In The One Thing, real estate entrepreneur Gary Keller argues that the key to extraordinary success is focusing daily on the “One Thing” that will make the biggest difference in achieving your goal.
Keller, founder of the world’s largest real estate company Keller Williams, says that success comes from choosing and doing the right things sequentially, each connected to and building on the previous one, rather than doing a lot of disparate things, regardless of value, simultaneously. Extraordinary focus on One Thing each day is what leads to extraordinary success.
You start by thinking big—imagining extraordinary results—then narrowing your focus until you’re thinking small—that is, focusing on the most important thing you can do at the moment to help get you where you ultimately want to go. Focus on it exclusively, and when you complete it, move on to the next One Thing on your way to your goal.
When you prioritize so you’re focusing on the right thing at the moment, everything after that subsequently falls into place like a progression of dominoes.
Physicist Lorne Whitehead determined in 1983 that a single domino can bring down another domino that’s 50% bigger. Another physicist tested and confirmed this in 2001, using eight dominoes of plywood, each 50% larger than the one before. The first was two inches tall and the last one thirty-six inches tall.
When you pursue your goals by starting with the one, right thing, it leads to bigger things—you build energy in a geometric progression like Whitehead’s progressively larger dominoes. To keep doing the math:
To achieve success, aim for the moon. Getting there is doable when you create a domino effect in your life.
Exceptional success, like a domino fall, is sequential, not something you achieve by multitasking or doing a lot of things simultaneously. You line up your priorities and focus on the first domino until you topple it. You begin with a linear process that becomes geometric; you build momentum as you do the first right thing, followed by the next and the next.
A wealthy person doesn’t become wealthy in a day; a champion athlete doesn’t start winning on day one. Money, skills, expertise, and accomplishments are built over time. Success builds on success, sequentially, as you move from One Thing to another until you reach the highest level possible.
Despite our potential for huge success, most of us believe a number of myths we’ve been taught about it, which keep us from focusing on One Thing:
Myth 1) Everything is equally important and we must do it all. We’re flooded with new information and input constantly. Everything feels urgent and important, so we try to do everything, using an ever-increasing to-do list that gives every item equal weight. However, without prioritization, it’s merely a “survival” list. All things are not equally important. Research shows that a minority of our effort (20%) produces the majority (80%) of our results, which means focusing on the few, highest-impact things is the key to creating extraordinary results.
Myth 2) Multitasking gets more done. Multitasking is a myth—our brains can’t focus on more than one thing at a time. What looks like multitasking is actually task-switching as our brains go back and forth between tasks. Rather than increasing our efficiency, this process is a huge time-waster. Researchers estimate that employees are interrupted every eleven minutes and spend a third of their day recovering from interruptions. It also takes longer to do things. Depending on the complexity of the task, switching can add 25% to 100% more time to completing it. You won’t succeed in your work or life unless you figure out what matters most in the moment and give it your undivided attention.
Myth 3) Only people with superhuman discipline succeed. Most people have all the discipline they need to succeed. Success isn’t a result of ongoing discipline. It results from applying discipline long enough for a new habit to stick and become automatic. When you exercise discipline, you’re training yourself to act in a certain way. When you do it long enough—research shows it takes 66 days to establish a habit—the new behavior becomes routine. You become successful when you’ve strategically applied discipline to the right thing—establishing a powerful new habit.
Myth 4) Willpower is unlimited. Willpower is like the battery power of your phone. As you draw on the available power, the supply diminishes. You make difficult challenges harder when you don’t reserve enough willpower to help you with them. Things that sap willpower include: resisting temptation, doing a task you dislike, and suppressing emotions. The key to having willpower when you need it is to:
Myth 5) You must live a balanced life. A balanced life in which no area is neglected—for instance work, health, or relationships—is a myth. Trying to maintain balance will keep you from achieving extraordinary success because success requires allowing some things to remain unaddressed, at least temporarily, so you can focus on what’s most important. The key is counterbalancing the way a ballerina does—by making constant adjustments with her toes and ankles.
In your work, when you focus on the most important thing, accept that other things will fall by the wayside; in your personal life, be aware of personal and family needs and constantly counterbalance to address them. To live a counterbalanced life, let the right things take precedence and tackle the rest when you can.
Myth 6) Don’t overreach by thinking big. Many people fear “going big” or pursuing exceptional achievement in their professional lives because it sounds difficult or like “pie in the sky.” Lowering your sights seems more prudent and realistic. However, how big you think determines your level of success, so aim high:
If the key to getting extraordinary results is focusing on the right One Thing, then you need a way of figuring out what that thing is. The way you determine it is by asking the Focusing Question: “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
The focusing question takes two forms—a big-picture and a small-focus question: 1) “What’s my One Thing?” and 2) “What’s my One Thing right now.” You ask the first to determine your purpose and the second to determine the most important immediate action toward attaining it.
You can apply it to every area of your life—spiritual, health, personal, relationships, job, and finances—to ensure that you’re doing what matters most. Customize the focusing question by inserting your area of focus; you can also include a time frame (this year/month). For instance— for my health, what’s the One Thing I can do to ensure I exercise (today, this week, this year) such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
There are three components to implementing your One Thing and achieving exceptional results: purpose, priority, and productivity. Your big One Thing is your purpose, and your small One Thing is your priority—what you do now—to achieve it.
Purpose, priority, and productivity are like three parts of an iceberg. Productivity is the tip or part you see, priority is directly under the surface, and purpose is deeper. Your purpose determines your priority, and both purpose and priority drive productivity. How well you connect your purpose, priority, and productivity determines your personal level of success.
1) Purpose is the one thing you want your life to be about more than any other.
Following are some tips for discovering your purpose.
Post your One Thing where you’ll see it often. Try it for a while, even if you’re not completely satisfied with it. You can always revise it or develop a better one later.
