Sneak Peak: As we embark on the new year, it's the perfect opportunity to reflect on our ambitions and establish meaningful goals. Goal setting transcends the tradition of New Year’s resolutions—a deliberate strategy that shapes personal and professional growth. Warren Buffett’s Three-Step Framework, or the "Two List Strategy," offers a powerful approach to focusing on what truly matters while eliminating distractions. By listing your top 25 goals, identifying your top 5 priorities, and actively avoiding the remaining 20, this framework enables you to channel your energy toward high-impact objectives. This year, let’s adopt this disciplined approach to goal setting, paving the way for clarity, focus, and unparalleled success.

Welcome, Analysts, to a New Year of Opportunity and Growth

As we just begin the new year, it’s an excellent time for us to reflect on our aspirations and set meaningful goals to be expert analysts. While we all know about New Year’s resolutions, goal setting is more than a New Year’s tradition. It’s a strategic exercise that can shape our personal and professional growth. To help us set the tone for success this year, let’s explore Warren Buffett’s Three-Step Framework for goal setting, often referred to as the “Two List Strategy.” This concept emphasises the importance of avoiding distractions to stay focused on what truly matters.

Step 1: Write Down Your Top 25 Goals

We have to start by brainstorming and listing all the goals we want to achieve, whether in the near future or over the long term. These could be career milestones, personal development ambitions, financial targets, or hobbies you’ve always wanted to pursue. Writing them down is more than a practical exercise—it’s a way to visually articulate what matters most to you and ensure nothing gets overlooked. This step helps us identify our priorities by externalising our aspirations onto paper. Seeing your goals laid out can provide clarity and inspiration.

Step 2: Circle Your Top 5 Goals

From the comprehensive list in Step 1, carefully select the five most important goals. These should resonate deeply with your long-term vision for success. They might align with your career path, personal values, or larger life objectives. Be honest with yourself and choose the goals that truly matter and not balance every sphere in your life. This step forces prioritisation, ensuring that our focus remains on the goals with the highest impact. Spreading our attention across too many objectives often leads to diluted efforts and less meaningful progress.

Step 3: Eliminate the Remaining 20 Goals

The final step—and perhaps the hardest—is to actively eliminate the remaining 20 goals from our focus. While these goals may seem appealing, they can act as distractions that pull us away from achieving our top priorities this year. Buffett’s wisdom lies in recognising that these “secondary goals” are the most dangerous because they consume time and energy without delivering meaningful results. Treat these unselected goals as a “do not do” list. Commit to resisting the temptation to work on them until your top five goals are fully accomplished.

Staying Focused in 2025

As analysts, our distractions can often emerge in the form of competing projects, numerous stakeholder demands, or even an overabundance of personal ambitions. The “Two List Strategy” is a practical framework to navigate these challenges and maintain focus. By prioritising our top goals and deliberately avoiding distractions, we’ll not only achieve our objectives but also create space for deeper, more meaningful work.

This year, let’s commit to being intentional about our goals. How? Let us embrace the discipline of prioritisation and don’t shy away from eliminating what doesn’t serve our bigger purpose. Here’s to a year of clarity, focus, and exceptional accomplishments!

In this section of our Newsletter, we aim to highlight the work that all our Being An Analyst members are doing to better the community at large. If you would like to be featured here, kindly send us an email: [email protected]

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