The things that we love that are not the most important
are the easiest to rationalize spending time on
and distracting us from the things that are really important.
This idea that we can suddenly go from having one most important thing
to ten most important things is a complete myth that our busy, industrialized,
technologically empowered culture has started to embrace for
some reason, but you can't change the laws of physics,
you can't bend reality.
You can only have one most important thing, and the way that we operate and the way that
we divide our energy and push our energy around has not changed,
even if we're defining it in a different way.
So given that, how do we decide what priorities to focus on,
how do we decide what to whittle out and what to cut down?
Warren Buffett has a strategy that I find relatively interesting and useful.
Buffett is probably the most famous investor the last hundred years
and certainly one of the most successful of all time.
And this story comes directly from his personal pilot, Mike Flynn,
he was telling this story to a friend of mine.
So Mike Flynn has been Warren Buffett's personal pilot for a while,
he's also flown Air Force One, he's flown multiple US presidents,
he's an accomplished guy.
And he was telling Buffett, “hey, Warren, you should really get this
new plane, it's pretty sick, I'd like to be able to fly this thing, you
should buy this at some point”, and he was like,
“I’d love to be able to fly this thing in the next 5 or 10 years”.
And apparently, Warren looked at Mike Flynn and said,
“if you're still flying for me in 10 years, then
I probably have failed you as a boss because you're not growing enough,
you haven't grown out of this and if I'm serious about developing you,
then we're going to need to do that”.
“So what I want you to do is sit down and write the top 25 priorities
that you have for yourself for the next 10 or 15 years”.
And this exercise I'm about to share, you can do this on any timeline,
you do, 25 priorities for your career, you can do 25 for this month,
25 for this year, whatever works for you.
So Mike Flynn goes off, writes down his 25 priorities,
he comes back and takes a look at Warren Buffett and says,
“here's the list, I got it”.
He says, “all right, good, I want you to circle the top 5,
I want you to focus on the 5 priorities that are most important,
you go and circle those, take a little bit time”.
He goes off and does that and brings the list back, and he's like,
“ok, tell me how are you going to deal with this now Mike,
what are you going to do?”
He says, “well, I've selected my top 5 most important priorities,
so I'm going to go ahead and focus on those and then the rest of this list will be kind
of like my backup plan, on weekends or when I have extra time or when
a project stalls, I'll work on the other stuff”.
And Buffett said, “no, no, you've got it all wrong”.
“This list of number six to twenty five is your never do under any circumstance list”.
And the reason, it took me a while to grasp why this is so important.
The things that we love that are not the most important
are the easiest to rationalize spending time on
and distracting us from the things that are really important,
the things that are good but not great, that's the stuff that ends up taking us off
course.
It's not that we don't really want something, it's not that we don't really want to improve
or we don't know exactly what the most important thing is to us,
it's that we choose to spend our time on number 6 to 25 too often,
we choose to make these rationalizations, “this is a decent use of time, I’m not
really wasting time, I'm not sitting around watching a bad TV show
or something, I'm working on something relatively important”,
but that's the stuff that pulls away from greatness.
So gardeners tell me that if you want a rosebush to blossom, to fully bloom, to become the
most that can be, you have to prune away buds,
you can't just let everything grow unpruned.
And in order to do that, that means you have to cut away buds
that could blossom into something that can become a full grown flower, that
could look good.
So these are good ideas that you have to clip away,
but you have to prune those out of your life if you want to truly be great,
if you want to focus on flourishing to the biggest degree.
So pruning away these ideas and using Buffett's strategy of this 25 - 5 rule
is one way to cut out the things that are in your life
that are distracting you from greatness.
In order to do this, so you may be thinking at this point,
“all right, I want to focus on the most important stuff,
but I still have a lot of priorities, I still have a lot of stuff that sounds important
to me, I still would like to build all these new
habits, how do I decide what to stick to first?”
In this case, I would suggest keystone habits.