2) Priority: Your purpose specifies where you want to go. Your priority is what you do now to get there. Because of the way humans are wired, it can be hard to connect the present—what we’re doing now—with the future. The way to do it is to think in steps, each building on the previous step to reach your final goal/purpose. It’s like lining up your dominoes, so a small action sets off a chain of related actions leading to the result you want. Train your mind to drill down from your big goal, like opening a set of Russian nesting dolls one at a time until you know the most important thing to do in the present.
3) Productivity: Once you know your purpose plus your immediate and future priorities for getting there, you need to use your time productively to achieve the results you want. The key to productivity is scheduling or blocking time on your calendar to focus on your priority and treating that time as sacrosanct.
There are four steps to time blocking:
Beware of four things that can undercut your productivity:
When you dream big and then make that dream your goal, you’re on the way to exceptional success. Of course, getting there requires working backward from your goal to determine the specific steps you need to take. Then, build momentum toward your goal by focusing on each One Thing until you master it.
Studies have found that what people regret most at the end of life are the things they didn’t do. The way to avoid this is to make sure that each day you do what matters most, so that everything else falls into place. You are the engineer of your success and are the first domino.
In The One Thing, author and real estate entrepreneur Gary Keller argues that the key to extraordinary success is focusing daily on the “One Thing” that will make the biggest difference in achieving your goal.
Keller, founder of the world’s largest real estate company Keller Williams, acknowledges this is counterintuitive in our multitasking world. But he argues that success comes from doing the right things sequentially, each connected to and building on the previous one, rather than doing a lot of disparate things simultaneously. Extraordinary focus on One Thing each day is what leads to extraordinary success.
The One Thing tells you how to apply this simple but transformative principle to your work and in your personal life, where escalating demands and constant distractions work against focusing on anything for long.
You start by thinking big—imagining extraordinary results—then narrowing your focus until you’re thinking small—focusing on the most important thing you can do at the moment to get you where you ultimately want to go. Focus on the small One Thing exclusively, and when you complete it, move on to the next One Thing on your way to your goal.
Keller used this approach in his business, when it seemed to be faltering after a successful first decade. He worked with a consultant, who determined that he could get the company back on track if he changed the leadership in 14 positions. So Keller focused on this One Thing: finding the right people. Then, with the people in place, he helped each one focus on the One Thing he or she needed to do to help the company succeed. In its second decade, the company grew rapidly from a regional to an international player.
Keller realized that in his work and life, his greatest successes came when he focused on One Thing, while in instances where he was less successful, he’d been juggling multiple priorities but accomplishing little.
A scene in the 1990s movie City Slickers sums up the One Thing approach. Curly, a crusty cowboy played by Jack Palance, advises city slicker Mitch, played by Billy Crystal: “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh-t.” Mitch asks, “What’s the one thing?” and Curly replies, “That’s what you have to figure out.”
The One Thing, which Keller co-authored with Jay Papasan, is about achieving exceptional success by figuring out and focusing on your One Thing every day.
Everyone has the same number of hours in a day, yet some people accomplish more than others in the same amount of time because they “go small” or narrow their daily focus.
Going small is:
Most people think and act in the opposite way. Achieving big goals seems too complicated and time-consuming, so they set modest goals and keep busy with immediate demands. They work from jam-packed calendars and unprioritized to-do lists that keep getting longer. Before long they feel overwhelmed and even modest goals seem unattainable, so they scale back their goals and settle for less.
Doing too many things without subtracting anything means missed deadlines, high stress, long hours, lackluster results, lost sleep, and missed time with family and friends—when success is actually a lot easier to attain than you might think.
Big success comes, not from lowering your expectations, but from doing a few things well—subtracting rather than adding to your daily tasks. Do fewer things that have more impact and your daily, focused achievements will add up to success.
Thinking big but focusing small works in any area of life. It means identifying and doing the One Thing that most advances your purpose.
When you prioritize so you’re focusing on the right thing at the moment, everything after that subsequently falls into place like a progression of dominoes. Each domino represents a small amount of energy and as your dominoes fall, the energy in the string builds so that your final results are astounding.
In 1983, physicist Lorne Whitehead determined that a single domino can bring down another domino that’s 50% bigger. Another physicist tested and confirmed this in 2001, using eight dominoes of plywood, each 50% larger than the one before. The first was two inches tall and the last one thirty-six inches tall.
When you attack your goals by starting with the one, right thing, it leads to bigger things—you build energy in a geometric progression like Whitehead’s progressively larger dominoes. To extend the math in his example:
To achieve success, aim for the moon. Getting there is doable when you create a domino effect in your life.
Exceptional success, like a domino fall, is sequential, not something you achieve by multitasking or doing a lot of things simultaneously. You line up your priorities and focus on the first domino until you topple it. You begin with a linear process that becomes geometric; you build momentum as you do the first right thing, followed by the next and the next.
A wealthy person doesn’t become wealthy in a day; a champion athlete doesn’t start winning on day one. Money, skills, expertise, and accomplishments are built over time. Success builds on success, sequentially, as you move from One Thing to another until you reach the highest level possible.
Focusing on One Thing instead of many things brings success—examples proving this are abundant. The One Thing spurring success can be a product, person, passion, or life purpose.
Hugely successful companies focus on one product or service:
Successful businesses continually ask themselves, “What’s our One Thing?” because it has to evolve in response to competition, technology, and consumer demand.
Apple focused on one exceptional product at a time, moving from the Mac, iMac, iTunes, and iPod, to the iPhone and then iPad. If your business doesn’t know what its One Thing is, then its One Thing or focus should be determining what that is.
No one succeeds totally alone. Many of those who’ve achieved exceptional success can cite one person who made the difference by pointing them in the right direction—for instance:
Sometimes, a person’s One Thing is a passion or skill that drives his or her success. Passion and skill are closely connected:
For example, American long-distance runner Gilbert Tuhabonye’s passion for running became a skill that led to a profession, which gave him the opportunity to contribute to the welfare of his native country. Born in Burundi, he was a national champion runner who escaped being killed during a civil war by outrunning his enemies. He was recruited by and attended Abilene Christian University in Texas, where he won All-America honors and later became a popular running coach. With professional success, he began a foundation to raise money to provide water systems in Burundi.
