1: Legendary investor Warren Buffett was talking with his personal pilot, Mike Flint.
Mike was “bemoaning his lack of clarity around his personal and professional aspirations and goals,” Sahil Bloom writes in his book The 5 Types of Wealth.
Warren instructed Mike to write down twenty-five career goals, “all the things he wanted to focus on and accomplish in the months and years ahead,” Sahil notes.
Mike made his list. Twenty-five items. Things he wanted to do.
Next, Warren told Mike to circle the top five goals from his list. So once again, he took out his pen.
“This required some effort to narrow down,” Sahil writes, as Mike “cared about all of them.”
At last, he had circled five goals.
2: Now, Warren instructed his pilot to create two lists, one with the five items he had circled and a second with the twenty he had not.
“What would he do with the non-circled items?” Warren asked. Mike responded that he would work on those goals whenever he had free time.
Warren “shook his head and replied that everything Mike hadn’t circled should become his ‘Avoid at All Costs’ List,” Sahil writes. “These items should get no attention until success was achieved with the top five.”
Warren Buffett’s point? “The most important items had been highlighted; everything else was simply a distraction threatening to derail Mike’s progress.”
3: We are told to focus on the most important things.
“But how do we identify what those things are?” Sahil asks. “How do we identify the projects, opportunities, and goals we should be focusing our attention on? What are the two to three areas that have the potential to drive the asymmetric rewards in our personal and professional spheres?”
We can use Warren’s two-list strategy to identify our most important goals and focus our attention.
To bring this practice to life, we begin by making a complete list of all our top professional priorities. We do the same exercise with our personal priorities.
Next, we narrow our list by circling the top three to five items. “These should be the absolute top priorities in our professional life, the items that will have the greatest impact on your trajectory—the long-term value drivers,” Sahil explains. “These are the items that truly matter.”
We follow the same practice with our personal priority list.
Lastly, we split the lists by writing down the three to five priorities circled on the left and the remaining priorities on the right.
“Label the left side of the sheet ‘Priorities’ and the right side of the sheet ‘Avoid at All Costs,’ Sahil notes. “Repeat this process for our personal list.”
We are using the two-list exercise to focus our attention. By separating our goals into “Priorities” and “Avoid at All Costs,” we now know where we should spend our time and what we will delegate or delete.
“Consider this your first line of defense,” Sahil recommends. “When new opportunities arise, refer to our two-list exercise and make a quick assessment of whether it falls into the category of one of our priorities or if it should be avoided at all costs.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I letting less important tasks distract me from the few priorities that will truly move my life and work forward?
Action: List my top 25 goals, circle the five that matter most, and commit to focusing exclusively on those-avoiding everything else until they are achieved.
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