The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results

Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

1 THE ONE THING 

“Be like a postage stamp— stick to one thing until you get there.”

“What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”

• I looked back at my successes and failures and discovered an interesting pattern. Where I’d had huge success, I had narrowed my concentration to one thing, and where my success varied, my focus had too.
• When you want the absolute best chance to succeed at anything you want, your approach should always be the same. Go small.
  • “Going small” is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.

You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.

2 THE DOMINO EFFECT

• In 2001 a physicist from San Francisco’s Exploratorium reproduced Whitehead’s experiment by creating eight dominoes out of plywood, each of which was 50 percent larger than the one before. The first was a mere two inches, the last almost three feet tall.
• The 10th domino would be almost as tall as NFL quarterback Peyton Manning. By the 18th, you’re looking at a domino that would rival the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The 23rd domino would tower over the Eiffel Tower and the 31st domino would loom over Mount Everest by almost 3,000 feet. Number 57 would practically bridge the distance between the earth and the moon!

So when you think about success, shoot for the moon. The moon is reachable if you prioritize everything and put all of your energy into accomplishing the most important thing. Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life. Find the lead domino, and whack away at it until it falls.

 

Why does this approach work? Because extraordinary success is sequential, not simultaneous.

• When you see someone who has a lot of knowledge, they learned it over time. When you see someone who has a lot of skills, they developed them over time. When you see someone who has done a lot, they accomplished it over time. When you see someone who has a lot of money, they earned it over time. The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.

3 SUCCESS LEAVES CLUES

• When you get the ONE Thing, you begin to see the business world differently. If today your company doesn’t know what its ONE Thing is, then the company’s ONE Thing is to find out.
• Everyone has one person who either means the most to them or was the first to influence, train, or manage them. No one succeeds alone. No one. We each have passions and skills, but you’ll see extraordinarily successful people with one intense emotion or one learned ability that shines through, defining them or driving them more than anything else.
• Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.

1 THE LIES THEY MISLEAD AND DERAIL US 

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” —Mark Twain

THE SIX LIES BETWEEN YOU AND SUCCESS 

• Everything Matters Equally 
• Multitasking 
• A Disciplined Life 
• Willpower Is Always on Will-Call 
• A Balanced Life 
• Big Is Bad

 

4 EVERYTHING MATTERS EQUALLY 

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Equality is a lie. Understanding this is the basis of all great decisions.

• When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. We become active and busy, but this doesn’t actually move us any closer to success. Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business.
• As Henry David Thoreau said, “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?”
• Achievers operate differently. They 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.
• to-do list is simply the things you think you need to do; the first thing on your list is just the first thing you thought of. To-do lists inherently lack the intent of success. In fact, most to-do lists are actually just survival lists—getting you through your day and your life, but not making each day a stepping-stone for the next so that you sequentially build a successful life.
• Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list—a list that is purposefully created around extraordinary results.
• Pareto points us in a very clear direction: the majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do. Extraordinary results are disproportionately created by fewer actions than most realize.
• The 80/20 Principle has been one of the most important guiding success rules in my career. It describes the phenomenon which, like Juran, I’ve observed in my own life over and over again. A few ideas gave me most of my results. Some clients were far more valuable than others; a small number of people created most of my business success; and a handful of investments put the most money in my pocket.
• EXTREME PARETO Pareto proves everything I’m telling you—but there’s a catch. He doesn’t go far enough. I want you to go further. I want you to take Pareto’s Principle to an extreme. I want you to go small by identifying the 20 percent, and then I want you to go even smaller by finding the vital few of the vital few.
• Keep going. You can actually take 20 percent of the 20 percent of the 20 percent and continue until you get to the single most important thing!

No matter the task, mission, or goal. Big or small. Start with as large a list as you want, but develop the mindset that you will whittle your way from there to the critical few and not stop until you end with the essential ONE. The imperative ONE. The ONE Thing.

• The inequality of effort for results is everywhere in your life if you will simply look for it. And if you apply this principle, it will unlock the success you seek in anything that matters to you.

BIG IDEAS: Go small. Don’t focus on being busy; focus on being productive. Allow what matters most to drive your day. Go extreme. Once you’ve figured out what actually matters, keep asking what matters most until there is only one thing left. That core activity goes at the top of your success list.

• Say no. 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. Don’t get trapped in the “check off” game. If we believe things don’t matter equally, we must act accordingly.

5 MULTITASKING 

“To do two things at once is to do neither.” —Publilius Syrus

Multitasking is a lie.

It’s not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it’s that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.