Applying the One Thing principle to your work and life is the most effective way to achieve extraordinary success.
Bill Gates is the paramount example of a person who has harnessed One Thing at various key moments to create an extraordinary life:
Focus isn’t easy in a world of technology, innovation, opportunities, and abundance. We’re bombarded with countless choices each day. Not wanting to miss an opportunity, we attempt too much and end up accomplishing less than we’d hoped.
We’d like to simplify and focus on less but aren’t sure how to choose the things that will lead to success. Curly the cowboy’s philosophy is the key: Figure out your One Thing and live it. Yet persistent myths and misinformation keep many of us from seeing the value of this simple, effective principle.
Focusing on One Thing brings success. The One Thing spurring success can be a product, person, passion, or life purpose. To discover the impact of the One Thing principle in your life, consider the following:
Does your company know its One Thing—the distinctive product or service that defines it? What is your company’s One Thing? How has it evolved over time and where is it headed?
What one person has positively influenced your life the most and how?
What one skill or passion has brought you success? How did you discover and invest/focus on it? How might you build on your success so far?
We act on what we believe. Unfortunately, a lot of what we believe—what we accept as objectively true or as common sense—is nonsense. For instance, we believe that:
Most of us believe similar myths about success, which keep us from focusing on One Thing.
The first myth standing in the way of success is that everything is important. However, all things are not equally important—figuring out and focusing on the most important things is the key to success.
We’re flooded with new information and input constantly—from personal interactions, family demands, directives from the boss, emails, requests from colleagues, and constant “alerts” from our cell phones. Everything feels urgent and important, so we try to do everything. However, despite being busy, we don’t accomplish much. Being busy isn’t the same as being productive or successful.
In fact, no one succeeds by being the person who does the most.
The time-management and “success industry” advocates tell us to-do lists are the answer for bringing order to chaos. However, without prioritization, they’re merely “survival” lists of our best intentions, not paths to success. In fact, they lead everywhere but to success.
With tasks and information bombarding us, we write items down on scraps of paper or build them into lists on notepads. We use planners, calendars, and notebooks to list daily, weekly, and monthly tasks, or we go mobile, using cell phone apps to create digital lists.
While they can be useful, lists more often control and distract us with inconsequential things we feel obligated to do because they’re on our list. But spending hours checking off items on a list has nothing to do with success. Instead of a to-do list, you need a “success” list created for achieving specific, extraordinary results.
Here are the differences between a to-do list and a success list:
If a list isn’t built for success, it won’t get you there. If it covers everything, it will take you everywhere but where you want to go.
To turn your to-do list into a success list, follow the 80/20 rule and prioritize.
The 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto Principle, states that a minority of effort (20%) produces the majority (80%) of the results.
In the 19th century, economist Vilfredo Pareto used it to describe wealth concentration in Italy, where 20% of the people owned 80% of the land. Much later, U.S. quality control expert Joseph Juran applied the idea to manufacturing, theorizing that a small number of flaws in the manufacturing process would produce a majority of product defects. Juran referred to the idea of the “vital few” versus the “trivial many” as the Pareto principle.
If a minority of your effort leads to the majority of results, then focusing on the few, highest-impact things is the key to creating extraordinary results. This means everything isn’t equally important; some things matter much more than others.
You can see this principle in almost everything:
You turn a to-do list into a success list when you apply Pareto’s Principle and prioritize or focus on the things that matter most.
To achieve extraordinary success, go even smaller than the vital few in choosing your focus. Keep on figuring out the 20% of the 20% of the 20% until you arrive at One Thing.
Applying this to his business, Keller reduced a list of a hundred ideas to make his company #1 in its field to just one idea: he would write a book about excelling in real estate. The book became a best-seller, launched a series of books, and changed the company’s image.
In his personal life, Keller applied the One Thing rule to learning to play the guitar. He decided he’d get the greatest impact from his limited practice time by focusing on scales. He narrowed that further to practicing the minor blues scale. Applying it, he could play the solos of several great classic rock guitarists. The scale became his One Thing and opened up the rock world.
The 80/20 rule is like a compass that points you in the direction of the One Thing that matters most.
A second myth that stands in the way of success is the belief that you can get more done by multitasking. You can’t.
With impossibly long to-do lists, many people believe multitasking is the way to get everything done. People think it’s something they should learn and practice in the name of efficiency. Web pages and blogs offer instructions. Some employers list multitasking as an essential skill for prospective hires.
However, 2009 research by Clifford Nass of Stanford University showed it doesn’t work. While multitaskers think they’re succeeding, they’re actually performing poorly. Nass found that multitaskers “were lousy at everything.”
As speaker and author Steve Uzzell noted, “Multitasking is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time.”
Multitasking might be a holdover from humans’ earliest days, when they had to watch their surroundings for predators while doing other things like picking berries. We seem to be wired to try to do more than one thing at a time. Because we feel so pressed for time, multitasking has become a hallmark of the modern human.
The term multitasking entered the lexicon in the 1960s, when scientists used it to describe computers’ ability to do many things quickly. However, it was a misnomer: rather than doing multiple things simultaneously, computers alternate tasks requiring memory until the tasks are done. Their speed makes it seem like they’re doing things simultaneously.
People actually can do two things at once—for instance, walk and talk. But like computers, we alternate our focus. Or we process different types of information in different parts of the brain. When we’re engaged in two activities, the brain controls one in the background and the other in the foreground.
A conflict occurs when an activity requires a brain channel already in use or when one task demands greater attention—for example:
Today’s workplaces are a multitasking circus, which costs time and productivity.
For instance, when a coworker interrupts you with a question while you’re working on a spreadsheet, you have to switch your attention to the new task and then later restart the one you suspended. This takes time—researchers estimate that employees are interrupted every eleven minutes and spend a third of their day recovering from interruptions. It also takes longer to do things. Depending on the complexity of the task, switching can add 25% to 100% more time to completing it.