A keystone habit is a type of behavior that you perform
that filters into your life in many other ways,
I'll give you a couple of examples.
So one keystone habit for me is working out.
If I go to the gym every Monday, Wednesday and Friday,
all sorts of things happen.
First, I get the benefits of strength training, so, yes, that's good, that's what most people
think you're going there for, but when I come back, I have an hour of solid
focus, like post workout high where you have really
clear thinking, so my focus is improved.
I tend to eat better when I work out.
And why?
I just don't want to waste it, I guess I could eat ice cream if I wanted,
but I just kind of feel like I have a good streak going,
so might as well continue eating well too.
Nutrition improves.
I sleep better that night because I'm tired and I've worked my body hard,
I wake up the next day and I have better energy because I slept well,
so at no point was I trying to build better focus habits, nutrition habits, energy habits,
sleep habits, but all those things came as a consequence
of this one keystone habit.
So if you're looking for a way to get started in a very practical way,
think about what the keystone habit could be for you.
Some popular examples, weightlifting is mine, meditation is another one that you commonly
hear CEOs talk about, “if I get my daily meditation habit in then
everything is much easier for me”.
Walking, going on a daily walk is a very common one,
especially for artists if they need some creative time,
if they do their daily walk each day, the rest of the day flows.
Visualization is a common one, you'll hear comedians say things like,
“I rehearsed the greatest performance I've had
right before I step out on the stage or, I visualize having a successful speech right
before I step onto the stage”.
So those type of visualization techniques can be useful as well,
but think about what you do on days when you perform at your best
that'll give you an insight into what your keystone habit could be.
Jerry Seinfeld, very famous comedian, one of my favorite comedians,
certainly one of the most successful comedians of all time.
And when he was starting his career as this show was getting on air,
first year or two, he was still he was still going around,
and so Seinfeld was still on the road, still going around doing his standup comedy,
and at this particular club, one night, Seinfeld was performing and headlining on
stage and there was a young comedian named Brad
Isaac who was opening for Seinfeld.
And Isaac got Seinfeld backstage and said, “Mr. Seinfeld, I'm a young comedian, I really
want to succeed, I'm interested in hearing do you have any
tips for somebody in my situation?”
And Seinfeld looked at and said, “well, the secret to being a great comedian
is write better jokes and the secret to writing better jokes is
to write every day”.
“So here's what I think you should do, I want you to get a big wall calendar
where you can see every day of the year on the calendar,
put that on your wall and each day that you do your task
of writing jokes for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is,
I want you to mark an X on that day”.
“You may do this once or twice and have a couple of false starts or whatever,
but at some point you're going to get 5, 6, 7, 8 days in a row,
you're going to get some kind of chain going, and at that point, your only goal becomes
don't break the chain, it doesn't matter how good or how bad your
jokes are, doesn't matter if they make it into your material
at any point, all it matters is that you don't break the
chain, you stick with the consistency”.
I know people who have used that for almost anything,
you can use it for workouts, don't break the chain of your training,
you can use it for dribbling drills, you can use it if you're a filmmaker,
“am I working on film for thirty minutes a day?”.
Whatever the goal is for you, don't break the chain.
And the caveat that I would add to that, the one thing that I would change from this
is, nobody is going to be perfect,
there's going to be some day where you fall off course
but the rule or the mental model that I like to keep in mind
when it's that case is never miss twice.
The thing that separates top performers from everybody else
is not that they don't make mistakes, they make errors, they slip up,
they make bad choices just like everyone else, they have a bad day,
but they find a way to get back on track quicker than anyone else, as fast as possible,
they may miss one workout, but they're not going to miss two.
So never miss twice as you're building these chains in your own life.
The key idea here, the phrase I like to use, “Rome wasn't built in a day, but they were
laying bricks every hour”.
You don't have to do everything you want today, but you do need to lay a brick,
you do need to keep that chain going, day after day, brick by brick,
how do you build the thing that you want to create?