Warren Buffett's Avoid-At-All-Costs List
📖📖 My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose
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At the core of my Meaningful Productivity framework is the idea that we can’t really manage time: it just ticks by and one day the time we have in this life will run out.
When I saw that, I got curious. If we can’t really manage time, what are the things we are actually managing when we say we’re managing time? And that’s where my Six Pillars of Meaningful Productivity come in.
One of those pillars is: Choice.
We can choose where we put our attention. We can choose what happens in our days, our weeks, our months.
And we always have a choice, even if some choices are unpalatable.
In The Power to Choose, I go further: not only can we choose what we do in our lives, but we can choose how we see our lives. When we do that, then even more becomes possible.
When I teach Meaningful Productivity - which I’ve done several times in the last few weeks, for parliamentary candidates, business leaders from dozens of organisations and fellow members of The 93% Club - one of the stories I always tell is of Warren Buffett and his Avoid-At-All-Costs List.
When I ask at the end of those workshops for people’s most important insights: the same story comes up.
I learnt it from this blog by James Clear, and here’s how I tell the story:
Buffett - arguably the most successful investor of the 20th Century, and so someone who knows something about choices - realised he wanted to give some career guidance to the pilot of his private jet, Mike Flint. (This is a story we can all identify with 😂.)
First, he asks Flint to identify the 25 things he most wants to achieve in the rest of his career.
Then, to circle the 5 most important ones.
If you want to do it now, whether for the rest of your career, or 2026, or this month, or this week, stop reading and make the list now.
When Flint comes back with his 25 things and the top 5 highlighted, Buffett asks him what he’s going to do.
‘I’m going to start working on the top 5 right away.’
‘And what are you going to do with the other 20?’
According to Clear, Flint replies: ‘Well, the top 5 are my primary focus, but the other 20 come in a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.’
‘No,’ says Buffett. ‘Numbers 6-25 have to become your Avoid-At-All-Costs List.’
These must be ignored - at all costs - until the top 5 are completed.
Buffett understood the most important principle of Choice Management, you see. As I learned long ago from Sarah Cartwright: saying Yes to one thing is saying No to everything else. And saying No to something gives you the opportunity to say Yes to something else.
With the Avoid-At-All-Costs List, Buffett takes this to a new level. He knows that to say Yes to the things that matter most, you have to say No (for now) to all the things which matter a lot.
You’re already successful. You’re doing almost nothing that is pointless. But you’re doing a lot of ‘quite important’ things. And that is what’s stopping you saying Yes to the most important things.
This is both practical Choice Management, and The Power to Choose in action.
Practically, it’s an incredibly powerful tool: I’ve done it twice a year (January and September) since 2017. In that time I’ve published 5 books, created two podcasts (one of which is ranked in the top 3% of all podcasts globally despite a niche audience), lauched transformational frameworks for leaders and for coaches, grown my business to new levels, worked with so many inspiring leaders, and more - and all while only working 4 days a week since the start of 2021 (and, honestly, taking quite a lot of time off). Even I have to admit that’s productive.
But it’s also a way to change how I look at things: if I choose to believe that it is only by saying No to the quite important that I can achieve the most important, then those ‘No’s feel completely different.
As a people pleaser, it is shocking that I suddenly see ‘No’ as a possibility move.
When you first do this exercise, there will be a mixture of things on your Avoid-At-All-Costs List. Some you’ll be relieved and delighted to get off your list. Some will be an emotional wrench. Some might take years to extricate yourself from.
It took me several years of calibrating what needed to be included on the list before I achieved all of my top 5 things for the year (you can read more about that here, and here, and here).
When I didn’t achieve something, I chose to believe it was because I hadn’t been honest on my list or I hadn’t included things that I should have. That helped me learn and be even more deliberate about what I said Yes to and what I said No to.
And yes, things can happen to us. Things can go wrong.
But we can choose to believe that we have our part to play, and that by making courageous decisions, by saying No with grace and gratitude, by committing to what really matters over what matters quite a bit…
By doing that, we can create results that 10 years ago we couldn’t even have dreamed of.
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PS My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.