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4 years ago The Case For The Learner’s Lifestyle
“Knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.”—Peter Drucker
First, in a knowledge economy, learning and thinking are the single best long-term investments you can make in your career. Learning and thinking determine our decisions. Then, decisions determine our results. Second, Buffett’s schedule is a harbinger of a new class of knowledge workers (especially investors, entrepreneurs, designers, developers, coaches, consultants, thought leaders, etc.) who realize that learning and thinking, not just doing, are the keys to their long-term success.
In 2009, Paul Graham, wrote an iconic article called Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. In the article, he spells out the difference between two types of schedules in a knowledge economy:
- Manager Schedule: The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one-hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
- Maker’s Schedule: But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
Buffett’s contribution is a third category — the Learner’s Lifestyle. In short, The Learner’s Lifestyle optimizes for insight over coordination and output. Whereas the manager’s schedule is primarily about coordination and the maker’s schedule is about output, the Learner’s Lifestyle is primarily about insight.
When we design our life for insight, we organize our schedule completely differently: We optimize for free time over busy-ness. Whereas managers must ALWAYS be tuned in and turned on so they can be responsive, thinkers create big blocks of free time to go above the noise and gain perspective. We work in environments that lead to more creativity. As I wrote in Why Successful People Spend 10 Hours A Week On “Compound Time”, many of the greatest insights in history have come during a nap or on a walk, not necessarily within a cubicle. We invest dramatically more in learning, experimenting, and thinking, because they are the fundamental building blocks of insight. Learning is about acquiring diverse, rare, and valuable chunks of knowledge through People, Information, & Experiences (what I call P.I.E.). Thinking is about synthesizing those chunks into rare and valuable combinations. Experimenting is about seeing how those combinations actually perform in the real world. We measure our success by the quality of insights we have, not by how quickly we finish our to do list. In other words, our measure of success moves away from efficiency toward effectiveness.
When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett, their host, Gates’ mother, asked everyone around the table to share the single most important factor to their success. Gates and Buffett both gave the same one-word answer: “Focus.”
When I tell people that Warren Buffett follows the 5-Hour Rule and spends 80% of his time reading and thinking, they have an immediate and predictable reaction: “Well, he can do that because he’s Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world. I could never do that.”
Buffett has spent most of his time reading and thinking since he was in grade school. Having more money or managing a large company doesn’t magically give you free time. Having free time is never the default. People don’t just fall into huge blocks of free time unless they retire. Rather, free time is the result of strategy. It’s the result of looking at time differently.
Only work with people you could see yourself working with forever
“If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.” — Naval Ravikant
Keep things super, super simple
As we grow in our careers, in our companies, and in our lives, it’s extremely easy to add complexity. In fact, it’s the norm. As you get more profit, it’s normal to hire more employees. As you earn more money, it’s normal to spend more and more. What’s truly powerful and unique is to keep things simple. That takes effort and skill. And, that is part of Buffett’s genius.
Focus on a few, high-quality bets
Warren Buffett only makes a handful of investments per year
Buffett believes that exceptional returns come from concentrated portfolios, that excellent investment ideas are rare, and he has repeatedly told students that their investing results would improve if at the beginning of their careers
As he summarized in the 1993 annual report, ‘We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.
Focus on long-term bets
Buffett holds his bets for extraordinarily long periods
He has held his current top five stock options for over twenty years on average. This compares with an average holding period of less than one year for the typical mutual fund. This translates into an exceptionally low level of investment activity, characterized by Buffett as “inactivity bordering on sloth.
Buffett applies a similar concept to investing in knowledge that will pay him back forever.
“The things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself. So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years. That lesson is something I use all the time now.”
Avoid the technology bandwagon
One would think that the greatest investor of all time (the GOAT if you will) stays on top of the latest technologies in order to stay up-to-date. Interestingly, the opposite is true. Here are few examples:
These unique choices show a few things about Buffett: Buffett is very clear on what data he needs to know in order to make an investment. He is confident enough in his thinking that he is willing to NOT do what is popular . He proactively removes potential distractions from his environment rather than depending on willpower
https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/warren-buffett-really-successful-people-say-no-to-almost-everything-ab78832ffebc