The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results

Gary Keller proposes a framework for achieving extraordinary results in work and in life in general. The author’s premise is that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus, or more precisely, by focusing on the One Thing. "[Achievers] have an eye for the essential. They pause just long enough to decide what matters and then allow what matters to drive their day. Achievers do sooner what others plan to do later and defer, perhaps indefinitely, what others do sooner. The difference isn’t in intent, but in right of way. Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority." The author explains how getting things done is not a matter of discipline but of developing habits that will help you focus on the task at hand. Discipline is needed to acquire the habit, but we cannot run on discipline in the long term. Achieving extraordinary results requires making extraordinary efforts. In that sense, Keller does not believe in a balanced life as a goal to be achieved or a state of balance, but in counterbalancing your life as an every day reality, an act of balancing. "If you think of balance as the middle, then out of balance is when you’re away from it. Get too far away from the middle and you’re living at the extremes. The problem with living in the middle is that it prevents you from making extraordinary time commitments to anything. In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets its due. Sometimes this can be okay and sometimes not. Knowing when to pursue the middle and when to pursue the extremes is in essence the true beginning of wisdom. Extraordinary results are achieved by this negotiation with your time." "One day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered." The book mentions the now-more-known Stanford Marshmallow Experiment by Walter Mischel, which relates the effect of delayed gratification and developing grit with outcome and success in different areas in life. Keller also cites Carol Dweck‘s research on growth-mindsets vs fixed mindsets as an example of how your perception of things strongly affect what you can achieve: "Dweck’s work with children revealed two mindsets in action—a “growth” mindset that generally thinks big and seeks growth and a “fixed” mindset that places artificial limits and avoids failure. Growth-minded students, as she calls them, employ better learning strategies, experience less helplessness, exhibit more positive effort, and achieve more in the classroom than their fixed-minded peers. They are less likely to place limits on their lives and more likely to reach for their potential" Keller’s framework is constructed on applying what he calls the Focusing Question to the different areas of your life: What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary? "Productivity isn’t about being a workhorse, keeping busy or burning the midnight oil…. It’s more about priorities, planning, and fiercely protecting your time." "To stay on track for the best possible day, month, year, or career, you must keep asking the Focusing Question. Ask it again and again, and it forces you to line up tasks in their levered order of importance. (…) you can drive yourself nuts analyzing every little aspect of everything you might do. I don’t do that, and you shouldn’t either. Start with the big stuff and see where it takes you. Over time, you’ll develop your own sense of when to use the big-picture question and when to use the small-focus question." Answers to the Focusing Question come in three categories: doable (something that is already within your reach), stretch (at the farthest end of your range), and possibility (an answer that exists beyond what is already known and being done). “Highly successful people”, explains Keller, “choose to live at the outer limits of achievement. They not only dream of but deeply crave what is beyond their natural grasp.” The Focusing Question, however, is not enough. Adopting the mindset of someone seeking mastery is needed (the commitment to becoming your best, and embrace the effort it represents). "More than anything else, expertise tracks with hours invested. Michelangelo once said, 'If the people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all.'" You will also need to deal with the natural ceiling of achievement with a purposeful mindset (not accepting the limitations of our natural approach as the last word), and learn to be accountable for the outcome of your lives (in contrast with being a victim of the situation). This is essential —according to Keller— to achieve extraordinary results. "If you have to beg, then beg. If you have to barter, then barter. If you have to be creative, then be creative. Just don’t be a victim of your circumstances." Almost finishing the book, Keller warns the reader against the four thieves that can stand in our way to extraordinary results. The inhability to say “No” , the fear of chaos —”pursuing your One Thing moves other things to the back burner (…) chaos is unavoidable. Make peace with it. Learn to deal with it”— , poor health habits, and an environment that doesn’t support your goals. I enjoyed reading the book and strongly agree with most of what the author proposes. You can use the framework “as-is” or adapt it to suit your needs

The ONE Thing” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan is a transformative guide to achieving extraordinary results through focused effort and prioritization. The central premise of the book is the idea that by concentrating on one single task—the most important one—you can achieve more significant results than by spreading your effort across multiple tasks. The authors emphasize the power of simplicity and the importance of identifying the one thing that will make everything else easier or unnecessary. They provide practical strategies for overcoming distractions, building productive habits, and maintaining focus. Through a combination of research, anecdotes, and practical advice, Keller and Papasan guide readers on how to apply this principle in various aspects of life, including work, personal goals, and relationships. The book’s clear, concise writing and actionable steps make it an accessible and valuable read for anyone looking to boost their productivity and achieve their goals. Overall, “The ONE Thing” is an insightful and practical book that encourages readers to prioritize their efforts and focus on what truly matters to achieve extraordinary results.

