The Key to Success is Setting Fewer, More Essential Goals
Warren Buffett’s secrets to time management and goal-setting
Born in Nebraska in 1930, Warren Buffett began his journey towards entrepreneurial stardom at a young age, purchasing his first stock at just eleven years old. Of all businessmen in the 20th century, Buffett was by far the most successful and well-respected.
Today, Buffett openly shares many of his tips and tricks for succeeding in business, but his works have since extended beyond the field of finances. Living in a modest house purchased for just $31,500 dollars back in 1958, Buffett stands out amongst other wealthy business magnates and publicly offers his advice about productivity, motivation and time management in his world-renowned essays and speeches.
But what was his secret? How did Buffett soar far above all of the other investors climbing the ranks at the same time as him?
It all starts with setting goals.
Reimagine Your Goals
When setting goals, Buffett advocates what he refers to as the two-list method. Speaking with his long-time personal pilot, Mike Flint, Buffett told Flint to split his aspirations into two separate lists.
- List one would contain the top 25 goals that would move him forward in his career.
- List two was created by circling the 5 most important goals from the first list.
Upon completing the second list, Buffett asked Flint what his plan was for the goals that were not in his top five. He replied by saying that he planned to work on those in his spare time.
Buffett’s response is crucial.
“No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. 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.”
The problem with goal-setting is not in setting goals — it’s in setting the right goals, exactly the right goals, and only those goals. You see, we all have things that we want to achieve. We all want to get in better shape, earn more money, improve our relationships — and every one of these is a reasonable goal to work towards. But unless they’re in our top five, we’re probably not going to make time to complete them.
The trick is to focus on setting the best goals for us and to avoid all other goals completely. These are the kinds of goals, that, if set right, will render all others unnecessary.
But Buffett and Flint’s brief conversation only refers to career-based aspirations. Goals, however, extend further than just our careers.
The Four Categories of Aspiration
Each of our goals can be split into four distinct categories: spirit, heart, mind and body.
- Spirit: Spirit-based goals are those that drive us towards improving ourselves, such as overcoming personal struggles, refining our character and finding inner-contentment.
- Heart: Heart-based goals represent those relating to love and relationships — interpersonal connections with other people. As Australian nurse Bronnie Ware observed of her patients in the last days of their lives, among their greatest regrets was not spending more time with loved ones.
It should be noted, before discussing the remaining categories, that spirit and heart-based goals are the most important as they provide us with purpose. Above money, health, anything, it is the goals that fall into these two categories that push us forward and give our lives meaning — even if everything else is taken from us.
The remaining two are more like maintenance goals that allow us the opportunity to experience the purpose and meaning the others create. When people become miserable, it is often because they’re confusing their maintenance goals like wealth and status with essential goals like love and kindness.
- Mind: Next is mind, which represents not only our mental health, but also our career and the financial aspects of our lives. Money in itself will not lead to happiness, though it does provide the freedom to spend more time on goals of the first two categories.
- Body: Last, but certainly not least, is the body. A healthy body consists of three aspects: sleep, diet, and exercise. These are like the legs of a stool. Take one out and the stool falls. Neglect any one of the three and you will fall.
In all of these goals, the most important question to answer when setting them is the following:
What goal, if set, would render all other goals I could possibly set completely unnecessary?
Which one matters more to you than anything else?
Setting Fewer Goals That Mean More
Now that we’ve clarified which types of goals fall into which category, it’s time to create your own list based upon Buffett’s two-list methodology.
- Begin by writing down a list of around twenty aspirations that you currently wish to achieve. Aim to include goals from each of the above categories: spirit, heart, mind and body.
- Then, select one goal in each of the four goal areas that would allow you to progress the furthest—those goals that, if completed, would make all others unnecessary.
You may have many micro-goals on you list, like eating less unhealthy food and cutting down on dairy, but a larger, more meaningful goal like switching to a plant-based diet would deem all of those smaller ones unnecessary. When you focus your efforts on a single goal of greater importance as opposed to several small and minor tasks, you will be far more likely to to succeed.
To say that all of your problems will be solved simply by switching up your goal-setting habits ignores the larger picture, but it is a start.
There is much value in tackling our aspirations using Buffett’s two-list approach, and in doing so, we give ourselves more room to achieve those things that matter to us most.
And that, in essence, is one of the fundamental principles of success.
Learning to Live Happier
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