Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Kate’s five projects and too few hours
Kate is an HR manager who runs a podcast on the side.
This year, she said yes to everything.
She started a YouTube channel in January, a course in March,
a second podcast in May, and a newsletter in July.
Now her few free hours are split five ways, and not one of the five is any good.
🧩 Her struggle:
She weighs each new project on its own, so she never sees what it costs the others.
At lunch, a coworker tells her the real story of an investor
who also saw people make too many choices,
and who became one of the richest people alive.
He says a few big choices are enough for a lifetime.
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🎫 The card with only twenty punches
In the spring of 1991, Warren Buffett stood in front of business students at Notre Dame, a university in Indiana.
Warren is one of the most successful investors who has ever lived.
Those students were training to pick stocks for a living.
Most of them expected to make hundreds of decisions a year, and to get better at it by doing more of it.
Warren told them the opposite.
He asked them to imagine he had handed each of them a punch card as they left school.
A punch card is like a coffee shop loyalty card.
It has a row of empty spaces, and somebody punches a hole in one every time you use it.
Once every space has a hole in it, the card is finished.
Here is what he told them, in his own words.
“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches, representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime.”
“And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.”
He did not mean twenty a year.
He meant twenty for your whole life.
Then he told them what that card would do to them.
“Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about.”
There is no such card, of course.
But think about what changes the moment you believe there is.
Without the card, one more investment costs you nothing.
There is always next week.
With the card, every decision uses up one of the only twenty you will ever get.
The question stops being “is this a good idea?”
It becomes “is this good enough to spend one of my twenty on?”
Warren was honest with them about the numbers.
He said they were not going to find twenty great investments in a lifetime.
They might find five, or three, or seven.
Get this — he said that at Berkshire Hathaway, the company he built, they would be thrilled to make one intelligent decision a year.
Even one every two or three years would be enough.
Turns out a card like that does not make you invest less.
It makes you think much harder about each one, because there are only 20 chances you can take in your lifetime.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Punch Card
Warren, one of the most successful investors who has ever lived,
told students to invest as if they had only twenty decisions for their whole life.
He used a fixed number to make every choice feel scarce.
Warren’s hack is called The Punch Card.
So draw yourself a card for your side project this year.
Count the free hours you actually have in a week, then decide how many big projects those hours genuinely have room for.
For most people with a job, that number is two, maybe three.
Draw that many empty boxes on a piece of paper.
Two boxes means two big projects, all year, and nothing else.
Every time you say yes to something big, you cross off one box.
When every box is crossed off, the next exciting idea waits until next year.
And the projects already on your card finally get the hours they needed all along.
Save your last box for something you absolutely want to invest your time in.
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🛠️ Kate’s turn
Let’s check in on Kate, whose few free hours are split between her podcast and four newer projects.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and gives it all five projects and the eight hours a week she really has.
Her AI sidekick says:
Your eight hours have room for two projects, so keep the podcast and the course, and stop the other three until next year.
She draws two boxes on a piece of paper.
She writes the podcast in one box and the course in the other.
Then she stops work on the YouTube channel, the second podcast, and the newsletter.
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🌅 Four months later
Kate has put out a podcast episode every week since.
She has finished her course, all six lessons.
When a new idea shows up now, she writes it on a list for next year.
You probably have time for fewer projects than you have said yes to.
Decide how many big projects your free hours have room for this year, and stop saying yes when you reach that number.
That’s it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours ‘proving one person with an AI sidekick can build something amazingly big’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below gives you a fixed number of big commitments for the year and works out which ones get the punches.
🧰 What you’ll need
Everything you’ve said yes to or are thinking about this year, and the hours you actually have each week
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. the podcast, a YouTube channel, a course, a second podcast, a newsletter and two conference talks, on about eight hours a weekHow many of them you could do properly with those hours, and which ones you’ve already promised someone
- e.g. honestly two, maybe three, and I told an event organizer I would give one conference talkWhat you’d regret not doing this year
- e.g. the course, because I have been saying it for two years
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my episode list, my listener numbers, or my notes, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people in their 40s who want to change careers.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- The number of slots is fixed before you start. You may not add one. Every item you include must be justified against the item it pushes out, by name.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Everything I am committed to or considering this year, and how many hours a week I actually have:
{e.g. the podcast, a YouTube channel, a course, a second podcast, a newsletter and two conference talks, on about eight hours a week}
How many I could do properly with those hours, and which ones I have already told somebody I would do:
{e.g. honestly two, maybe three, and I told an event organizer I would give one conference talk}
What I would regret not doing this year:
{e.g. the course, because I have been saying it for two years}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The number — how many slots I actually have this year, with the arithmetic in plain hours.
2. The punches — which commitments get them, and for each one, the specific thing it pushes off the card.
3. The cut list — everything that does not make it, named, with what I lose in each case.
4. The promises to unwind — the ones I have already half-committed to and how to say no now rather than later.
5. The rule for next time — what has to be true for something to earn a punch mid-year.
Then tell me which item I put on the list because somebody asked, not because I want it.