Stop drowning in your dreams. How to work on the thing that actually matters.

How to use practical billionaire wisdom to get leverage on yourself and do what you need to do. Before it’s too late.

Photo by Chelms Varthoumlien on Unsplash

Making your “Not to do” list using the 5/25 rule

“The ultimate reason for setting goals is to entice you to become the person it takes to achieve them” — Jim Rohn

All across the world, all humans are pretty similar.

We all have endless things we want to have or do. We may even have goals around how we want to be.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we are constantly in a state of wanting on some level.

Perhaps others are more intense in their desiring than others, but we all have desires. For different parts of our life, we’re all wanting to get to a new state from a place of inspiration or leave another behind out of desperation.

Either way, we are constantly in this state of striving for change.

Some of these desires are small and easy to attain, while others will be more difficult to materialize and will demand more resources.

But it is these latter, larger, challenging desires that give our lives a sense of richness.

They create life-affirming experiences. They make us feel alive.

In fact, the world we live in today is a result of people’s bigger, more emotionally driven visions and desires for them to materialize.

The technology we use, the vehicles we travel in and the architecture around us all started off as someone person’s desire first before it was birthed materially.

So with all these wide-ranging desires and potential new realities, how do we fit it all in?

The answer is we can’t.

Though our desires are endless life is not.

In fact, we have roughly 80 years on average in a given lifetime, according to the author of the book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman.

What an average lifetime looks like on a single sheet. Image Source — Outus via Amazon

But this isn’t a reason to feel morbid or depressed. Instead, we must be selective, urgent and action orientated.

Socrates says it best:

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”

So how do we use our time to make our life long?

We must go after as Socrates puts it, ‘good activity’.

Because not all of our desires are the same.

Not all of them will have atomic-like positive effects that benefit other parts of our life. Not all of them will be enriching to the soul, not all of them will positively affect others and not all of them will stretch us and cause us to level up as human beings.

We can’t afford to waste time on menial, lesser desires that simply don’t do this.

Therefore we must be highly selective. We have to decide well.

We must be ruthless.

We must only go after the desires that will have the biggest bang for our buck.

Leading domino desires.

Desires that aren’t selected necessarily for their difficulty or size of scope. But for their potential effects elsewhere.

Desires where once they’ve been achieved, set off a chain reaction of fulfilment across other areas of our life too.

Image Source — Laurène Boglio

To get clear on what matters the most to us and what we should focus on, we can use an exercise known as the 5/25 rule, widely credited to the billionaire investor, Warren Buffet (though he has no idea).

Here’s how it goes:

(1) Write down the list of our top 25 desires. Go nuts.

(2) Order them from most desirable to least.

(3) Then circle the top 5. These are now the goals we must focus on.

(4) The other 20? This is our strictly ‘not to do’ list. AVOID at all costs.

It doesn’t have to be polished and perfect. It doesn’t have to be logical or well thought out yet.

But it must be true to you. That’s the point.

Then once complete we now have an incredibly valuable personal asset. Something that was simple for us to do, but highly potent.

Those childhood wishes, teenage dreams and adult aspirations are all now distilled into one area, mirroring back at you the contents of your heart.

In many ways, it’s a snapshot of us across time.

Who we were in the past, who we are now in the present and who we wish to be in the future.

By being able to compare our desires against one another like this it becomes evident what those leading domino desires are.

Those desires that should we sincerely pursue will have the largest effect on giving us the fulfilment we crave in our life.

These leading domino desires are what we need to focus on now.

But even within this small selection, we need to further narrow it down.

Using regret minimization to find your ONE thing

“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” — Naval Ravikant

So now how do we get to work on these five leading domino goals?

Trick question. We don’t.

As much as we think we can go after multiple things at once, Confucius’ quote still holds true:

The man who chases two rabbits catches none

It has to be one thing at a time to maximize our chances of success.

Let’s not self delude ourselves and be that type of person that talks more than does, overpromises and under-delivers and leaves a bunch of half-built buildings.

Plus, going after more desires is not necessarily equal more fulfilment. It’s also not a sign of competency or superiority, in fact, it just weighs us down with more to do, more overwhelm and overall unhappiness.

Let’s not spread ourselves needlessly thin. Let’s make this easy and pick carefully.

So from this list of five, we’re looking for that one, top no brainer desire that will change the course of our lives. We then need to turn it into a goal. A dream with a deadline, backed by a plan of action.