Besides external interruptions, there are other distractions. Computer users change windows or check email or other programs 37 times an hour. You actually get a jolt of dopamine when you switch, making attention-shifting addictive.
To sum up the drawbacks of multitasking:
Multitasking doesn’t save time, it wastes time.
Society is beginning to understand and take seriously the risks of distraction in one area: driving a motor vehicle. Distracted driving causes 16% of fatalities and a half-million injuries a year. Talking on the phone while driving can take 40% of your focus and can have the same effect as driving drunk.
As a result of the increased awareness, many states and communities have banned using the phone while driving. We should take distraction just as seriously at work and in our home life.
If you lose a third of your workday to distractions, imagine what it costs you and your business over the course of a career. Distractions erode your personal relationships each time you ignore the needs of your spouse, children, or friends to check your cell phone.
All of this is a steep price to pay for something—multitasking—that doesn’t work to begin with.
You won’t succeed in your work or life unless you figure out what matters most in the moment and give it your undivided attention.
Studies show that when we try to multitask, we end up doing multiple things badly. In addition, trying to do two things at once wastes time because the brain has to switch back and forth between the tasks and reorient itself each time.
Think about how your day went yesterday. How many times did you attempt to multitask and what tasks were involved?
How did the instances of multitasking turn out? Was there something you wish you had done better? What was it?
Looking at your computer right now, how many windows do you have open? How many times do you check them? Why do you need to keep these windows open?
People often think that only those with superhuman discipline achieve success. However, this is another myth. Almost everyone has sufficient discipline to achieve success—they just need to apply it more strategically.
Success isn’t a result of ongoing discipline. It results from applying discipline long enough for a new habit to stick and become automatic. When you exercise discipline, you’re training yourself to act in a certain way. When you do it long enough, the new behavior becomes routine and no longer requires discipline.
You become successful because you’ve strategically applied discipline to the right thing—establishing a powerful new habit.
Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps is an example of someone succeeding through strategically applied discipline. As a child with ADHD, he couldn’t focus in school and was prone to disruptive behavior. However, from age 14, he applied discipline to One Thing that became a powerful habit—swimming every day. Phelps swam six hours a day, seven days a week and ultimately became the most successful Olympian in history.
Besides bringing success, developing the right habit simplifies your life. Focusing discipline on the right thing—finding your sweet spot—actually means you can be less disciplined about other things. Phelps found his sweet spot in swimming and made it a habit that changed his life.
The idea of disciplining ourselves and adopting better habits seems hard and unpleasant. But habits are hard only in the beginning. Establishing a habit takes more energy than sustaining one.
How long it takes to form a new habit depends on the nature of the habit. Self-help advocates often assert that it takes 21 days to make a change. However, researchers at the University College of London determined that it takes about 66 days—easier behaviors take fewer days to establish and difficult ones take more.
So don’t quit too soon. Decide on the right habit and apply discipline, giving yourself enough time for it to become second nature. Remember that success is sequential, and build new habits one at a time, building on the success of the previous habit with each new one.
We’ve all heard the adage, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” and taken it to mean that with enough determination you’ll accomplish your goals. Just summon up your willpower and you can do anything.
But you set yourself up for failure if you don’t understand how willpower works and manage it properly. When you’re struggling to accomplish something and can’t seem to muster the willpower, you may feel you lack character or fortitude, so you try harder. But the problem isn’t your determination. The truth is that willpower isn’t always there when you need it. It’s not on call.
Yet willpower is critical to success.
In the sixties and seventies, researchers at Stanford University did a famous study of willpower with 500 toddlers called the Marshmallow Test. Kids were offered their choice of one of three treats (one was a marshmallow) but told if they waited fifteen minutes, they’d get a second treat. Only three in ten succeeded in waiting the full fifteen minutes.
Decades later, researchers tracked down the original subjects and found that ”high delayers” had more successful lives—for instance, higher test scores and academic achievements, better stress management, and a greater sense of self-worth. In contrast, “low delayers” were more likely to be overweight and had higher rates of drug addiction and other problems. Learning to use willpower effectively is critical to achieving success.
Willpower is like the battery power of your phone—the more you use it, the more it wanes until it’s gone.
That’s why you’re more likely to break your diet and eat junk food when you get home after a tough day—you’ve used up your willpower on other things. You make difficult challenges harder when you don’t reserve enough willpower to help you with them.
Activities that drain willpower include:
When you do things without thinking that diminish your willpower, it’s like making a hole in your car’s gas line: your willpower leaks away, leaving none for your most important work.
To put your willpower to work effectively, pay attention to it and manage it. To get the most out of your day, do your One Thing early before your willpower is drawn down. Build your activities around it, so you can count on it when you need it.
One way to recharge your willpower is to feed it. Your brain consumes one-fifth of the calories your body burns. When your brain isn’t getting enough food energy, you lose willpower.
What happens is that when nutrients run low, your body prioritizes which parts of the brain get the available calories. The parts of the brain that regulate breathing and nervous responses get first dibs. There may be nothing left for the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for things like focus, short-term memory, solving problems, and controlling impulses (willpower).
Also, exercising willpower leads to a drop in blood glucose, which diminishes mental performance. Researchers gave two groups a task requiring willpower, then followed up with another willpower task. Between the two tasks, one group got a glass of sugar-laden Kool-Aid, while the other got a placebo drink. The first group made half as many errors on the next task.
Researchers concluded that willpower is a mental muscle that needs time to recover from use. If you use it for one task, less capacity will be available for the next unless you refuel. You need to feed your brain. The most effective fuels are complex carbohydrates and proteins, which keep blood sugar steady over long periods, although simple carbs work for quick energy boosts.
When your willpower is low you tend to make decisions by default. An Israeli study on the performance of judges making parole decisions showed how this works.
Researchers analyzed parole board hearings by eight judges. Each heard up to thirty-four cases a day with only about six minutes to make a decision in each case. They got two breaks: a morning snack and a late lunch.