This book by Gary Keller was a number 1, Wall Street Journal bestseller. The author’s credibility derives from his being the founder of Keller Williams Realty International, which is the largest real estate company in the world, by agent count. The book opens with a dialogue between Curly and Mitch from the comedy/drama, “City Slickers”. Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is? Mitch: No. What? Curly: This. [He holds up one finger.] Mitch: Your finger? Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*t. Mitch: That’s great, but what’s the “one thing”? Curly: That’s what you’ve got to figure out. The route to extraordinary success, according to Keller, is the discovery of what your ‘One Thing’ is. As children, we were required to do things when the time came: breakfast time, time to go to school, time to do homework, bath time, and bedtime. As we got older, we were given the discretion to choose when to do things, but not whether – homework before bed. But as adults, everything becomes a choices, and it is these choices that define our lives. This book addresses the question of how to make good choices. Without a clear formula for making decisions, everything feels urgent and important. The ‘One Thing’ is such a formula. Keller describes the search for the ‘One Thing’ tightly: “What’s the One Thing you can do this week (day/month or year) such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary?” He reports that where he has had huge success, it was always a function of narrowing his concentration down to one thing - and the converse was true too. Your to-do list probably contains many entries and possibly a few rated ‘A’. What this indicates is that you could be focusing attention on all your ‘A’s today, as opposed to the ‘One Thing’ that will help you achieve your major ‘One Thing’ in your business or private life. To-do lists commonly lack the focus on the ‘One Thing’ - success. “In fact,” notes Keller, “most to-do lists are actually just survival lists.” Survival lists are long, success lists are short. Keller uses this principle to explain why some people seem to get ahead where others don’t. Why, with the same number of hours available, do some succeed and others don’t? The successful identified the ‘One Thing’ that they really wanted to achieve, and applied the ‘One Thing’ principle to it, daily. This is not limited to work, but to one’s health – (What is the one thing I should do to increase my fitness?), marriage, income, and so on. This is the realization that not everything matters equally and that focusing on many things precludes giving your ‘One Thing’ the time and effort it deserves. To grasp the full intent of the criteria for a true ‘One Thing’, focus needs to be on the second half of the formula: “What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?” To illustrate the power of this insight, Keller cites the ‘domino effect’. This effect is the repercus sions of an act on every associated entity, like a row of standing dominos that falls when just the first one is pushed over. In an article in the prestigious American Journal of Physics in 1983, Lorne Whitehead described how a single domino can bring down another domino that is actually 50 percent larger. Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life through the ‘One Thing’ principle. The ‘One Thing’ bears a striking resemblance to the over-used Pareto Principle, or the ‘80-20’rule, and differs only in that Kelly takes it to the extreme. His call it to take the 20% of your activities which will give you 80% of your benefit, and identify the ‘One Thing’ from that - the vital few of the vital few, until you get to the essential One Thing. All efforts are not equal, some will produce significantly more. To be able to say “yes” to the ‘One Thing’ requires saying no to all else. “Whether you say ‘later’ or ‘never’, the point is to say, ‘not now’ to anything else you could do until your most important work is done,” Keller advises. The suggestion that human beings can multitask is nonsense. Professor Clifford Nass of Stanford University, conducted enough experiments to conclude that “multitaskers were just lousy at everything.” The term was developed to describe computers not people, and the computers only processed only one piece of code at a time, just fast enough to appear as multitasking. Once the ‘One Thing’ of your work or current concern is identified, you won’t have to become a extremely disciplined human being to achieve. We already, naturally, have more discipline than we need: we simply need to direct and manage it a little better. “When you see people who look like disciplined people, what you’re really seeing is people who’ve trained a handful of habits into their lives,” Keller observes. Success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right. Before retiring, Michael Phelps had won 22 medals, making him the most-decorated Olympian in any sport. His coach since age 11, Bob Bowman, talked of his ability to focus as his greatest attribute, despite the fact that others said he would “never be able to focus on anything”. It would be fair to say that Phelps channelled all of his energy into one discipline, the One Thing, that developed into one habit—swimming daily. The results from developing the right habit are inevitable, they produce both the success you are searching for which greatly simplifies your life. “It’s not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do,” Keller notes, “it’s that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.” The ‘One Thing’ is hardly a new notion, anyone who ever attended the 30-minute motivational speech at the company conference, has heard it. But hearing the message is quite different from internalizing it. Reading this very accessible book will ensure the message is internalized. And you will be very pleased you did. Readability Light -+--- Serious Insights High -+--- Low Practical High ---+- Low *Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy, and is the author of the recently released ‘Executive Update.

