest get zero.

The margin between good and great is narrower than it seems. What begins as a slight edge over the competition compounds with each additional contest.

as The Matthew Effect, which references a passage in The Bible that says, “For all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

The 1 Percent Rule states that over time the majority of the rewards in a given field will accumulate to the people, teams, and organizations that maintain a 1 percent advantage over the alternatives.