Priorities isn't a word

If you read personal development stuff at all, you’ve almost certainly heard about how Warren Buffett tried to help his private pilot, Mike Flint, get some focus in life. He instructed Flint to make a list of his top twenty-five goals, then circle the top five.

As the story goes, his pilot assumed the top five were meant to be his areas of primary focus. But no no! Buffett told Flint that he now had only five priorities. The bottom twenty were distractions he should avoid at all costs.

When someone finally had the opportunity to ask Buffett directly about what’s been called his 5/25 Rule, he answered that he and his business partner, Charlie Munger, weren’t disciplined enough to make decisions that way. “I can’t recall making a list in my life,” Buffett noted.

Complete fabrications aside, there’s another issue with this story. It turns out, technically speaking, even five priorities is too many. As Greg McKeown points out in his book Essentialism:

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities.

What I love about a singular priority is that it forces you to think big picture. A single project or goal would be too restrictive. You’re not trying to generate a list of “avoid at all costs” activities, but a rubric for making trade-offs when conflicts inevitably arise.

In other words, what is the one thing that cannot be sacrificed? What is “the very first thing”?

For me, right now, it’s health. I try to interpret the term broadly. It’s not just my own physical and mental health, but also healthy relationships with people, my work, and even the Earth. When I put health first, everything else just seems to fall into place.

Maybe it’s why the concept of work/life balance never worked for me. When I do something, I tend to be all in. It’s just who I am. But there’s no way to be “all in” with work and fun and family and still have balance. That’s a recipe for exhaustion (and so far I’ve had no luck at becoming a completely different, less ambitious person either).

But when I’m “all in” with my health, balance is a welcome byproduct.

I don’t mean to suggest that health should be everyone’s priority. My husband began working with a start-up at the beginning of the year, and his priority right now is his job. It means he works long hours and has less time for the family or even exercise. But he’s loving the challenge and his group has seen results in just five months that have eluded them for years.

Making work your priority doesn’t mean everything else necessarily gets sacrificed. For example, at one point, he realized he was getting really stressed and it was negatively impacting his performance. So he slowed down and got curious. When his mindset shifted, he found the solutions he needed.

Like anything I’ve ever suggested, it’s not a cure all. For example, I’m still playing a dumb game on my phone that’s clearly at odds with my health priority. I’ve deleted (and reinstalled) the app several times and failed to set reasonable limits.

At least it’s a problem I’m committed to solving. And by paying attention to it, I have confidence I’ll find healthier ways to meet whatever need that game is providing.

Probably the healthiest thing of all is the ability to laugh at ourselves. We’re all just experimenting and finding our way, aren’t we?

Even those of us who have never made a list in their life.

P.S. Speaking of making health a priority, I’ve decided to be a kid again and take a summer vacation. Whoopee! So you can expect my next newsletter in mid-August.