The Two-List Strategy: Warren Buffett's Priority System

The story goes like this. Warren Buffett's personal pilot, Mike Flint, had been flying Buffett for over a decade. One day, Buffett asked Flint about his career goals. Flint clearly had ambitions beyond flying.

Buffett walked him through a three-step exercise:

Step 1: Write down your top 25 goals. Career, personal, financial -- everything important.

Step 2: Circle the top 5. The five most important goals on the list.

Step 3: The remaining 20 goals become your "Avoid at All Costs" list.

Flint assumed the remaining 20 would become his "secondary priorities" -- things he'd work on occasionally when he had time. Buffett corrected him:

"Everything you didn't circle just became your Avoid at All Costs list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you've succeeded with your top 5."

Why the Bottom 20 Are More Dangerous Than Zero Goals

This is the counterintuitive insight that makes Buffett's strategy powerful: the goals ranked 6 through 25 aren't harmless secondary priorities. They're the most dangerous distractions in your life.

Here's why. Goals ranked 6-25 are things you genuinely care about. They're interesting, valuable, and appealing. That's exactly what makes them dangerous. Random distractions are easy to ignore -- you don't care about them. But your 6th-most-important goal? You care about that. You can justify spending time on it. You can convince yourself it's productive.

And every hour you spend on goal #6 is an hour you're not spending on goals #1 through #5.

The real competition for your top priorities isn't laziness or distraction. It's your other good ideas.

The Math of Focus

Consider two people with identical talent and work ethic:

Person A distributes their energy across 15 goals. Each goal receives roughly 6.7% of their available time and attention.

Person B focuses on 3 goals. Each goal receives roughly 33% of their available time and attention.

Person B dedicates 5x more energy to their top priorities than Person A. Over a year, this compounds dramatically. In five years, the gap is virtually insurmountable.

This isn't about working harder. Both people work the same hours. It's about concentration of force -- a principle that applies in business, investing, and military strategy alike.

Buffett himself is the embodiment of this principle. Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio is extremely concentrated compared to most investment firms. Buffett would rather own a lot of a few great businesses than a little of many good ones.

How to Actually Do This

The concept is simple. The execution is brutal. Here's how to make it work.

1. Write the Full List

Spend 30 minutes writing down every goal that matters to you. Don't filter. Don't judge. Let it all out. Career goals, health goals, relationship goals, financial goals, creative goals, learning goals.

Most people end up with 15-30 items.

2. Force-Rank Them

This is where it gets hard. You must rank every goal against every other goal. Use pairwise comparison: "If I could only achieve goal A or goal B, which would I choose?" Repeat until you have a clear ranking.

This process reveals your true priorities. Many people discover that the goals they spend the most time on aren't the ones they rank highest. They've been living someone else's priority list.

3. Draw the Line at Five

Circle the top five. These are your active goals. Everything else goes on the Avoid list.

"But what about goal #6? It's so close to the top 5!"

That's precisely why it's dangerous. It's close enough to feel important, but pursuing it will dilute your focus on #1-5. Cut it.

4. Schedule Your Top Five

Your top five goals should appear on your calendar as scheduled blocks of time. If a goal doesn't have time allocated to it, it doesn't have commitment behind it.

A tool like KeepRule can help you formalize your top priorities into decision principles that you reference when new opportunities or distractions arise -- making it easier to say no to the tempting-but-not-top-five.

5. Review Monthly

Each month, look at how you actually spent your time. How much went to top-five goals? How much leaked to goals #6-25?

Be honest. The gap between intended focus and actual focus is where your growth potential lives.

Common Objections

"I can't ignore 20 things I care about."

You're not ignoring them forever. You're deferring them until your top five are achieved. Buffett's point isn't that goal #6 is worthless. It's that goal #6 is actively harmful to your pursuit of goals #1-5, because it competes for the same finite resource: your time and attention.

"What if one of my top five changes?"

Good. That's growth. Revisit the list quarterly. Re-rank. Maybe goal #8 has become more important due to life changes. Promote it and demote something else. The list is living, not permanent.

"What about maintenance goals like health?"

Health, relationships, and basic self-care aren't "goals" in this framework -- they're prerequisites. They're the foundation that enables goal pursuit. Don't list "exercise regularly" as a goal. Just do it as a non-negotiable daily practice that doesn't require prioritization against career goals.

"This seems extreme."

It is extreme. That's the point. Average focus produces average results. Extreme focus produces extreme results. Buffett isn't average, and his focus isn't either.

The Buffett Paradox

Here's what's interesting about Buffett: he reads five to six hours a day. He has lunch meetings. He plays bridge. He seems relaxed and unhurried. He doesn't appear to be grinding through 80-hour weeks.

That's because extreme focus doesn't require extreme effort. When you eliminate 20 competing priorities, the remaining five don't consume more energy -- they consume more concentrated energy. You can do less and achieve more because every unit of work is directed at your highest-value targets.

The busiest people you know are often the least focused. Their calendars are packed because they said yes to everything on their 25-item list. They're exhausted not from doing important work, but from spreading thin across too many semi-important tasks.

Buffett's empty calendar and relaxed demeanor aren't despite his success. They're because of it. He solved the prioritization problem decades ago and has been executing on it ever since.

Start Today

Write the list. All 25 items. Rank them honestly. Circle five. Put the rest away.

Then watch what happens when 100% of your discretionary energy flows toward the things that actually matter most to you. The compound effect isn't just financial. It applies to every domain of life.

Twenty focused years on five priorities will produce results that twenty scattered years on twenty-five priorities never could.

Buffett's pilot got the lesson. The question is whether you'll actually follow it.