Did Warren Buffett really tell his pilot to ignore 20 of his 25 goals?

Probably not as told. The “25/5 rule” says Warren Buffett had his pilot, Mike Flint, write 25 career goals, circle five, and treat the other 20 as an “avoid-at-all-cost” list. No interview, letter, biography or Buffett statement that I could find confirms any of it, and the version that circulates reached the internet through a chain of retellings. The advice has merit anyway, with a few edits.

What is the claim, and where did it come from?

The claim is a three-step exercise: list 25 goals, circle the top five, and give the remaining 20 no effort until the five are done. In the story, Flint says he will work on the others “intermittently,” and Buffett says no.

The best-known retelling is on James Clear’s site. Clear writes that it came from Flint, described as Buffett’s personal pilot for ten years and a man who has flown four U.S. presidents, via Clear’s friend Scott Dinsmore, the founder of Live Your Legend. Clear gives no date for the conversation and no caveat about accuracy.

The Motley Fool carried a version in January 2015 and wrote that it had been unable to independently confirm the story, noting that Dinsmore heard it secondhand through someone close to one of Buffett’s pilots. So the trail runs from Flint’s circle to Dinsmore to Clear to everyone else. I could not find a dated original of Dinsmore’s post, a recording of Flint telling it, or any statement from Flint himself.

What does the source actually say, and what survives?

A claim-by-claim check, using only what I could trace:

Claim	What the trail shows	Verdict
Buffett invented the 25/5 rule	No primary source. Several write-ups say Buffett was asked about the pilot story at the 2013 Berkshire Hathaway meeting and answered that he could not recall making a list in his life. I could not open those original reports, so treat that detail as secondhand.	Unsupported
The pilot is Mike Flint	Clear and others use that name. Some retellings use other first names, which is a warning sign for a story passed along by word of mouth.	Plausible name, unconfirmed event
The “avoid-at-all-cost” phrasing is Buffett’s	It appears in retellings only, never in a transcript.	Apocryphal until sourced
Buffett said that very successful people “say no to almost everything”	Quote sites repeat it without a date, venue or citation. Some give “very successful,” others “really successful.” One account says it was popularized by Clear and Farnam Street. I found no primary source.	Floating quote

Buffett is widely associated with a nearby idea, the “circle of competence”: stay inside what you understand and don’t worry about what you miss outside it. I did not verify where he said it. It is about investing, not career goals, and it is a different claim from “avoid 20 goals.”

What survives is the logic, not the provenance. The exercise forces you to say which good things you will not do, and that is the part most goal lists skip. If you have wondered why a long list of intentions produces so little, the longer answer is in why your goals keep failing and in the case against writing goals at all in stop setting goals.

Does an avoid-list help or nag?

It can do both, and the research on unfinished business explains why. Bluma Zeigarnik’s work in the 1920s is usually cited for the idea that unfinished tasks stay active in memory; the Zeigarnik effect post covers how well that holds up. The more useful modern finding is from Masicampo and Baumeister (2011, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology): unfinished goals intruded on unrelated tasks and hurt performance, and making a specific plan for the goal removed the intrusion even though the goal was still undone.

Read that against the 25/5 rule. Telling yourself to avoid 20 goals “at all costs” leaves 20 open loops with no plan attached. Each one can keep tugging at you. The fix suggested by the 2011 paper is a plan, not a ban: give each parked goal a date and a place to wait. That is why the exercise below asks for a revisit date.

The Ivy Lee list is a close cousin, and its legend is shaky in similar ways. A short ranked list with leftovers carried forward does the same job as a dated avoid-list.

Which goals should never go on the cut list?

Some items on your 25 are not goals. Getting out of bed at a set time, sleeping seven hours, eating a real meal: these are conditions that every other goal runs on. If you circle five career goals and cut “wake up on time” because it ranked eighth, you have removed the floor under the other four.

Treat these as infrastructure. They get a standing place on the page, outside the scoring. A person who writes a novel at 6 a.m. needs the 6 a.m. to happen first, and a missed morning quietly cancels the project. If that is where your list keeps breaking, an alarm that makes you prove you are up, such as DontSnooze, is one way to hold that floor in place.

The same logic applies to people. Advice on which goals to drop is better when someone else sees your list, and the personal board of directors idea is a practical way to find that person.

The one-page exercise

Use a single sheet, and do it in one sitting of about half an hour. The steps are in the how-to above; here is how to run them well.

Start with 25 and resist stopping at 10. The early entries are the ones you would say to a stranger. The later ones, such as “learn the cello” or “stop answering email at night,” tend to show what you actually want.

Underline the infrastructure items before you circle anything. This keeps the choosing honest, because you are comparing achievements to achievements.

When you circle five, use the regret test rather than the importance test. Almost everything feels important. Asking what you would regret not having moved in a year narrows it faster.

Then write the avoid-list as a real second list and put a date beside each item. The list is not a graveyard. It is a queue with a start time, which is what keeps it from nagging.

Finally, choose three refusals for this month and phrase each as something you can say aloud: “I can’t take on the board seat this quarter.” Saying no is a skill that needs a sentence ready. When starting the circled five is the hard part, the ten-minute rule is a low-cost way to begin.

What should you take from the Buffett story?

Use the exercise and drop the pedigree. A quotation attributed to a famous investor carries weight it has not earned here, and the most-repeated lines are the least sourced. If a retelling of the 25/5 rule gives you no date, no venue and no recording, you can treat it as a parable. Parables can still be useful, as long as you do not cite them as history. For a similar case where the origin story collapsed but the practice held, see the SMART goals piece on what George Doran actually wrote.