Here is an excerpt from an article written by John Taft for LinkedIn. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here.

Photo: creative commons licensed (BY-NC-ND) flickr photo by trackrecord

* * *

“You’d get very rich if you thought of yourself as having a card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch. You’d resist the temptation to dabble. You’d make more good decisions and you’d make more big decisions.” —Warren Buffett, quoted in The Snowball, by Alice Schroeder

This week, Warren Buffett celebrates his 84th birthday.

Those of you who follow my blogs know I have a bit of a man crush on Buffett, not just because of his investing acumen but because he has always seemed to me endowed with a kind of uber-common sense… an ability to cut to the heart of a situation or an issue and capture it in a few words, understandable to experts and common folk alike.

Lists of his “10-greatest” or “18-greatest” (or however-many-greatest) sayings pop up everywhere in online searches. But the Buffett-ism that’s stayed with me is the one at the top of this blog – namely, the notion of a punch card (a quaintly antiquated thing you don’t run across very often these days).

Buffett used his punch card analogy in an investment context. It’s consistent with his belief that really profitable investment decisions are few and far between. His counsel to individual investors has always been to “wait for the fat pitch.” [See “Bored Investors Beware.”]

But I think the punch card analogy applies equally well to life, and to the decisions that define and shape our lives over the five, six, seven or eight decades most of us are on the earth. For someone graduating from high school, I think the number 20 is just about right. For someone like me, in middle age, the number of un-punched punches on the card is a lot smaller. There might be only two or three left.

The point is, whether it’s two or twenty, the number of inflection points in our lives is a lot smaller than it often seems. The trick is having the wisdom, or the instinct, to recognize “fat pitches” at the time they show up, which is always easier in hindsight. Then we need to make our big decisions count.

* * *

Here is a direct link to the complete article.

John G. Taft is CEO of RBC Wealth Management – U.S., and author of Stewardship: Lessons Learned from the Lost Culture of Wall Street (John Wiley & Sons, 2012). RBC Wealth Management-U.S. is a division of RBC Capital Markets, LLC, a member of NYSE/FINRA/SIPC.