Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

by Oliver Burkeman

Buffett’s advice is different: he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organises his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs – because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.

Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son – a thought that appals me, but one that’s hard to deny, since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty – there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the sea, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time.

9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity. I’m definitely still working on the habit proposed (and practised) by the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein: whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind – to give money, check in on a friend, send an email praising someone’s work – act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off until later.