6 A DISCIPLINED LIFE

• Success is actually a short race—a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.
• When you discipline yourself, you’re essentially training yourself to act in a specific way. Stay with this long enough and it becomes routine—in other words, a habit. So 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. This makes them seem “disciplined” when actually they’re not.
• You can become successful with less discipline than you think, for one simple reason: success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right. The trick to success is to choose the right habit and bring just enough discipline to establish it.
• The results suggest that it takes an average of 66 days to acquire a new habit. The full range was 18 to 254 days, but the 66 days represented a sweet spot—with easier behaviors taking fewer days on average and tough ones taking longer.
• Australian researchers Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng have even found some evidence of a halo effect around habit creation. In their studies, students who successfully acquired one positive habit reported less stress; less impulsive spending; better dietary habits; decreased alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine consumption; fewer hours watching TV; and even fewer dirty dishes. Sustain the discipline long enough on one habit, and not only does it become easier, but so do other things as well.

7 WILLPOWER IS ALWAYS ON WILL-CALL

• In the morning you start out with a full charge. As the day goes on, every time you draw on it you’re using it up. So as your green bar shrinks, so does your resolve, and when it eventually goes red, you’re done. Willpower has a limited battery life but can be recharged with some downtime. It’s a limited but renewable resource.
• The more we use our mind, the less minding power we have. Willpower is like a fast-twitch muscle that gets tired and needs rest. It’s incredibly powerful, but it has no endurance.

WHAT TAXES YOUR WILLPOWER 

• Implementing new behaviors Filtering distractions Resisting temptation Suppressing emotion Restraining aggression Suppressing impulses Taking tests Trying to impress others Coping with fear Doing something you don’t enjoy Selecting long-term over short-term rewards. 
• When it comes to willpower, timing is everything. You will need your willpower at full strength to ensure that when you’re doing the right thing, you don’t let anything distract you or steer you away from it.

BIG IDEAS 

• Don’t spread your willpower too thin. On any given day, you have a limited supply of willpower, so decide what matters and reserve your willpower for it.
• Monitor your fuel gauge. Full-strength willpower requires a full tank. Never let what matters most be compromised simply because your brain was under-fueled. Eat right and regularly. Time your task. Do what matters most first each day when your willpower is strongest. Maximum strength willpower means maximum success.

8 A BALANCED LIFE

• Nothing ever achieves absolute balance. Nothing. No matter how imperceptible it might be, what appears to be a state of balance is something entirely different— an act of balancing.
• We hear about balance so much we automatically assume it’s exactly what we should be seeking. It’s not. Purpose, meaning, significance—these are what make a successful life.
• The act of living a full life by giving time to what matters is a balancing act. Extraordinary results require focused attention and time. Time on one thing means time away from another. This makes balance impossible.
• In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets its due.
• The reason we shouldn’t pursue balance is that the magic never happens in the middle; magic happens at the extremes.
• Time waits for no one. Push something to an extreme and postponement can become permanent.
• When you gamble with your time, you may be placing a bet you can’t cover. Even if you’re sure you can win, be careful that you can live with what you lose.
• So if achieving balance is a lie, then what do you do? Counterbalance. Replace the word “balance” with “counterbalance” and what you experience makes sense. The things we presume to have balance are really just counterbalancing.
• When we say we’re out of balance, we’re usually referring to a sense that some priorities—things that matter to us—are being underserved or unmet. The problem is that when you focus on what is truly important, something will always be underserved.
• Leaving some things undone is a necessary tradeoff for extraordinary results. But you can’t leave everything undone, and that’s where counterbalancing comes in. The idea of counterbalancing is that you never go so far that you can’t find your way back or stay so long that there is nothing waiting for you when you return.
• In your professional life, go long and make peace with the idea that the pursuit of extraordinary results may require you to be out of balance for long periods. Going long allows you to focus on what matters most, even at the expense of other, lesser priorities. In your personal life, nothing gets left behind. At work it’s required.

“Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you’re keeping all of them in the air. But 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.”

