You might be familiar with the notion that distraction is prevalent in today’s society. We seem to all experience mild ADHD, always looking for the next best thing, for something more exciting to come along and capture our attention.
In such times, it is even more crucial and influential to be one of those few rare individuals who can focus intently on a few top priorities, thereby making significant progress.
Warren Buffett is the epitome of focus. His life strategy is simple. You don’t need a lot of small successes. You need only a few BIG successes. He's a multi-billionaire, so he’s probably onto something.
Now, naturally, we’re not all Warren Buffett, far from it. It requires a ton of discipline and patience to concentrate on a few key ideas/businesses, waiting for the few perfect opportunities that will change our lives.
However, his lessons and strategy is something we can apply to our hectic lives nowadays, to help prioritize and make us focus on the really important things in life.
This is exemplified best by two exercises Buffett talks about:
One is the punch card. Imagine you have a punch card with about 5 slots.
Every time you invest in a company, that’s a slot. For our purposes here, let’s say that every time you decide to take on a big project/initiative, that’s one slot. That means that you need to think very very carefully about every endeavour and initiative you take, as you have only 5 to use in your entire lifetime. Suddenly, focusing on a few key important areas in your life becomes almost easy, as you don’t really want to spend your 5 punch cards on things which are not absolutely crucial for you.
Another exercise complements the previous one, as it helps us realize how important it is to say “no” to the things we are excited about but are not completely in line with our highest purpose and bigger life goals.
Enter the two list strategy.
Take a sheet of paper, write down your 25 most important goals in life, the things you care deeply about and you want to achieve at all costs.
Now, choose your top 5 most important goals, which mean the most to you and you simply can’t consider your life fulfilled without them.
Now, you might think okay, I’ll tackle the 5 most important goals, and the other 20 I’ll try to squeeze in between, so I can be as productive as possible.
Wrong. Buffett says the first list is your 5 most important goals, you’re going to focus on it for the rest of your life. The other 20 goals? That’s your “avoid at all costs list”. No matter how tempted you might be to squeeze some of these goals in, work on them for just an hour a week, etc. You must avoid them and keep focusing on your top 5 priorities.
Saying “no” is definitely hard. I’m sure the other 20 important goals are pretty important too, but we all have limited resources. Buffett may have billions of dollars, but even he has limited resources when it comes to time. We all have the same 24 hours, and we have to make the best out of them.
So next time you’re faced with a cool new project, ask yourself — is this project a part of my 5 top priorities in life? if it isn’t, it’s a distraction and you need to avoid it at all costs. Stay focused.