Researchers found that in the mornings and after each break, petitioners’ chances of getting parole were as high as 65%. However, at the end of each period, the chances dropped to almost zero as the judges’ energy waned and they reverted to their default choice, which was to deny parole.
When our willpower runs out, we also revert to our default settings—for instance, grabbing chips instead of a healthy snack or succumbing to distractions. Making decisions by default leads to average achievement at best.
You need your willpower at full strength to do the right thing and resist distraction. Then, for the rest of the day, you need enough willpower to support what you’ve accomplished and not undermine it.
Willpower is like the battery power of your phone. As you draw on the available power, the supply diminishes. You make difficult challenges harder when you don’t reserve enough willpower to help you with them.
Think of a time when you wanted to accomplish something (for instance, to complete a task) but you couldn’t summon the willpower to make it happen. What was the situation and what time of day did it occur?
Now, recall the other things you did that day, leading up to the event where your willpower failed. How many/which of your prior actions might have drained your willpower (for instance, suppressing an emotion, resisting a temptation, doing something you disliked)?
The next time you face this task or a similar one, what steps can you take to conserve the willpower you’ll need to get it done?
A balanced life in which no area of life—for instance, work, family, or health—is neglected is a myth. Trying to maintain balance will keep you from achieving extraordinary success because success requires allowing some things to remain unaddressed, at least temporarily, so you can focus on what’s most important.
The goal of achieving balance in our lives is relatively recent. For most of human history, work and life were synonymous. You had to work all the time, hunting or raising crops and livestock, in order to live. With the rise of the industrial age, people began working for others, who then controlled much of their time. Unions and labor laws sought to mitigate work demands on time.
The work-life balance concept emerged in the 1980s, when a critical mass of women entered the workforce and had to meet the demands of both work and home life. In the 1990s, balance became important for men too. The rise of technology that erased work-life boundaries added to the craving for balance.
The problem is that balancing all areas of your life at once keeps you from making an extraordinary commitment to anything. Yet the extremes are where exceptional achievement occurs. We instinctively know this, but don’t know how to manage our lives while pursuing the extraordinary. We swing back and forth between working too long and neglecting our personal life, and neglecting work to take care of family matters. Either way, we end up feeling we don’t “have a life.”
Instead of trying to do everything at once or swinging between extremes, we need to counterbalance, which is what ballet dancers do. A ballerina may look like she’s balancing, but she’s really counterbalancing or making constant adjustments with her toes and ankles create the effect she wants.
When you counterbalance, you focus on your One Thing at work or at home, and shift to another area only when you need to. Like a ballerina, you remain aware of what’s happening and make adjustments as necessary one at a time.
The question isn’t whether you allow aspects of your life to be out of balance while you focus on the most important thing in a particular area—it’s for how long: a short period or a long one.
At work, go long—accept that achieving extraordinary results will require extraordinary focus on One Thing for long periods. This means allowing other work tasks to go undone for long periods, with only occasional counterbalancing or shifting focus to address the most pressing ones.
In your personal life, go short. The key is to be aware of personal and family needs and constantly counterbalance or switch your focus to address them. You can’t neglect your family, friends, and personal interests for long without causing irreparable damage. Shift back and forth quickly between personal priorities to ensure you’re leaving nothing unattended for long.
In your work, some things necessarily will fall by the wayside; in your personal life, you can’t let important things languish.
In Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, author James Patterson offers a work-life metaphor: It’s like juggling five balls representing work, family, health, friends, and integrity. Work is a rubber ball—if you drop it, it will bounce—but the others are glass, which will shatter or be damaged if you’re careless with them. So you can afford to drop some balls at work, but not in your personal life.
To get the most important things done at work and at home, think of prioritizing in both places rather than balancing one against the other.
At work, be clear about your most important priority so you can get it done in order to focus on your priorities outside of work. At home, understand your priorities there so you can address them and go back to work.
Start living a counterbalanced life—let the right things take precedence and tackle the rest when you can.
Many people fear “going big” or pursuing exceptional achievement in their professional lives because it sounds difficult or like “pie in the sky.” Lowering your sights seems more prudent and realistic. But thinking big is essential to extraordinary results. (This is different from having a small focus—that is, narrowing your focus to a single priority or most important step toward your big goal. You need to think big and focus small.)
Since what you think determines what you do, how big you think determines your level of success. Big success has to start with big thinking. For example, Sabeer Bhatia, the man who developed Hotmail and eventually sold it to Microsoft for $400 million, arrived in Silicon Valley as an immigrant with only $250 and a big idea. He believed he could build a major tech company that stood out from any other in record time—and he did.
Other examples of thinking—and achieving—big are:
Think as big as you can and base your actions on succeeding at the highest level. When people feel a need to reinvent themselves, it’s often because their goals were too limiting. Your goals can be either a platform for your next level of success or a ceiling constraining you.
When you set out to do something that seems daunting at first, you often discover that it was easier than you thought it would be. In any case, you grow in the process of reaching for a big goal. When you look back, what seemed insurmountable looks smaller because you’ve grown in your thinking, skills, and relationships.
Stanford psychologist Carol S. Dweck studied how our thinking or mindset influences our actions. She identified two mindsets: a “growth” mindset that thinks big and seeks growth and a fixed mindset that thinks small and seeks to avoid failure. (Shortform note: Read the Shortform summary of Mindset by Carol S. Dweck here.)
Dweck found that growth-minded students used better learning strategies, were more confident, applied greater effort, and achieved more academically than their fixed-minded peers. They didn’t limit themselves and tended to reach for their potential.
Dweck noted that you can change your mindset to a more positive way of thinking, like any new habit, by applying discipline until the mindset becomes routine.
There’s no telling where thinking big can take you. Apple executive Scott Forstall looked for growth-minded people when seeking recruits to work on a new, top-secret project. He advertised for people willing to make mistakes and struggle on the chance they could come up with something extraordinary. He accepted only those who immediately jumped at the challenge. His team went on to create the iPhone.
