The ONE Thing

The principles in this book have really guided me and challenged me in every area of my life. They’re especially been influential in my business life and in the way I approach things as a business leader, and that’s why I wanted to share the principles that I’ve learned from this book that I’ve been applying for several years now.

The book here is called The ONE Thing by Gary Keller of Keller Williams and Jay Papasan. It’s a book all about the power of focus and the power of the domino effect. I’ll actually reference my copy here a couple of times here because it’s just been such a huge change for me helping me understand, stay focused and understand, and be thinking critically about the effects of how I’m spending my time.

That’s what the book is about, the power of focus and the power of the Domino Effect, which I’d like to share with you briefly. The key to The ONE Thing is that you want to be conscientiously choosing actions that will have the biggest effect in the long run, thinking about what the next domino is and leverage your choices as well as your energy111.

The book starts out with a little bit of introduction as to this. It then talks about the six lies, but I’m not covering all of them. If you want to know all of them, just read whole the book.

This book has been such an influence on my life that there are three or four books I give away and this is one of them. If you would like a copy of this book just to put on your bookshelf, I would encourage you to read it. I give this book away all the time because it is really really for anyone, but especially for a business owner.

Unlike Profit First, which I’ve talked about previously, is really for a business owner. But this book can be applied by anyone to their job or career. I’d be happy to send you a copy for free. It’s made that much of an impact on my life that I want to give it away to other people. I believe that if I give away a few copies of this book, it will some of the people who read it. That makes me happy.

Send me your mailing address and I will send you a copy. If you ask, I can send you a free copy at audible.com instead. Audible is great for listening while you drive to work, or while you drive to a project, or while exercising. Whatever you’re doing, audible.com is great for that. I consumed this book that way, but I also have several paper copies available. Let me know, and I’ll ship one right to your doorstep.

The Six Lies

I was talking about the six lies, and I’m not going to cover all of them, just a couple that really stood out to me.

Number one: everything matters equally. Gary Keller and Jay Papasan talk about this in reflection to the 80/20 rule as we know it, or Pareto’s Principle, which is that it’s a law of nature that 20% of the wealthiest people own 80% of the land. They give a various other examples of how that’s generally true and the percentages might change a little bit, but generally 20% of your effort is yielding 80% of your results. Also, 20% of your customers are yielding the largest portion of your profit and 20% of your ideas will yield the largest growth or expansion or whatever it might be.

So you want to be focusing on identifying that 20%. What I really loved about this is the way they applied it to your to-do list. If you are like me, your to-do list is a mile long and those are just the things I wrote down.

Now that I’ve narrowed my list down to four, I have to decide—which one of these is the most important? We get to The ONE Thing, take the 80/20 rule, and go to the extreme. The authors also discuss the opposite effect that happens: in order to say yes to that one thing, something else has to say no. This means you have to get better at saying no. They give a lot of suggestions and tools for that. But ultimately, what’s going to yield more success for you is saying yes to the right things, and saying no to other things.

That has been a huge lesson for me is taking my to-do list, turning it into a success list, and working harder and harder at saying no.

Multitasking

Another one of the lies is multi-tasking.

We’ve been taught in today’s society that a computer can multi-task, so should be able to do it too. But that’s just not true. It took a little bit of convincing me to believe this one. We can juggle, we can walk and talk and chew gum, and they explain why some of that works and it’s not really multi-tasking. But to really focus on something and to give it the attention it deserves, you aren’t.

If you were to think you’re “multitasking,” what you’re actually doing is “task-switching.” You’re actually losing time, energy and focus by switching and reloading the rules. I’m switching to this task, and so now I have to go back. Sometimes it’s just a little bit here and there, but it really adds up; sometimes it’s a lot. You can lose an entire day’s worth of progress because you have to re-orient yourself on a bigger project.

There are some interesting statistics in the book about how much time is lost in the average American office just by test switching, something like 30%. It’s absolutely crazy to think about. So, multi-tasking is a lie. Just stay focused on one thing at a time.

The second thing is that a lot of self-help circles will say is that building new habits takes 21 days. However, it usually takes a lot longer than that. The average is 66 days depending how strong the habit is and how challenging it is. So expect to spend two to three months building a really good habit, which takes one back to focusing on which habits you’re building. That was huge for me.

The Myth Of Willpower

Number four also stuck out to me, and that was willpower.

We think things like:

“I can’t do a good job because I’m just not good enough”

“I don’t have character”

“I’m not determined enough”

“I can’t just seem to go back to work”

Some people may not have this problem, but they may have it more on the focusing end. That really spoke to me. It’s not necessarily a matter of being disciplined, it’s a matter of building the habits. And one of the challenges there is that willpower is not always on “will call” and we can’t always just will ourselves to do something.

