Use Warren Buffett’s 5/25 Rule To Achieve Your Most Important Goals Faster

4 min readSep 14, 2018

“Understanding what you should not pay attention to is as important as understanding what should be focused on”
~ Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett, the multi-billionaire investor, who earned his fortune through the power of intelligent decision making is also known for his quest for following principles on how to live a holistic good life.

Once he asked his personal airplane pilot Mike Flint (serving him for a decade) what are his 25 important goals in his life. Flint did the exercise and presented Buffett a list of his 25 major life goals.

Buffett further asked him to prioritize and circle 5 of his most important goals.

It was a bit of a stretch, but Flint after thorough introspection, circled 5 items as most important from the 25 items listed earlier.

Finally, Buffett asked him what would he do about the remaining 20 items.

Flint responded that since all these 25 items were important to him, so he would some time on these remaining 20 items when he was not working on his main 5 goals.

As he heard this, Buffett’s expression changed. He responded sternly:

“No. You’ve got it wrong. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”

That’s the power of selective focus and this rule is known as 5/25 Rule.

Buffett was mindful that items 6 through 25 on your list are things you care about- means they are important to you. So you would try to justify spending time on them.
But here is the key — when you compare them to your top 5 goals, these items are distractions. Spending time on secondary priorities is the reason you have 20 half-finished projects instead of 5 completed ones.

In fact, our time and attention are the most valued commodity and with the advent of technology, there are already so many distractions waiting to steal our attention.

Therefore, until we build our focus and deliver quality attention to our most important goals, it’s not going to move the needle.

FOCUS is the Key To Breakthrough Achievement

Alexander Graham Bell once said profoundly:

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”

Interestingly, Robert Kiyosaki, bestselling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad stated FOCUS as an acronym and explained it as below:

F- Follow
O- One
C- Course
U- Until
S- Successful

How to Create Impactful Work

In his great book Deep Work, Cal Newport, professor of computer science in Georgetown University, US explains the secret of producing high quality work.

He states that we can either do Deep Work or we can do Shallow Work.

In the modern distracted world, Deep Work is becoming simultaneously more rare and more valuable too. While most people keep switching around from one Shallow Work task (email/phone call etc.) to another, very few of us can unplug from technology and lock ourselves in a bubble of focus where we can do some truly impactful Deep Work. And that’s where the real magic happens.

In fact, Newport’s equation for producing high quality of work is worth engraving as brain tattoo. He says

High Quality Work Produced = Time Spent x Intensity of Focus

Conclusion:

Therefore, it’s important that while we prepare a list of our most important goals, we should mindfully create a To-Avoid-List (until we achieve our most deserving goals).

Once we start forcing ourselves to eliminate our options, we quickly find that only a few things truly matter to us. The crux of 5/25 Rule is that we would be best served if we ignore distractions and do more of what really matters.