Warren Buffett’s 5/25 Rule and the List You Have to Abandon

Write down twenty-five things you want from your career. Circle five. Then treat the other twenty as the enemy. That is the Warren Buffett 5 25 rule in one breath, and the third step is the one almost everyone skips, because it asks you to abandon goals you genuinely care about.

The method works. The story attached to it is shakier, and Buffett himself appears to have said so. Both facts are worth knowing, because the second one tells you something about how focus actually gets built.

Below: where the story comes from, how to run the exercise properly, why the second list is where the value sits, and the situations where the rule gives bad advice.

Where the Story Comes From

The version most people know was popularised by James Clear, who credits it to the late writer Scott Dinsmore. In it, Mike Flint, described as Buffett’s personal pilot for ten years, is talking career priorities with his boss. Buffett asks him to write down his top twenty-five goals, then circle the five that matter most. Flint says he will work on the other twenty when he has time. Buffett corrects him. In Clear’s telling, the line is: “Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list.”

It is a good story. It has a billionaire, a pilot, a lesson that fits on an index card. It has been retold in thousands of productivity posts, usually with the steps shuffled and the number sometimes flipped to 25/5.

The trouble is the source. According to Inc., when the author Alex Banayan put the method to Buffett, Buffett said he and Charlie Munger were not disciplined enough to decide things that way, and added: “I can’t recall making a list in my life.” Accounts of that exchange differ on the details, and nobody has produced a recording of the original conversation with Flint. The honest position is that the exercise travels under Buffett’s name and he does not seem to recognise it.

That should change how you use it, though less than you might think. A rule can work without a famous author, as long as it has a mechanism. And the mechanism here lines up with something Buffett has said in plain sight for decades in his shareholder letters: stay inside your circle of competence, and say no to the things outside it however attractive they look. The 5/25 story is a parable about that habit. Whether Flint’s notebook ever existed matters much less than whether the habit holds up when you try it.

How the Warren Buffett 5 25 Rule Works

The exercise has three steps. The first two are easy and feel productive. The third is uncomfortable, and it is the only one that changes anything.

Step	What you do	Where people go wrong
1. List 25	Write every goal you hold for the next few years, work and life, in one sitting	Stopping at ten because the list feels finished. Push to 25; the later entries are the ones quietly taking your time
2. Circle 5	Pick the five that would matter most if they were done	Circling the five that feel most urgent this month instead of the five that matter most over years
3. Avoid 20	Treat the other twenty as off limits until the five are done	Keeping the twenty as a “when I have time” list, which means working on them whenever the five get hard

The point of writing twenty-five is to drag the hidden commitments into the open. Most people can name their top three goals without thinking. Goals eleven to twenty-five are the ones they never name, and those are the ones eating evenings: the side project, the board seat they half want, the course they signed up for, the second language, the investment property they keep researching.

The point of circling five is to force a ranking. Five is arbitrary, and you could argue for three or seven. What matters is that the number is small enough to hurt. If circling feels easy, the list was too short or you circled the obvious.

The point of the third step is the whole rule. The Warren Buffett 5 25 rule, in the form that circulates, says the twenty uncircled goals get no attention at all until the top five are achieved. That instruction is what makes the exercise different from every other prioritisation method you have tried.

Why the Second List Is the Hard One

The twenty you did not circle are good goals. That is exactly the problem.

Bad goals are easy to drop. Nobody struggles to abandon an ambition they never wanted. The hard ones are goal number six, which you would genuinely enjoy, and goal number nine, which would probably pay off, and goal number fourteen, which you have already spent money on. They are attractive enough to keep pulling you back, and not quite important enough to finish. So they get an hour here and a weekend there, and the top five move slower than they should.

There is a cost to this beyond the hours. Sophie Leroy, a management professor at the University of Washington Bothell, has spent years studying what she calls attention residue: when you switch from one task to another, part of your attention stays behind with the first one, especially if it was left unfinished. Her work finds that performance on the next task suffers, most of all when that task is demanding. A goal you are half pursuing is an unfinished task that never ends. It sits in the back of your mind during the work that matters.

That is why the rule says avoid rather than deprioritise. A deprioritised goal still gets checked on. It still produces small decisions: should I reply to that email about it, should I read that article, should I take that call. An avoided goal produces none, because the decision has already been made once.

Most people resist this because it feels like giving something up for good. It does not have to be. The rule says avoid until the five are done. Some of the twenty will come back. Others will look different by then, and you will be glad you never sank a year into them.

