Melinda French Gates: Warren Buffett gave me this important career advice—it helped me learn to set boundaries

Roughly two decades ago, Warren Buffett gave Melinda French Gates a piece of career advice — and she’s never forgotten it.

“Warren Buffett once said to us … ‘Find your bullseye of what you’re working on and let the other things fall away. You’ll feel better if you keep your talents in that bullseye and keep working on those issues, and you’ll feel less bad about letting other things go,'” French Gates told LinkedIn News interview on Tuesday.

“And I think that’s true,” she added.

French Gates received that advice from Buffett during the early days of the Gates Foundation, the philanthropic organization she co-founded with ex-husband Bill Gates in 2000, she said.

Buffett, the billionaire investor and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, served as a trustee and major donor to the Gates Foundation from 2006 to 2021, helping drive the organization’s environmental, economic and humanitarian philanthropic programs.

By 2022, Buffett contributed more than $36 billion to the foundation, in addition to “the gift of time and advice,” Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman wrote on the organization’s website.

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Today, French Gates considers Buffett’s words to be a cardinal rule for setting boundaries at work, she said.

Without boundaries, you risk getting bombarded with requests to take on extra work, favors from colleagues and other distracting duties — keeping you from getting your other work done, and often leading to stress or burnout.

Spending your time effectively sometimes means giving a firm “no” to projects that seem difficult to turn down, or even requests from loved ones, said French Gates: “I have learned that saying ‘no’ early is important. If you know it’s a no right away, don’t linger on it, just say no. The clarity helps you and it helps them.”

Buffett agrees. “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything,” he was quoted as saying in author James Clear’s 2018 bestselling book “Atomic Habits.”

If you tend to feel bad about saying no to people, try to stop thinking about how the other person will respond, and focus instead on how your decision will benefit you personally, behavioral scientist and Cornell University associate professor Sunita Sah recently told LinkedIn’s “Hello Monday” podcast.

Doing so doesn’t make you a selfish person or a poor employee, said Sah. It shows that you value your long-term productivity and mental health — and if you focus on doing yourself a service, rather than doing someone else a disservice, you might find saying no a lot easier.

“That reframes it from this negative connotation to a proactive positive force in society,” Sah said, adding: “One of the key things I’ve learned is that defiance is a practice, not a personality. It’s a skill set and we can choose to utilize it or not.”

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