Small thinking diminishes your life, while big thinking enlarges it, so aim high:
We overanalyze and overplan our careers and lives. We accept feeling overstressed, while following conventional advice for success, including acting and dressing for success, meditating for inspiration, and getting to work before anyone else so we can do more. However, the key to success isn’t doing more than anyone else, but focusing on a few, right things and doing them well.
Andrew Carnegie, whose steel company was the largest enterprise in the world, gave this advice to college students in 1885: “Concentrate your energy, thought, and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged.”
He had observed that the companies that fail are the ones that spread themselves too thin by going in too many directions. “Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket,” he said. “It’s easy to watch and carry the one basket. It is trying to carry too many baskets that breaks the most eggs in this country.”
The way you determine which basket to pick is by asking the Focusing Question: “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
The focusing question is a simple formula for getting answers that lead to exceptional results. It’s both big-picture and small-focus: It requires asking both “What’s my One Thing?” and “What’s my One Thing right now?”
Asking the focusing question tells you what basket or goal to choose and also the first step toward attaining it.
Here’s a breakdown of the focusing question:
In summary, the focusing question is both big picture and small focus: your One Thing is your big-picture goal, and your One Thing right now is your priority today for getting there.
The focusing question can be a success habit when you make it a way of life. You can ask the question when you start your day, when you get to work, and when you get home: “What’s the One Thing that will have the biggest impact?” With practice, you’ll know whether to use the big-picture or small-focus version.
You can apply it to every area of your life—spiritual, health, personal, relationships, job, and finances—to ensure that you’re doing what matters most. Customize the focusing question by inserting your area of focus; you can also include a time frame (this year/month). For instance:
To make the One Thing part of your daily routine:
The focusing question helps you identify your One Thing—your big goal and the steps you must take to reach it. Applying the question is a two-step process that leads to extraordinary results:
An example of a big and specific (exceptional) question is: What can I do to double sales in six months? This is a big goal, with a specific timeframe. Achieving it will challenge you to look beyond the usual solutions.
In contrast, a big question that’s broad rather than specific would be: What can I do to double sales? It’s broad because it lacks a timeframe.
You can go small and broad by asking, What can I do to increase sales?, but this is really a brainstorming question rather than a goal-oriented question. You also could go small and specific: What can I do to increase sales by 5% this year? Although specific, the goal isn’t challenging and will lead to only average results.
So your question must be big and specific to get exceptional results.
Next, turn it into a focusing question: What’s the One Thing I can do to double sales in six months such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary? Now you have to figure out your most important step and start there.
Once you’ve asked the focusing question, there are three categories of possible answers for your One Thing: doable, a stretch, and a possibility.
The doable answer is easily within your reach, the one likely to be achieved. The stretch answer is also within reach but pushes the envelope for you. Achieving it depends on your effort—you need to extend yourself by researching solutions and finding examples of success to emulate.
The highest achievers choose the third answer—the possible, extraordinary goal that requires going beyond what’s been achieved before. It involves finding a path where none has existed. Accomplishing the extraordinary requires research plus benchmarking and trending:
This is the path to exceptional achievement. Because you’re breaking new ground, you’ll have to grow and change in the process. But when you achieve the extraordinary, your life becomes extraordinary.
The focusing question, intended to help you figure out what your immediate priority should be, is: “What’s the One Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” You can apply it to your work or any aspect of your life. For practice, try applying it to a simple goal, such as healthy eating.
Start by considering the question, “What’s the One Thing I can do to ensure that I eat healthy today such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” What are some possible answers?
Considering your possible answers, which one would make the most difference in ensuring that you eat healthily today?
How would doing that thing make everything else easier or unnecessary? For instance, taking healthy food to work with you might make it easier to resist eating the doughnuts in the break room.
Finally, extend the time frame in the focusing question to “this week” and “this month.” What One Thing would enable you to eat healthy not just today, but this week and this month?
There are three components to implementing your One Thing and achieving exceptional results: purpose, priority, and productivity. Your big One Thing is your purpose, and your small One Thing is what you do now—your priority—to achieve it.
Purpose, priority, and productivity are like three parts of an iceberg. Productivity is the tip or part you see (just one-ninth of the iceberg). Priority is directly under the surface and purpose is deeper. Your purpose determines your priority, and both purpose and priority drive productivity.
How well you connect your purpose, priority, and productivity determines your personal level of success; the same formula applies to business success as well. The formula for an exceptional life is to live with purpose, live by priority, and live for productivity.
Your purpose is the one thing you want your life to be about more than any other.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens illustrates how purpose sets or changes the course of your life. At first, Scrooge’s purpose is to have money. His priority is amassing as much as he can. With maximum productivity, he accomplishes his goal/purpose. By his standards, he’s extraordinarily successful.
However, later in the story after being visited by ghosts, he changes his purpose. This changes his priority and how he focuses his productivity. Scrooge’s new purpose is caring about people; his priority is using his money to help people, while still making as much as possible. He’s productive in accumulating as much money as he can to help others.
When it comes to purpose, happiness is what we want most; it drives most of our actions.
Most people pursue happiness the wrong way. Acquiring money or something else you want can make you happy for the moment, but having things doesn’t guarantee lasting happiness. If you don’t have a big-picture purpose, you can fall into a pattern of always seeking more. After you get what you want your happiness diminishes as you get used to it, so you seek something else.
In reality, lasting happiness comes from becoming engaged in and finding meaning in what you do; your daily actions are driven by a bigger purpose. Happiness occurs in the process of fulfilling your purpose.
Following are some tips for discovering your purpose. Remember that you can always change it; the key is to get started. (Shortform note: For more details, download the author’s free worksheet here.)
Post your One Thing where you’ll see it often. Try it for a while, even if you’re not completely satisfied with it. You can always revise it or develop a better one later.
Your purpose specifies where you want to go. Your priority is what you do now to get there.
