PICK FIVE THINGS

If you have lot’s of stuff on your plate, how do you decide what to work on?

Whether or not you’ve completed the ikigai exercise also available on this site, you probably have more options of what to do with your time than you realize, or can realistically make progress on in a given day, week, or year. Hopefully, many of those things overlap, or you can see how they might fit together in your life. But for the vast majority of people, they won’t all match up. Some goals and activities will be completely incompatible with others, and some just won’t nest neatly together, even if they’re technically compatible. So how do you choose?

While you’re allowed to do more than one thing in your life, you can’t do everything.

Helping you choose what to focus on is what this exercise is for. It comes from Warren Buffett. As the story goes, Buffett asked his private jet pilot of many years something along the lines of “Do you have goals or aspirations other than continuing to be my pilot?” The pilot admitted that yes, he did indeed, but he hadn’t been able to work toward them. So Buffett laid out this general process for him, in three simple steps.

What you need for this exercise:

  • Pen and paper

STEP #1: LIST 25 OF YOUR GOALS

This exercise is about zeroing in on your top goals, but to get there, you first have to figure out all the goals floating around in your life and your head. So list them out, including both career and life goals. List at least twenty-five, but don’t stop there if you’ve got more.

When I did this exercise for the first time, I was skeptical. Who has twenty-five goals? Then I started listing projects I was involved in. Résumé fodder I was working toward. Positions I hoped to move into. Hobbies I wanted to explore. Skills I wanted to develop. My list went past twenty-five pretty quickly.

STEP #2: CIRCLE YOUR TOP 5

Next, really think about the whole list. Go over it. Search your soul. Circle your top goals, but no more than five. You really have to be serious about deciding what your five (or fewer) most important goals are. Let me tell you, it’s not easy for most people. If, like me, you struggle to narrow your list, I recommend using the “several stages of why” technique. For each goal, ask yourself why you want to achieve it. Then ask why again, and again, until you get to the root of the goal. When you first start asking why, your list will likely expand, but then there’s a good chance you will find that several of your goals are really mid-level goals, with the same overarching goal above them. That top-level goal is one of the five goals you need to circle.

  • To make progress on anything, you need direction, and that comes from the “big stuff.” So what’s the “big stuff”? It’s all the things you want most out of life—your big hopes and dreams for your career, your relationships, your hobbies, and so on. Goals are important, but not all goals are created equal. Whether you’re aware of it or not, you have a hierarchy of goals. If you’ve made the effort to define it, the big stuff is at the very top. Long-term, top-level goals can be broken down into smaller mid-level and low-level goals.

    As an example of a small hierarchy, consider going on a date. You may have the goal to look good for your date. But that goal is really to serve a different (higher) goal: to make a good impression on your date. Serving that same higher-level goal, you may also have goals of choosing a movie your date will enjoy and a restaurant you both will be comfortable at. And for each of those goals, there will be even lower-level goals or tasks—seeing what’s showing at the local theater, looking up movie and restaurant reviews, and so on. So you have tasks, under low-level goals, under one or more layers of mid-level goals. Now step back. Looking at your life, is making a good impression on this particular date one of your main life goals? Probably not. Making a good impression is in service of an even higher-level goal—a goal perhaps about long-term companionship, or love, or family.

    As you start to think about it this way, you might begin to see that, when defining goals, it is important to start at the top and work your way down. Writing out a bunch of tasks won’t get you very far if they aren’t organized around specific goals. And achieving those lower-level goals isn’t going to mean much if they’re not in service of a higher-level goal. If you are clear on your top-level goal, it can also help you move on when you fail at some low-level goals or leave some tasks incomplete. There will be other paths to reach your top-level goal, so any specific task or lower-level goal doesn’t necessarily matter much for its own sake.

    (this text, along with this exercise and others on the site, is adapted from my book, Better Than Destiny: Practical Science for Creating the Life you Want)

As an example, , when I made my big list, I had “gain programming experience” on there. Why did I want programming experience? Because it moved me toward being on the data science team. Why did I want to be on the data science team? Because I wanted to work on clinical decision support—helping doctors make better medical decisions in complex situations. Looking back at my list, I realized I had a couple other mid-level goals like “gain programming experience.” These goals weren’t particularly important in and of themselves. They were important because they moved me toward the bigger, more unifying goal: working on clinical decision support. That helped me narrow the field quite a bit—instead of including all the mid-level goals in my top five, I included just the top-level goal: improving clinical decision support. After you’ve weeded out the mid-level goals, if you’re still struggling to pick just five top-level goals, you can temporarily put the list aside and either review or move on to the other exercises from this chapter. Also, think about the things from the previous chapter—what makes us happy and the importance of passion and purpose. And if all else fails, just take your best shot for now, and schedule a reminder to revisit this exercise in a few months or a year.

STEP #3: AVOID THE OTHER 20

Now, take a good, hard look at the remainder—the other twenty or more goals on the list that are not in your top five. Remember these, because, according to Warren Buffett, you are to avoid them at all costs. This doesn’t necessarily mean throwing out all your mid-level goals. But it does mean relegating them to their proper place. They are only of value in service to one of your chosen top-level goals, not in and of themselves. Remember the hierarchy of goals. Sometimes you can achieve a top-level goal without achieving all the mid-level or low-level goals below it. You don’t want to get too hung up on lower-level goals.

If you are familiar with the concept of opportunity cost, this exercise should make a lot of sense. Any time, money, or energy you spend on other goals is time, money, and energy you can’t spend on your top five most important goals. If your attention and resources are divided between too many goals, you’ll struggle to make significant progress on any of them. So get focused. Pick 5 things.