I am an "idea factory," and this book has been a total game-changer for me. It offers a realistic framework and tools to get projects all the way across the finish line efficiently and effectively I first listened to it right before the pandemic, and it was the key to staying productive and hitting my goals while sheltering in place. I’m currently revisiting it for a refresh to tighten up my habits and get back to peak focus. It is just as relevant the second time around!

I am impressed by the Title, Table of contents, as well as how the author guides the reader in a very creative way the meanings, and the excellent examples to make his point crystal clear, REGARDING BLATANT LIES AS MULTITASKING AND HOW TO ASK YOURSELF : "WHAT IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT I CAN DO TODAY SO SUCH BY DOING IT EVERYTHING ELSE WOULD BE EASIER AND UNNECESSARY? This question was a real challenge for me, and now, I like challenges that will make my life useful to others and at the same time enjoy my life. VERY SIMILAR TO WHAT STEVE CHANDLER TALKS FREQUENTLY: Focus on one thing at a time. Everybody, has only 24 in one day, if I want to change something the answer for many people (including myself in the past)thought that working more hours, doing more things etc was the answer. Steve Chandler's set of a Success course on CD, was the first person I heard talking an I will quote him "business is laziness" and this book THE ONE THING, hekped me to nderstand better what Steve meant. In the last 4-5 years I have read many self help books , but never one like this one. Several years ago I read another book concerning the same topic, Comparing what I got from this one is unbelievable, and I am taking into account that I have grown from the personal point of view, and inspite of this the book is A MUST TO ANYBODY THAT IS LOOKING FOR ANSWERS LIKE PURPOSE IN LIFE, HOW TO FIND IT, HOW TO BECOME EFFICIENT, HOW TO DEVELOP A POSITIVE HABIT ETC..I RECCOMEND THIS BOOK WITHOUT HESITATION, DO NOT WASTE MONEY OR TIME LOOKING FOR SELF-HELP BOOKS....THIS ONE (I ignore if it was the authors purpose or not)INCLUDES ALMOST ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW TO THRIVE IN YOUR PERSONAL, FAMILY, SOCIAL, BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL LIFE. I HAVE FOLLOWED MANY OF HIS ADVICES AND WITHOUT BEEN A MIRACLE-LIKE RETRIBUTION YOU GET, ACTUALLY IT HELPS YOU TO UNDERSTAND REALITY IN A VERY PECULIAR AND AT THE SAME TIME SIMPLE VIEW. describing the benefits with less words might be unfair to any body looking for down to earth answers...HE WILL NOT GIVE THEM IN YOUR MOUTH LIKE FOOD...YOU NEED TO THINK, AND THINK POSITIVE

YES! The One Thing is a focused and motivating read that teaches the power of prioritizing what truly matters. It shows how concentrating on a single most important task can simplify life and boost productivity. A great reminder that success comes from focus, NOT multitasking.