Because of the way humans are wired, it can be hard to connect the present—what we’re doing now—with the future. According to psychologists, the further away a reward is, the lower our motivation to achieve it. In addition, we have a “present bias,” meaning we prefer present gains over future ones. For instance, if offered a choice of $100 now or $200 in the future, most people would take the $100 rather than waiting.
With this mindset, you can lose sight of achieving potentially extraordinary results. The way to connect your present action or priority to your big goal or purpose is to think in steps, each building on the previous step to reach your final goal/purpose. It’s like lining up your dominoes, so a small action sets off a chain of related actions leading to the result you want.
To see how things connect, ask yourself this series of questions:
Many people don’t reach their goals because they haven’t lined up the dominoes to connect the present to the future. Strategic thinking, or breaking down the process for achieving a big goal into steps, avoids what researchers call the “planning fallacy,” which is overestimating what you can accomplish because you haven’t thought through the process.
Train your mind to drill down from your big goal, like opening a set of Russian nesting dolls one at a time until you know the most important thing to do in the present.
Once you know your purpose plus your immediate and future priorities for getting there, you need to use your time productively to achieve the results you want. The key to productivity is scheduling or blocking time on your calendar to focus on your priority and treating that time as sacrosanct.
There are four steps to time blocking:
Begin each year by planning your time off. Manage your work time around your downtime—when you reserve time off to recharge and then take it, you’ll be more productive.
Design your days around your priority by blocking off a minimum of four hours a day to work on it as early in your day as you can. Each day, take up to an hour to deal with timely matters, then focus on your priority.
Venture capitalist Paul Graham argues that in a typical business, there are two types of time: “maker” time, which focuses on doing or creating, and “manager” time, which focuses on directing or overseeing. Maker time requires large time blocks, usually half-days, while manager time is broken down into hours, usually spent attending meetings. For optimum productivity, be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld blocked off time every day for writing jokes (developing his craft). When he completed a time block, he crossed it off on his calendar so that the crossed-off days formed a visual chain. His mantra was: “Don’t break the chain” by misusing a time block.
Near the end of each year, block planning time to assess where you are and what progress you need to make next year toward achieving your purpose. Also, block an hour each week to review your annual, monthly, and weekly goals/priorities.
Blocking time is pointless unless you protect your blocked time and use it as designated. By doing so, you protect your priorities and purpose. Treat this time as inviolable.
Three threats to your time block are:
1) An urgent request from your boss or key client to do something. One way to respond is to say yes but put off actually doing it by asking, for instance, “Would Friday work?” Often the person asking for something will be satisfied if you just commit to getting it done. If you have to do it immediately, also reschedule your time block immediately.
2) The urge to deviate from your time block to deal with other things. Remind yourself of the domino that will fall when you complete your priority task. To preempt distraction, post a note where you can see it stating: “Until my priority task is done, everything else is a distraction.”
3) Trouble staying focused. When thoughts cross your mind of things you should do, make a note so you won’t forget them and get back to your priority.
Four ways to fight distractions are:
1) Find a place to work where you won’t be distracted or interrupted. If you have an office, close the door and window blinds. Or find a vacant room and close the door.
2) Have supplies, snacks, and drinks on hand, so you don’t need to leave your workspace except for bathroom breaks.
3) Remove distractions: turn off your phone, shut down your browser and email.
4) Enlist support: Tell colleagues what you’re doing and when you’ll be available.
The key to productivity is scheduling or blocking time on your calendar—at least four hours daily—to focus on your priority and resisting distractions and interruptions.
How much uninterrupted time do you consistently spend each day on your top priority at work or in your personal life, so that you are making measurable progress each day and week toward your big goal?
What are the forces working against blocking off more time for your priority? Which one has the biggest impact?
How can you address each person or circumstance that keeps you from focusing on your priority—for instance, by changing your schedule, shutting down your email, or moving to a quieter location for your time block? (Remember that it’s your choice whether to be a victim of your circumstances.)
How might you enlist support from your boss and colleagues to focus on your priority?
Achieving exceptional results from time blocking requires exceptional effort in three areas: 1) committing yourself to mastery, 2) determining the best way to do something, and 3) holding yourself accountable.
Mastery is a process rather than an end result. It’s based on the desire to become the best you can be at doing your most important thing and an understanding that there’s always more to learn. You’ve mastered tasks accomplished in the past, but you’re an apprentice when it comes to future tasks. There’s always a new level of expertise to reach.
Mastery of the right thing topples your first domino and “makes everything else easier or no longer necessary.”
Besides requiring a mindset of continual learning, achieving mastery or expertise requires a significant investment of time. The time you spend is ultimately more important than talent.
Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson debunked the idea that top performers excel because they’re gifted. He found that the key to reaching elite levels was intense and “deliberate” practice over many years—for instance, top violinists accumulated over 10,000 hours of practice by age 20. If you put in 250 work days a year on your One Thing, you need to average four hours a day to amass 10,000 hours in ten years. (Shortform note: Read more about why high-quality practice matters more than talent in our summary of Ericsson’s book Peak.)
When you approach your focused time blocks with a “mastery mentality,” each level you achieve prepares you for the next—your growing knowledge, skills, and competence give you momentum for further successes. Mastery is a pursuit that “keeps on giving.”
When you set out to do something, you have a choice of either doing it the best you can or doing it the best it can possibly be done.
Doing something the best you can is an entrepreneurial approach. With an entrepreneurial mindset, you see what needs to be done and jump into it by applying your energy and ability. However, everyone has an ability limit and will top out. For instance, some people hit their home-repair skill limit as soon as they pick up a hammer, while others are more expert at using it. If your goal is to just do your best, then you’re done once you reach your talent limit. Your best effort won’t bring you exceptional success—that requires continually improving how you do your One Thing.
Instead of an entrepreneurial approach, you must take a purposeful approach. This means not stopping when you reach your knowledge and talent limit, but seeking new and better ways to do what you’re doing.
Here’s an example comparing the two approaches:
A purposeful approach applies the rule that getting a different or better result requires doing something different. Applying a purposeful approach during your time block unlocks your potential.
