Fill your buckets in the right order!

The five buckets:

What you know (your knowledge)

What you can do (your skills)

Who you know (your network)

What you have (your resources)

What the world thinks of you (your reputation)

The Story:

“At the start of my career, as an 18-year-old start-up founder, I was haunted by a moral question that I couldn’t seem to share: is focusing my time and energy on building a company (which would ultimately enrich me) a more noble pursuit than going back to where I was born in Africa and investing my time and energy in saving even one life?

This question remained at the front of my mind for several years until one chance encounter in New York granted me some much-needed clarity. I attended an event hosted  by Radhanath Swami, a world-renowned guru, monk, and spiritual leader, at an event he was holding in New York.

As I squeezed in among a sea of Swami’s mesmerised followers, who were starry-eyed and hanging on to his every word in perfectly still, appreciative silence, the guru asked if anyone in the crowd had a question for him.

I raised my hand. The guru gestured at me to deliver my question. I asked, “Is building a business, and enriching myself, a more noble pursuit than going back to Africa to try and save lives?”

The guru stared at me as if he could see into the depths of my soul, and after a long, blinkless pause he proclaimed: ‘You cannot pour from empty buckets.’

Almost a decade on from that moment, it’s never been clearer what the guru meant. He was telling me to focus on filling my own buckets, because someone with full buckets can positively bend the world in any way he or she desires.”

- Steven Bartlett, CEO, founder, co-founder or board member of four industry-leading companies that collectively - at their peaks - reached a cumulative valuation of more than $1 billion.

Going back to the five buckets in the right order, knowledge, skills, network, resources and reputation - the sum of these five buckets is the sum of our professional potential. The fullness of these buckets will determine how big, believable and achievable our dreams are to us, and to those that hear them. Those that achieve great things have spent years, often decades, pouring into these five buckets. Someone fortunate enough to have five full buckets has all the potential needed to change the world.

We usually start our professional life acquiring knowledge (school, university, etc.), and when this knowledge is applied, we call it a skill. When we have knowledge and skills we become professionally valuable to others and our network grows. Consequently, when we have knowledge, skills and a network, our access to resources expands, and once we have knowledge, skills, a valuable network and resources, we will undoubtedly earn a reputation.

However it is important to note that the first bucket (knowledge) is the highest-yielding investment we can make. Because when that knowledge is applied (skill), it inevitably cascades to fill our remaining buckets.

Closing advise from Steven: 

When deciding which path to take in life, which job to accept or where to invest our spare time, we must remember that knowledge, when applied (skill) is power. We should prioritise filling those first two buckets and our foundations will have the long-term sustainability we need to prevail, regardless of how life’s tectonic plates move and shake beneath us. There are only two buckets that any such professional earthquake can never empty - it can take away our network, it can take away our resources, it can even impact our reputation, but it can never remove our knowledge and it can never unlearn our skills. The first two buckets are our longevity, our foundation and the clearest predictor of our future. So let’s make sure that we fill our buckets in the right order!

#myreflections #anideaaday #fivebuckets #knowledge #skills #network #resources #reputation #thediaryofaceo