The energy it takes to will yourself to do something depletes—based on your fitness, on what ate today, based on how tired you are. The authors talk about this as well as the importance of doing your one thing as early in the day as possible. That’s been really big for me, making the priority because that’s the thing that’s going to drive everything else forward. Then they talk a lot about balance, another lesson I took to heart. That the magic happens at the extremes, and that one of the lies is thinking we need to live a balanced life.

Going Extreme

Go extreme at work, in your business, in your career. Go as far as you can without losing everything, but understand that some things are going to have to wait. Some things are so far down the list that they’re not going to get done. That’s , because you’re doing more important, more impactful things. At home, when you deal with fitness and family and mental health and finances, you need to counterbalance much more quickly. If you go to the extreme with your health, you’ll have major health issues and you may never recover, but work will always bounce back. So go as far to the extreme as you can, but do counterbalance.

But when I look at my personal bucket, it’s a completely different view. I look at my relationship with my wife, or with my son, my health, finances, I want to keep going back and forth. I want to spend time with my wife on a regular basis, making sure that I don’t go too far to one extreme. Does that make sense?

So you’re in work, you want to counterbalance slowly and go as far to the extremes as you can. In your personal life, you need to keep your health and your personal relationships all in balance and in balance against each other. You want to find ways to combine activities as well, but that’s a great lesson that I took.

I’ll leave the sixth lie for you to read in the book for yourself.

That sits heavy on me every time I read it. Because the lesson here is that what we ask for is what we get, and the questions that we ask of ourselves and the questions that we ask of our life are what will ultimately determine our outcome. And the principle they take is that the way we phrase those questions will then determine the answers that we seek and apply, which will then determine our eventual results.

That’s a big lesson here, and it leads to, how do you come up with uncommon questions that take you to uncommon answers? Their answer is the Focusing Question. The ONE Thing is centered around this Focusing Question, because it guides you to an uncommon approach to living your life.

The question is, “What’s The ONE Thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” I ask this question of everything important in my life like the book guides you to ask. Certainly on the personal side, but very frequently on the business side. I have it actually the wall as a little reminder for myself.

But, “What’s The ONE Thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary?” That’s how strongly that question impacts me and influences me. So when it comes to growing my business, and growing myself as a business owner, I ask that question all the time.

They also talk about the success habit, which is the first habit that you should start developing. Unless you have one that you know will have a more direct impact on you, such as your physical health or your financial state. For that I’ll reference you to Profit First.

So that’s the habit that I’ve been developing over the last two years since I read the book. This question is the path to great answers. They go into additional things like purpose leading to priority and leading to productivity. If you want to achieve extraordinary results, know your purpose. Your purpose drives your priority, which you discover these by asking yourself The ONE Thing. That then leads to productivity.

Let me offer just a few quick other thoughts that I wanted to share with you. And that is how to kind of work this in and how I use it. So, what I’m dealing… What I try to do, is follow their principles to identifying what I should be working on. And so I ask myself in life, “What is my overall goal, what is my someday goal, what’s The ONE Thing I want to do before I am gone? What kind of impact do I want to leave and what legacy do I want to leave behind me?”

That’s a very challenging question that I consider several times a year. With what I have, my current goal in mind, I then set a five-year goal. And I do that by asking the Focusing Question and the just modify it slightly. They walk you through this in the book. But I think it helps to understand that, so the question becomes, “What’s The ONE Thing I could do in the next five years to reach, that would take me towards my someday goal, such that by doing it, everything else would become easier and unnecessary?” And for me that’s building my business. I have a specific goal for that. Then I do that with my one-year goal. In order to achieve my five-year goal, what’s The ONE Thing I can do this year, such that by doing it, everything else in achieving that five-year goal will become easier or unnecessary?

I think about this. I actually used their planner to help refresh this and I reassess that. Then we go down to a month and I ask the whole thing, then we go back to a week. And so every week, I sit down and I say, “So in order to achieve my someday goal, and in order to achieve my five-year goal and my one-year goal and my one-month goal, what’s The ONE Thing I can do this week, such that by doing it, achieving all of those goals will become easier and or unnecessary?” As they teach, this helps you line your dominoes up so you know that you’re working on something that’s going to follow that 80/20 principle, and is going to knock over a domino that will make it easier to knock over the next domino.

The details are not what’s driving that domino to fall over. Me doing it myself is not what’s driving that domino to fall over. So part of my personal growth, especially and as a business owner that I’m struggling with right now, just to be real, is letting go of things that I want to do myself. But the truth is that it’ll probably get done faster and better by somebody else, if I would just trust.

Learning to communicate better and learning to hand things over is a domino that I’m working on, that’s a habit that I’m working on right now. And every week I have a reset: what’s my goal for this week, to keep me on track for my one-month goal, to keep me on track from my one-year goal, keep me on track for my five-year goal, keep me on track for my someday goal? What’s one thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary?

Conclusion

So I hope that helps. I hope you took a little bit from this that you can apply to your life. Ask yourself that Focusing Question every week, every month, every day, at the beginning of every day and let me know if you want a free copy of the book. I will be more than happy to send it to you.