9 BIG IS BAD

• None of us knows our limits. Borders and boundaries may be clear on a map, but when we apply them to our lives, the lines aren’t so apparent.
• “Let me ask you a question first: Do you know what your limits are?” “No,” was the reply. So I said that it seemed the question was irrelevant. No one knows their ultimate ceiling for achievement, so worrying about it is a waste of time.
• When you allow yourself to accept that big is about who you can become, you look at it differently.
• Thinking big is essential to extraordinary results. Success requires action, and action requires thought. But here’s the catch—the only actions that become springboards to succeeding big are those informed by big thinking to begin with.
• What you build today will either empower or restrict you tomorrow. It will either serve as a platform for the next level of your success or as a box, trapping you where you are.
• “The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man’s foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.” — Thomas Henry Huxley
• Before Sam Walton opened the first Wal-Mart, he envisioned a business so big that he felt he needed to go ahead and set up his future estate plan to minimize inheritance taxes. By thinking big, long before he made it big, he was able to save his family an estimated $11 to $13 billion in estate taxes.
• That’s when it’s important to realize that on the journey to achieving big, you get bigger. Big requires growth, and by the time you arrive, you’re big too! What seemed an insurmountable mountain from a distance is just a small hill when you arrive—at least in proportion to the person you’ve become. Your thinking, your skills, your relationships, your sense of what is possible and what it takes all grow on the journey to big. As you experience big, you become big.
• Don’t fear big. Fear mediocrity. Fear waste. Fear the lack of living to your fullest. When we fear big, we either consciously or subconsciously work against it. We either run toward lesser outcomes and opportunities or we simply run away from the big ones.
• Only living big will let you experience your true life and work potential.
• Don’t fear failure. It’s as much a part of your journey to extraordinary results as success. Adopt a growth mindset, and don’t be afraid of where it can take you. Extraordinary results aren’t built solely on extraordinary results. They’re built on failure too. In fact, it would be accurate to say that we fail our way to success. When we fail, we stop, ask what we need to do to succeed, learn from our mistakes, and grow. Don’t be afraid to fail. See it as part of your learning process and keep striving for your true potential.

2 THE TRUTH THE SIMPLE PATH TO PRODUCTIVITY

 “Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.” —Erich Heller

• Here’s what I found out: We overthink, overplan, and overanalyze our careers, our businesses, and our lives; that long hours are neither virtuous nor healthy; and that we usually succeed in spite of most of what we do, not because of it. I discovered that we can’t manage time, and that the key to success isn’t in all the things we do but in the handful of things we do well.

I learned that success comes down to this: being appropriate in the moments of your life. If you can honestly say, “This is where I’m meant to be right now, doing exactly what I’m doing,” then all the amazing possibilities for your life become possible.

10 THE FOCUSING QUESTION

• LIFE IS A QUESTION You may be asking, “Why focus on a question when what we really crave is an answer?” It’s simple. Answers come from questions, and the quality of any answer is directly determined by the quality of the question. Ask the wrong question, get the wrong answer. Ask the right question, get the right answer. Ask the most powerful question possible, and the answer can be life altering.
• Great questions are clearly the quickest path to great answers. Every discoverer and inventor begins his quest with a transformative question. The scientific method asks questions of the universe in hypothesis form.
• Research shows that asking questions improves learning and performance by as much as 150 percent. In the end, it’s hard to argue with author Nancy Willard, who wrote, “Sometimes questions are more important than answers.”
• any wage I had asked of Life, Life would have willingly paid.” One of the most empowering moments of my life came when I realized that life is a question and how we live it is our answer. How we phrase the questions we ask ourselves determines the answers that eventually become our life.
• To get the answers we seek, we have to invent the right questions—and we’re left to devise our own. So how do you do this? How do you come up with uncommon questions that take you to uncommon answers?
• You ask one question: the Focusing Question. Anyone who dreams of an uncommon life eventually discovers there is no choice but to seek an uncommon approach to living it.

The Focusing Question collapses all possible questions into one: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do / such that by doing it / everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

PART ONE: “WHAT’S THE ONE THING I CAN DO… 

• This sparks focused action. “What’s the ONE Thing” tells you the answer will be one thing versus many. It forces you toward something specific.
• The last phrase, “can do,” is an embedded command directing you to take action that is possible. People often want to change this to “should do,” “could do,” or “would do,” but those choices all miss the point. There are many things we should, could, or would do but never do. Action you “can do” beats intention every time.

PART TWO: “…SUCH THAT BY DOING IT... 

• “But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas all ran away and hid from one little Did.” —Shel Silverstein This tells you there’s a criterion your answer must meet. It’s the bridge between just doing something and doing something for a specific purpose. “Such that by doing it” lets you know you’re going to have to dig deep, because when you do this ONE Thing, something else is going to happen.

PART THREE: “… EVERYTHING ELSE WILL BE EASIER OR UNNECESSARY?” 

• Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and I could move the world,” and that’s exactly what this last part tells you to find. “Everything else will be easier or unnecessary” is the ultimate leverage test. It tells you when you’ve found the first domino.
• Most people struggle to comprehend how many things don’t need to be done, if they would just start by doing the right thing.

11 THE SUCCESS HABIT

• For example: “For my job, what’s the ONE Thing I can do to ensure I hit my goals this week such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
• Use it. Ask yourself the Focusing Question. Start each day by asking, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do today for [whatever you want] such that by doing it everything else will be easier or even unnecessary?”
• Make it a habit. When you make asking the Focusing Question a habit, you fully engage its power to get the extraordinary results you want. It’s a difference maker.
• Leverage reminders. Set up ways to remind yourself to use the Focusing Question. One of the best ways to do this is to put up a sign at work that says, “Until my ONE Thing is done—everything else is a distraction.”

