The 80% Man
The Man Behind The Performance
The man I’m writing this for may not think it’s for him.
He’s successful. He’s competent in rooms where competence is hard to fake. People depend on him. He delivers.
From the outside, it looks exactly like it should.
But somewhere between the last win and the next one, there’s a hum. A low, persistent, dull buzz of emotional tinnitus. It’s the quiet roar you can’t quite tune out.
Is this it?
You’re an extraordinary man running on partial capacity. Everything you’ve built—the business, the career, the life—you built on 80% of who you are.
Yet, 80% is a remarkable machine. It makes sound decisions. It meets commitments. It runs on proven patterns and repeating algorithms. It almost never fails.
But it isn’t all of you. It’s just the version that learned to be reliable.
The other 20%? It’s used up, or it’s missing.
One story is about friction.
You aren’t broken. You are complete. But the energy required to hold it all together is a tax you can no longer afford. Managing every situation. If-then. If-then-else loops. Squeezing the life so tight it doesn’t fall apart. Pushing the weight. The three coffees to sharpen the morning; the extra whiskey to blunt the night.
You’re running on empty because the friction is burning the fuel before it hits the engine.
The other story is about the vacuum.
Something left a long time ago. No single moment. No momentous fall. Just a pot on a stove with no lid and no one watching. Slowly, the heat took what was inside.
You’ve hit every target. You’ve built what you were supposed to build. But you wake up at 3:00 AM and wonder what the point is. You look at the person lying next to you and realise you are both strangers.
You don’t need to push harder. You need to go back and get what’s missing.
Two stories. One number.
80% is a fine score. It’s enough to win. But it’s not the full picture.
What would the people closest to you say if they got the other 20%? Your wife. Your children. The men who think they know you.
What would change in your business if the man making the decisions was fully present, not just expertly managed?
You already know which story is yours.
Are you running at 80%?
Who would the full version look like?
The man his children will actually remember - not the one who paid for everything, but the one who was genuinely there.
The man his wife chose - not the one she’s learned to work around.
The man who walks into a room and doesn’t need to perform for it.
The man who is as present at the dinner table as he is in the boardroom.
Loved this. Been on my own 80% journey off and on. I enjoyed your writing.