A pilot named Mike Flint had been flying Warren Buffett’s private plane for ten years. One day, the story goes, Flint asked Buffett how he should think about career priorities. Buffett had him write down the 25 most important goals in his life. Then circle the top 5. The rest — the other 20 — Flint figured he’d work on when he had time.

Buffett’s reply changed how Flint thought about priorities for the rest of his career. It’s also, if you can get past the discomfort of applying it, the single most useful priority exercise most people will ever run.

The story (and the honest caveat)

The anecdote circulates widely online. The honest version: Buffett himself has publicly denied the specific story. Whether the exchange happened literally or became an instructive legend doesn’t really matter — the exercise stands on its own. Variations of the two-list approach have appeared in productivity and strategy writing for decades, well before the Buffett attribution. What matters isn’t who said it; it’s whether it works.

And it works. Here’s the actual exercise.

The 25/5 exercise, step by step

1Write down 25 things that matter to you

Not a to-do list. Goals, aspirations, directions you want your life to take. Career ambitions, relationships you want to deepen, places you want to live, skills you want to develop, projects you want to finish, versions of yourself you want to become, experiences you want to have, communities you want to join.

Twenty-five is uncomfortable. The first 10 come easily. 11–20 require thought. 21–25 force you to dig. That digging is the point — those last items often reveal things you’ve been avoiding admitting to yourself.

Write all 25 before you start evaluating any of them. Don’t self-edit. If it’s true, write it down — even if it conflicts with another item, even if it’s unrealistic, even if it embarrasses you.

2Circle your top 5

From the 25, circle the five that matter most. Not the five most urgent. Not the five easiest. The five that, if you accomplished nothing else from the list over the next five years, would make you say you’d lived a good chapter of your life.

This step takes real time. Expect to agonize. You’ll want to circle 7 or 8. You’ll want to split some items. Resist. Exactly five.

3Build two lists

Now rewrite:

  • List A: the 5 circled items. This is where your energy goes.
  • List B: the other 20. This is where you expect to work "when you have time."

So far, this is standard productivity advice. The exercise would still be useful if it stopped here. But the stop here isn’t where Buffett’s version stops — and the next step is what gives the exercise its real power.

The twist most people miss

Flint, in the story, assumed List B was his secondary focus. Important things, just not top-5 important. He’d work on List A primarily, chip away at List B in spare moments.

Buffett’s response: no, those 20 are your "avoid at all costs" list.

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.

This is the move that makes the exercise work. The 20 aren’t a secondary list. They’re a competitor list. They’re the things that will steal your attention away from the 5 that actually matter. They’re not bad goals — they’re good goals that aren’t the top 5, which makes them more dangerous, not less.

Why the counterintuitive move works

Three mechanisms produce the effect.

Opportunity cost is invisible until named. Every hour spent on item #11 is an hour not spent on item #3. In normal life this trade-off is invisible — both are “productive,” both feel like progress, you don’t notice the choice you’re making. The two-list exercise makes the opportunity cost visible. “I’m working on this good thing instead of the great thing” becomes a conscious trade rather than an unconscious drift.

Good goals are the enemy of great goals. Bad goals don’t pull you off track — you recognize them as bad and avoid them. It’s the good goals that cause the damage. Learning a new language is a good goal. Learning woodworking is a good goal. Running a half-marathon is a good goal. If your top 5 is about building a business, deepening your marriage, and raising young children well — those good goals become the quiet thieves that leave you busy and un-advanced.

The 5 need protection, not promotion. People already know what their top priorities are, in a general way. The failure mode isn’t ignorance of what matters; it’s the slow erosion of attention toward what matters. The 20-item avoid list defends the 5 from the erosion. Without the explicit avoid list, the 5 slowly become 7, then 12, then dissolved into general life.

The painful cut from 25 to 5

This is where the exercise usually breaks down for people. The cut from 25 to 5 is genuinely painful because every one of your 25 matters to you — you wrote them down. Twenty of them get the "avoid at all costs" treatment, which feels like a kind of grief.

Three framings help:

You’re not giving up the 20 — you’re deferring them. This exercise is for the next 2–5 years, not forever. In five years you run it again, your top 5 shifts, and some of the current 20 become next cycle’s 5. Nothing is permanently abandoned.

Not deciding is also a decision. If you don’t pick 5, you’ll functionally pick 25 — which means you’ll make meaningful progress on roughly zero. The 25/5 cut converts a passive non-decision into a conscious one.

