Today, we’re talking about the one thing more than anything that Warren Buffett credits with his success.
And this was actually in a 2017 documentary that I was watching over the weekend. I think it was on HBO. And they asked Warren Buffett and Bill Gates what the one thing they credited more than anything with being successful. And the one thing was focus. I like to call it absolute focus and I’ve described the phenomenon as it happens to me whenever I jump into a new business idea or a new business.
Basically everything else just gets put by the wayside and it’s not very good for this mind-body balance that people talk about or these things.
But it’s what it takes to be successful.
And another way that Warren Buffett talked about this was in something he called the 20-slot rule. And in the 20-slot rule, he says that if he were to give you a card and tell you that there were 20 slots that you could punch out, and you could only Make twenty investments what would happen and the takeaway from that is that you would think really really really hard. Before punching one of those twenty slots if you could only make twenty investments in your whole lifetime.
That’s effectively what Warren has done with Brookshire Hathaway in his approach. He doesn’t flip stocks. Sure, he did some things during the pandemic, but that’s a once-in-a-century, a once-in-three-century event. But Brookshire Hathaway’s long-term goal and quote-unquote secret of their success has been a buy and hold strategy. Most of the time they’re buying the whole company, not trying to flip it. They’re taking the cash, putting that away and reinvesting it and taking the cash and taking it into Berkshire Hathaway, which gets distributed to the shareholders.
So the whole idea is focus.
And I believe that this extends beyond just 20 investments. You could think of that as a fellow business owner or an entrepreneur, if you’re watching. Think about all the ideas that you get and how easily you can go chase one of these things. And I’m sure if you’re watching or listening to this, you can think of somebody in your life that’s always switching, switching, switching, switching.
And the thing about it is, is that switching like that and not focusing doesn’t give a chance to that one idea to actually get to success or for that original idea to morph into something else that does lead to success.
So you’ve got to stay focused. And that’s the lesson for today. If there’s one thing, just one thing that you can do better and that can lead to unlimited success, It’s focus.
Your move.
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