Learning Where Your Priorities Aren't
You need to know what you don't want.
The story goes that Warren Buffet gave his pilot this advice: jot down your twenty biggest goals. Then, choose the five most important. These five are your goals. Those other fifteen, ignore them. You don’t have time for them.
This story is a lie. It’s a fabrication from countless friends of friends of friends of friends of Warren Buffet’s pilot. But the advice is sensible — so sensible it doesn’t matter that a random billionaire neither gave nor follows it.
It tells you where your priorities are.
The 20/5 task is useful because culls unnecessary goals, goals even you don’t think are that important. It tells you where your priorities are. If learning an instrument keeps hitting your list of twenty goals, but never reaches your top five, maybe you’re not a musical person.
I’ve done the exercise a few times, funnelling into the twenty personal, academic, and professional goals. (We have only one bank of time.)
The first time, in my twenty, I wrote ‘Start dating’. I’d never had a girlfriend. I could never be bothered to put in all the effort. I thought I should probably get some experience. I didn’t want to be like a former priest, who starts dating from scratch in his fifties.
Dating didn’t reach my top five. It was edged out by learning data visualisation with Python.
When you tick off your goals, you redo the exercise. Maybe some of the goals that weren’t quite important enough the last time are important enough now.
No matter how many times I completed the exercise, dating never reached the top five.
This seemed odd. For other people, romance and sex seemed to be compulsions. They seemed to actually want to be with someone else, even if just for a night.
I had no compulsion. I had no temptation to supress. I felt no pull towards anyone.
I realised I didn’t want it and would never want it. After Googling, I realised I was asexual and aromantic.
What did I actually learn, you ask. What changed? I already wasn’t dating and had not, really, been planning to. What do the names ‘asexual’ and ‘aromantic’ do?
There’s a kind of person who doesn’t like ‘labels’. ‘Why can’t people be people,’ they say. I can’t agree with them.
‘Why can’t flowers just be flowers?’ Because a cactus is not a lily.
My grandmother has a green thumb. I don’t. When I see trees and flowers, I see just trees and flowers. They may have different shapes, colours, sizes, but in my memory, they reduce to ‘trees’ and ‘flowers’.
When my grandmother sees trees and flowers, she sees camellias, succulents, eucalypts, birches, hickories, daisies, aspens, lilies, orchids. ‘Why can’t flowers just be flowers?’ Because a cactus is not a lily.
My grandmother’s mind holds these trees and flowers in pigeon-holes, conveniently labelled
It’s difficult to name what we are not
Naming is the first step to understanding. You have paid enough attention to an object to understand that it is dissimilar to other things. Nothing ‘changed’ when I realised was asexual and aromantic, except my understanding of myself.
I suggest people try 20/5 exercise, if only to see where your priorities don’t lie. It’s difficult to name what we are not, until we try to feed an appetite we do not have.