The sunk cost of unmade progress. If you’ve been working on all 25 for three years, how much have you actually completed? For most people honestly reflecting, the answer is: shockingly little progress on everything, meaningful progress on nothing. The spread of attention produced the spread of results.

Living with the 20

The hardest part of the exercise isn’t writing the lists. It’s living with them for the next 90 days.

You’ll notice yourself being tempted to drift back to the 20. A friend mentions a project in your old interest area, and the pull is strong. A new opportunity appears that aligns with item #14. A hobby in the top 20 would be genuinely restorative on a stressful week. Each of these is a legitimate thing — and each is also, in the two-list framework, a defection from your top 5.

Three ways to live with the discomfort:

Say no with the list in hand. “I’d love to but I’m focused on five specific things this year, and that would be number 11.” People respect this far more than vague deflection. The clarity is attractive.

Track the pulls. Keep a running list of the top-20 items that call to you during the three months. This serves two purposes: it validates that your original 20 were meaningful (they’re still pulling), and it gives you material for your next 25/5 cycle.

Celebrate the top-5 wins visibly. Progress on the five that matter is what reconciles you to the deferral of the twenty. If month-end review shows zero movement on your top 5, the exercise failed — and you need to look at why. Usually it’s that life kept drifting back to the 20 without you noticing.

When to run the exercise again

The default: annually. The yearly focus window (January, or whichever month functions as your natural reset — see How to Set a Yearly Focus That Actually Sticks) is a natural time for the 25/5 exercise.

Also redo it when:

  • A major life transition happens (new job, new baby, marriage, divorce, death of a parent, serious illness)
  • You’ve completed one of your top 5 and the slot is open
  • You realize three months in that your top 5 was wrong — this is rare, but legitimate
  • You’ve been drifting back to the 20 consistently and need to re-anchor

Don’t redo it monthly or quarterly. The point of the exercise is multi-year focus; redoing it too often converts it into another form of restless priority-shifting.

Common objections

“What about balance? Life is more than 5 things.” Yes — life has many areas. The top 5 is where you’re actively investing effort toward growth or achievement. The rest of life (sleep, basic health, existing relationships, basic hygiene, work you’re already doing competently) continues as it always did. The 20 you’re avoiding are the additional ambitions you’re deferring, not basic life functions.

“What if a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity appears for something on the 20?” Then you re-examine your 5. If the new opportunity is genuinely bigger than any of your top 5, swap it in. If it’s a strong temptation but doesn’t actually outrank your top 5, decline it. The exercise doesn’t forbid flexibility — it forbids drift.

“I can’t narrow to 5 because they’re all equally important.” They aren’t. The feeling that they’re all equally important is often the symptom the exercise exists to treat. Force the ranking even if it feels arbitrary — the arbitrary ranking still produces more progress than the no-ranking status quo.

“What about my family / spouse / kids — aren’t they always a top priority?” Yes. “Deepen my marriage,” “be present for my kids during these years,” “care for my aging parents” are legitimate items on the top 5. They’re not automatic exclusions; they’re so important they belong on the list explicitly.

“Can a couple or team do this together?” Yes — and the exercise is especially powerful for couples. Each person does their own 25/5. Then compare. The overlaps become shared priorities; the mismatches become conversations worth having.

Start this weekend

Block a Saturday afternoon. Pour a coffee. Open a notebook. Write 25 things. Walk away for an hour. Come back and circle 5. Write out the two lists cleanly on a fresh page. Post the lists somewhere you’ll see them — inside a planner, taped to the inside of a drawer, pinned by your workspace.

For the next 90 days: run your weeks toward the 5, run them away from the 20. At day 90, review honestly. What did you actually accomplish on the 5? Where did attention leak back to the 20? Then run it again with what you learned.

The exercise takes two hours. The follow-through takes a lifetime. The difference between the lives that compound meaningful progress and the lives that stay busy without advancing often comes down to whether someone made this specific cut — and defended it.

The yearly rhythm context in The Complete Guide to Personal Planning. The habit mechanics for defending the top 5 in The Complete Guide to Habit Building. For the physical parallel — the way decluttering your home mirrors decluttering your priorities — see The Complete Guide to Decluttering Your Home.

Twenty-five goals, five circled, twenty deferred. The paper takes an afternoon. The clarity lasts years.