Never done this before! Right there—on page 117—was a stunner-of-a-statement that went immediately from the book to my brain, to my laptop, to my printer, and now it’s big and bold on my office door: "Until my ONE Thing is done—everything everything else is a distraction." I’ve just read a powerful book, The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. This bestseller will certainly be on my Top-10 book list for 2016, and is already a contender for my 2016 book-of-the-year. But first—an apology. The ONE Thing waited patiently on my overflowing “books-to-read” shelves for three years. Then recently, it popped back onto The Wall Street Journal business bestsellers list. (OK. OK. I’ll read it!) But I apologize because you (and I) could have been much more productive over these last three years. So sorry—but better late than never. Gary Keller, chairman of the board and cofounder of Keller Williams Realty, Inc., the largest real estate company in the U.S., has seen his share of failures and successes—and that’s how he discovered The ONE Thing. He writes, “Where I’d had huge success, I had narrowed my concentration to one thing, and where my success varied, my focus had too.” Here’s Keller’s big idea: "What's the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?" Read his chapter titles and you’re hooked. The first section highlights six lies that mislead and derail us: • Lie #1: Everything Matters Equally • Lie #2: Multitasking • Lie #3: A Disciplined Life • Lie #4: Willpower Is Always on Will-Call • Lie #5: A Balanced Life • Lie #6: Big Is Bad The second section addresses the focusing question, the success habit (66 days), and the path to great answers. The final section motivates with unusual clarity on the four thieves of productivity: • Thief #1: Inability to Say “No” • Thief #2: Fear of Chaos • Thief #3: Poor Health Habits • Thief #4: Environment Doesn’t Support Your Goals Well…I promised you 10 tweetable quotations. (I know—somewhat ironic that I have over 20 quotations in a book review about The ONE Thing.) On a short plane ride, I winnowed hundreds of PowerPoint-worthy insights down to just 35—just before I landed. I’ve given you three already—and here are 20 more (but who’s counting?). Tweet your 10 favorite! On rabbits, to-do lists, and irrelevancy: • "If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one." (Russian proverb) • "Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list—a list that is purposefully created around extraordinary results." • "...it turns out that high multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy." On a “balanced life” and productivity: • "A 'balanced life' is a myth—a misleading concept most accept as a worthy and attainable goal without ever stopping to truly consider it." • "'Don't put all your eggs in one basket is all wrong.' I tell you ‘put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.'" (Dale Carnegie) • "Productivity isn’t about being a workhorse, keeping busy or burning the midnight oil. ... It's more about priorities, planning, and fiercely protecting your time." (Margarita Tartakovsky) On goal-setting, accountability, and coaching: • "Accountable people receive results only others dream of." • "When Arthur Guinness set up his first brewery, he signed a 9,000-year lease." • "Earlier I discussed Dr. Gail Matthew's research that individuals with written goals were 39.5 percent more likely to succeed. But there's more to the story. Individuals who wrote their goals and sent progress reports to friends were 76.7 percent more likely to achieve them." • “Ericsson’s research on expert performance confirms the same relationship between elite performance and coaching. He observed that ‘the single most important difference between these amateurs and the three groups of elite performers is that the future elite performers seek out teachers and coaches and engage in supervised training, whereas the amateurs rarely engage in similar types of practice.’” On saying no: • “Someone once told me that one ‘yes’ must be defended over time by 1,000 no’s.” • In the two years after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, “he took the company from 350 products to ten. That’s 340 no’s, not counting anything else proposed during that period.” On time-blocking and buckets to focus on The ONE Thing: • "Build a bunker. Turn off your phone, shut down your email, and exit your Internet browser. Your most important work deserves 100 percent of your attention." • "My recommendation is to block four hours a day. This isn't a typo. I repeat: four hours a day. Honestly, that’s the minimum. If you can do more, then do it." • "If your time-blocking were on trial, would your calendar contain enough evidence to convict you?" • "The people who achieve extraordinary results don't achieve them by working more hours. They achieve them by getting more done in the hours they work." • "Paul Graham's 2009 essay, 'Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule,' underscores the need for large time blocks." • "Graham divides all work into two buckets: maker (do or create) and manager (oversee or direct)." •"To experience extraordinary results, be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon. Your goal is 'ONE and done.’ But if you don't block each day to do your ONE Thing, your ONE Thing won't become a done thing." On books: "One of the reasons I've amassed a large library of books over the years is because books are a great go-to resource. Short of having a conversation with someone who has accomplished what you hope to achieve, in my experience books and published works offer the most in terms of documented research and role models for success." Warning! Keller: “After my wife, Mary, read this book, I asked her to do something. She turned to me and you know what she said? ‘Gary, that’s not my ONE Thing right now!’ We laughed, high-fived, and I got to do it myself!” Ready, set, TWEET!

I read The ONE Thing several days before going into the Grand Canyon for a 5-day solo retreat and took with me a slight variation on the question posed in the book: What is the one thing that, if accomplished, would facilitate every other goal that we have at Values Coach? On the flight to Arizona I wrote out what I thought would be my answer in a journal (it had to do with creating new teaching materials around our core course on personal values). But after living with the question for those 5 days, I came out of The Canyon with a completely different answer - and it is an answer that has gained unanimous support of the rest of the crew. What made the question so powerful was the way in which it forced me to think in terms of priorities - not "either / or" but "what one thing comes first." With that, it became clear that achieving critical mass with another product that had been one of several priorities would make everything else a whole lot easier - and with that, it becomes a whole lot easier to make the commitment to saying "not yet" to those other priorities. Another strength of the book is the persuasive argument they make for blocking off a significant chunk of time each day to work on that ONE Thing priority. As someone with RBADD (Really Bad!) I've read lots of books and articles on focus, several of which the authors quote, but this is the most compelling and practical discussion of the topic that I have seen. And since I am on the road almost every week for at least part of the week, the challenge of blocking off four hours a day for this ONE Thing means some serious rethinking of our business model and my personal life and work choices. One caution: the authors show how this question to identify the ONE Thing can be used in multiple dimensions of your life - professional, financial, family, spiritual, etc. But trying to identify ONE thing in each of those realms at once runs the risk of creating the exact lack of focus that the book is designed to help you overcome. So while it's a useful question in each of those life domains, it would be wise to choose just one to start with and prove to yourself that it works. I give the book 5 stars because it is well researched and well written and makes a unique contribution to a crowded field. If I can follow through on the simple but by no means easy prescription I have given myself as a result of reading it, I will come back a year from now and petition Amazon to allow me to upgrade my review to 10 stars.