A key to exceptional outcomes or results is holding yourself accountable for the way things turn out.
You can choose to be accountable and be the “author of your life,” or choose to be unaccountable and be a victim. An accountable person acknowledges or seeks to understand the reality, tackles the task or problem, takes ownership of it, and finds a solution. In contrast, someone with a victim attitude avoids or fights reality, blames, makes excuses, waits, and hopes things will improve. An accountability approach shapes the outcome, while a victim approach doesn’t. Either attitude becomes a habit.
The best way to become accountable is to find an accountability partner—a mentor, peer, or coach who will:
Research shows that accountability leads to better results—in one study, people who wrote down their goals were almost 40% more likely to achieve them. In addition, those who not only wrote down their goals but also sent progress reports to friends were 77% more likely to achieve them.
An accountability partner will help you stay on track and improve your productivity.
Despite your best intentions, several tendencies can block your productivity.
Saying yes to (or focusing on) your One Thing is your priority. This means you have to protect what you’ve said yes to by saying no to everything else that impinges on your time block. To put it another way, one yes must be defended over time by a thousand nos.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he proceeded over the next two years to reduce the company’s products from 350 to ten. He understood that the more things you do (say yes to), the less successful you are at any of them.
It’s human nature to want to be helpful when someone asks you for something. Saying no in order to focus on your own goals can seem selfish. But you can do it in a respectful and even helpful way by:
Your talent, abilities, and time are limited. Your life must be about what you say yes to—rather than what you ought to have said no to.
When you focus on your One Thing, it’s a given that other things will be delayed or won’t get done. Knowing there are loose ends and unfinished work can be distracting, but you need to develop a tolerance for such messiness or you’ll never accomplish what matters most.
In fact, the greater your commitment to your priority, the more pressure you may feel to address things you’ve put on hold, even to the point that things seem about to explode. Giving in may relieve the pressure, but by doing so you allow less important things to steal your productivity and rob you of future success.
It’s important to accept that when you strive for exceptional results, chaos is the guaranteed tradeoff.
Of course, there are likely to be times when you’ll need to adjust to life’s demands and circumstances. The key is to be creative rather than becoming a victim of your circumstances and giving up.
Everyone’s circumstances are unique and require a unique response. Your time block may look different from someone else’s. You may not be able to block off a morning—your time block may have to be at a different time of day for a while. You may have to trade off time with someone else, so you protect each other’s time blocks.
When you commit to One Thing, you’ll ultimately achieve exceptional results, which will increase your ability to manage the chaos. So work around the chaos of the present and trust that doing the right thing will pay off big in the long run.
When you constantly try to do too much, you’ll eventually pay a price with your health. For instance, you may strive for success at the expense of your health by working long hours, staying up too late and sleeping poorly, missing meals, not taking time off, and not exercising.
This may seem to work for a time, but there are two problems:
Exceptional achievement requires enormous energy. Here are some ways to build and conserve energy for maximum productivity.
In addition, plan your day. Determine what’s most important and make sure you get those things done. Estimate how much time you’ll need and plan it. Planning time to get the most important things done inspires you and eases your worries about what won’t get done.
Spending the early hours of each day building your energy will propel you through the day. If your morning is productive, the rest of your day will fall into place.
At night, get eight hours of sleep. Don’t allow other activities to impinge on sleep time. Understanding that the right amount of sleep is necessary for success should motivate you to go to sleep and wake up at the right times.
Your environment includes the people you associate with and your physical surroundings, both of which can help or hinder your productivity.
The people you surround yourself with affect your attitude, health, and performance. If those around you are unhappy and negative, you’re likely to pick up some of their negativity. Even if you’re a positive person, their negativity will rub off eventually. Also, other people’s bad habits can affect you. For example, a 2007 study on obesity found that if your close friends become obese, you’re 57% more likely to do the same.
Instead, surround yourself with people who will support, encourage, and help you. Research indicates that associating with success-minded people creates “a positive spiral of success,” in which their energy uplifts you. They also can motivate you to improve your performance.
Also, organize your physical environment to minimize distractions and support the pursuit of your One Thing. Otherwise, getting to work will be like walking down a candy aisle when you’re trying to lose weight.
Make a test run of the path you follow every day and look for the distractions—from the point you wake to arrival at your office or workspace where you focus on your One Thing.
Eliminate any distractions you find—for instance, email, TV news, the doughnut shop on the way to work, and the office coffee pot. Save these kinds of things for later in the day.
Don’t allow people and physical distractions to detour you from your One Thing. Clearing your path of obstacles to success will help you get there.
Focusing on your One Thing is your priority. This means you have to protect your priority by saying no to everything else that impinges on your time block.
Think about the past few days at work. How much time did you spend responding to others’ requests? What were some of the requests you received?
Do you see any patterns—for instance, what type of request was most frequent or time-consuming? Among your colleagues, who made the most requests?
What are some ways you can deter and/or redirect your colleagues, especially the ones making the most requests, in order to protect your time block?
When you dream big and then make that dream your goal, you’ll end up living large. To see what this could look like, write down your income and multiply it by two, five, ten, or some other number. Then write down the new number.
Ask yourself whether what you’re doing now will get you this number in the next five years. If your current actions will get you there, continue doubling the number until they won’t.
If you change your actions to match the ultimate number—your big goal—you’ll be living large.
You can apply this process to anything that matters: your health, relationships, spiritual life, career, finances, or business success. When you stop limiting your thinking, you remove the limits on where you can go in your life.
Of course, getting there requires working backward from your goal to determine the specific steps you need to take. Then, build momentum toward your goal by focusing on each One Thing until you master it. By taking action now, you avoid the alternative, which is feeling regret later.
In Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware interviewed people at the end of their lives about what they wished they’d done differently. The most common responses were wishing they’d:
Other researchers have also found that what people regret most at the end of life are the things they didn’t do. The way to avoid this is to make sure that each day you do what matters most, so that everything else falls into place. You are the engineer of your success and are the first domino.