Running It on a Real Career

The exercise is most useful for people whose lives already contain too many good options. That describes most executives and founders, which is why the story spread so widely in exactly those circles.

Run it with work and life on the same page. Splitting them into two lists lets the work list win every time, and the goals that fall off are usually the ones that keep the rest running. Health is the classic casualty. If sleep, training or simply getting home on time ends up on your avoid list by default, the top five will pay for it within months. Our piece on whether 6 hours of sleep is enough sets out what that trade costs by the end of a working week.

Money goals need the same treatment. “Retire early” often makes the top five, and then sits there as a wish rather than a plan. If it is genuinely in your five, it deserves the work of a real plan and probably a specialist, and our guide to choosing a financial advisor for early retirement covers what to ask for. If you are not prepared to do that work, it was never really in the five.

Career moves are where the rule earns its keep. People considering a change tend to hold five versions of it at once: a new industry, a new role, going independent, a qualification, a move abroad. Each one stays alive and none gets done. Circling one forces the question of what you already have that carries over, which is the subject of our piece on transferable skills examples.

When two of your five pull against each other, which happens more often than the clean story suggests, resist the urge to demote one immediately. Look first for the move that serves both. A promotion that also builds the network you want for a future business, or a project that teaches the skill you need for the next role. Finding that move is a different kind of thinking, and our piece on lateral thinking covers how people who run things actually do it.

Where the Rule Breaks

The rule is a tool for people with too much on, and it gives poor advice in at least three situations.

Early in a career. At twenty-five, you often do not know which five goals are yours. Exploration is the work. Trying several things in parallel is how you find out what you are good at and what you will keep doing when it gets dull. Applying a hard avoid list too early can lock you into five goals you picked before you had the information to pick well.

When the five are vague. “Be a better leader” and “grow the business” are directions, and directions never finish. The rule depends on the top five being done at some point, so that the avoid list can reopen. If none of your five has a finish line, the twenty stay locked forever, and you will rightly ignore the rule within a month. Rewrite each circled goal until you could tell a stranger whether it has been achieved.

When life changes under you. A list written in January can be wrong by June. A parent gets ill, a company is sold, a market turns. The rule says nothing about review, which is one of its weaknesses as a story. Treat the list as something you rewrite at fixed points, once or twice a year, rather than a vow.

There is also a quieter lesson in Buffett’s own reaction. If he really cannot recall making a list, the focus people admire in him did not come from an exercise. It came from a small number of things he cared about intensely and a lifelong habit of turning down the rest. The list is a way for the rest of us to fake that until it becomes habit. That is a perfectly good use of it, as long as you know that is what you are doing.

What to Do This Week

Set aside forty-five minutes, without your phone, and do the full exercise on paper.

Write twenty-five goals. Include work, money, health, family and the things you would only admit to yourself. If you stall at twelve, keep going; the later entries are the useful ones.

Circle five, and rewrite each so it has a finish line. “Lead a team of fifty by the end of next year” works. “Develop as a leader” does not.

Copy the other twenty onto a separate page and give it a date to be reread, six months out. Then pick the one item on that page that is currently taking the most of your time each week, and stop it this week. Cancel the course, hand back the project, decline the next meeting. Tell one person you have done it, so it stays stopped.

That last step is the whole exercise. Everything before it is preparation.

Questions Readers Ask About the 5/25 Rule

Did Warren Buffett really create the 5/25 rule?

Probably not in the form it circulates. The story comes through James Clear and Scott Dinsmore, attributed to Buffett’s pilot Mike Flint. When the author Alex Banayan asked Buffett about it, he reportedly said he could not recall making a list in his life. The idea fits his long-stated habit of saying no to most opportunities, but the exercise itself is best treated as a parable.

Is it the 5/25 rule or the 25/5 rule?

Both names describe the same exercise. People search for the Warren Buffett 5 25 rule and the 25/5 rule about equally, and articles use them interchangeably. The steps are identical: list twenty-five goals, circle five, avoid the other twenty.

Should the avoid list be permanent?

No. The original story says the twenty get no attention until the top five are done, which implies they can come back. In practice, reread the avoid list at a fixed date, once or twice a year. Some items will return to the top five. Many will look less appealing than they did, which is the rule doing its job.

The useful part of the exercise was never the arithmetic. It is the moment you look at a goal you like, admit it is number eleven, and close the door on it for now. Most people never do that once. Doing it every year is most of what focus is.