There are many names for this top goal of ours.

Our Wildly Important Goal (WIG) as shared in the book ‘The 4 Disciplines of Execution’, our Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) mentioned first by Jim Collins in ‘Built To Last’.

Or as I like to think of it, our ‘ONE Thing’, as coined by Gary Kelly in the book by the same name.

This will act as our north star, the goal that orientates all our actions.

Having this one central guiding goal simplifies things. It makes our decisions easy.

Anytime we’re faced with a choice, we can run a simple test:

‘Is this action I’m about to take in line with me reaching my goal?’

It also increases our chances of success as we have no other distractions and all our energy and focus gets funnelled into this one goal. Perfect.

But in order to have an effective north star goal, we have to be fully committed.

Emotionally and logically all in.

No looking over the shoulder at other goals like that distracted boyfriend meme we all love.

It may seem difficult to attain right now and we may even feel silly or even deluded to think we can achieve it today, but locking into the most exciting goal you can be something we won’t regret.

Speaking of which, we can make the process of deciding on whether we should pursue a given goal very easily by leaning on Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization framework.

This was something he used when deciding to take the plunge and leave his comfortable six-figure salary job on Wall Street to start an e-commerce platform on the emerging internet as a first-time founder, on the other side of the country. Turns out he and his early investors did ok in the end.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder, in 1997 with no regrets. Image Source — nbcnews.com

Here’s how he explained it in ‘Invent and Wander’:

“ I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”

Here’s how he thought through the decision and how we can too:

(1) Project ourselves into the future having taken this course of action.

(2) Look back and reflect on having taken this course.

(3) Ask “Will I regret not doing this?”

(4) If yes, act now with urgency. If no, go back to (1)

Getting clear on our ONE thing puts us in a small yet special group.

Finding clarity but also the contentment in pursuing one path is one of the hardest things anyone can do when it comes to achievement and the lack of this notable milestone has been behind the decline of many in history.

Prioritization is a superpower and we’re on the path to developing it.

Going from someday to right now

“Someday starts now.” — Martha Brockenbrough

So now we’ve selected our ONE thing and got that out the way, we need to actually take it from a dream into something we can actually make progress on daily with practical, easy to do steps.

We need to go from someday to today.

For this process, we can borrow Gary Keller’s framework of ‘goal setting to the now’, which uses reverse engineering to go from the clouds to the dirt.

Here’s how:

(1) Based on my someday goal, what’s the ONE Thing I can do in the next five years to be on track to achieve it?

(2) Now, based on my five-year goal, what’s the ONE Thing I can do this year to be on track to achieve my five-year goal, so that I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?

(3) Now, based on my goal this year, what’s the ONE Thing I can do this month so I’m on track to achieve my goal this year, so I’m on track to achieve my five-year goal, so I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?

(4) Now, based on my goal this month, what’s the ONE Thing I can do this week so I’m on track to achieve my goal this month, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this year, so I’m on track to achieve my five-year goal, so I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?

(5) Now, based on my goal this week, what’s the ONE Thing I can do today so I’m on track to achieve my goal this week, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this month, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this year, so I’m on track to achieve my five-year goal, so I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?

(6) So, based on my goal today, what’s the ONE Thing I can do right NOW so I’m on track to achieve my goal today, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this week, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this month, so I’m on track to achieve my goal this year, so I’m on track to achieve my five-year goal, so I’m on track to achieve my someday goal?

Image Source — The ONE Thing by Gary Keller

By following this process we connect our dream to our daily reality. Everything links up sensibly like dominoes.

The hard part now is to actually show up and do the work that we know we need to do.

There are no hacks. No elevators.

There’s only one way up and that’s taking the metaphorical stairs.

Showing up and taking action.

Again and again.

Sounds simple enough, so why do so many of us fall at this stage?

Because simple is not always easy.

Many of us do not properly prepare and underestimate how difficult it is to do the simple.

So let’s now look at a few ways we can make sure we’re showing up in the right way to do our work. Day by day. Session by session.

So to summarize:

1. Choose — Choose your most exciting goals to work on by making your “Not to do” list using the 5/25 rule.
2. Select — Use regret minimization to whittle it down to the goal that you’d regret the most, not having tried to go after.
3. Minimize — Get granular on what you need to do right this moment that will move you closer to progressing on the goal.
4. ACT! — Think small and definite steps, and repeat with iteration.