12 THE PATH TO GREAT ANSWERS

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” —F. M. Alexander

simple process: You ask a great question, then you seek out a great answer. As simple as two steps, it’s the ultimate Success Habit.

• • Great questions, like great goals, are big and specific. They push you, stretch you, and aim you at big, specific answers. And because they’re framed to be measurable, there’s no wiggle room about what the results will look like.
  • The challenge of asking a Great Question is that, once you’ve asked it, you’re now faced with finding a Great Answer. Answers come in three categories: doable, stretch, and possibility.
  • Highly successful people choose to live at the outer limits of achievement. They not only dream of but deeply crave what is beyond their natural grasp.
  • “Gary, you’re smart, but people have lived before you. You’re not the first person to dream big, so you’d be wise to study what others have learned first, and then build your actions on the back of their lessons.”

• A new answer usually requires new behavior,

• The best goal explores what’s possible.

3 EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS UNLOCKING THE POSSIBILITIES WITHIN YOU

EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS 

• There is a natural rhythm to our lives that becomes a simple formula for implementing the ONE Thing and achieving extraordinary results: purpose, priority, and productivity.
• Your big ONE Thing is your purpose and your small ONE Thing is the priority you take action on to achieve it. The most productive people start with purpose and use it like a compass. They allow purpose to be the guiding force in determining the priority that drives their actions. This is the straightest path to extraordinary results.
• Great businesses are built one productive person at a time.

13 LIVE WITH PURPOSE

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” —George Bernard Shaw

• Our purpose sets our priority and our priority determines the productivity our actions produce.
• Who we are and where we want to go determine what we do and what we accomplish.
• “You are victorious, but before you go, fulfill my curiosity. What is the secret of this begging bowl?” The beggar humbly replied, “There is no secret. It is simply made up of human desire.”
• Happiness happens on the way to fulfillment.
• Dr. Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association, believes there are five factors that contribute to our happiness: positive emotion and pleasure, achievement, relationships, engagement, and meaning.
• Of these, he believes engagement and meaning are the most important.
  • Becoming more engaged in what we do by finding ways to make our life more meaningful is the surest way to finding lasting happiness. When our daily actions fulfill a bigger purpose, the most powerful and enduring happiness can happen.

• I believe that financially wealthy people are those who have enough money coming in without having to work to finance their purpose in life.
• The prescription for extraordinary results is knowing what matters to you and taking daily doses of actions in alignment with it. When you have a definite purpose for your life,* clarity comes faster, which leads to more conviction in your direction, which usually leads to faster decisions. When you make faster decisions, you’ll often be the one who makes the first decisions and winds up with the best choices. And when you have the best choices, you have the opportunity for the best experiences. This is how knowing where you’re going helps lead you to the best possible outcomes and experiences life has to offer.

Discover your Big Why. 

• Discover your purpose by asking yourself what drives you. What’s the thing that gets you up in the morning and keeps you going when you’re tired and worn down? I sometimes refer to this as your “Big Why.” It’s why you’re excited with your life. It’s why you’re doing what you’re doing.
• Absent an answer, pick a direction. “Purpose” may sound heavy but it doesn’t have to be. Think of it as simply the ONE Thing you want your life to be about more than any other. Try writing down something you’d like to accomplish and then describe how you’d do it.
• Pick a direction, start marching down that path, and see how you like it. Time brings clarity and if you find you don’t like it, you can always change your mind. It’s your life. (The place I found most people get stuck. They sit around waiting for an answer to hit them in the face instead of taking action) 

14 LIVE BY PRIORITY

 “Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” —Alan Lakein

• Live with purpose and you know where you want to go. Live by priority and you’ll know what to do to get there.
• Purpose has the power to shape our lives only in direct proportion to the power of the priority we connect it to. Purpose without priority is powerless.
• To be precise, the word is priority—not priorities—and it originated in the 14th century from the Latin prior, meaning “first.” If something mattered the most it was a “priority.”
• The truth about success is that our ability to achieve extraordinary results in the future lies in stringing together powerful moments, one after the other. What you do in any given moment determines what you experience in the next.
• Your “present now” and all “future nows” are undeniably determined by the priority you live in the moment. The deciding factor in determining how you set that priority is who wins the battle between your present and future selves.
• hyperbolic discounting—the further away a reward is in the future, the smaller the immediate motivation to achieve it. 
• you’re training your mind how to think, how to connect one goal with the next over time until you know the most important thing you must do right NOW. You’re learning how to think big—but go small.
• It’s particularly effective when they ask me what they should do. I turn it around and say, “Before I answer your question, let me ask you something: Where are you going, and where do you want to be someday?”
• In 2008, Dr. Gail Matthews of the Dominican University of California, recruited 267 participants from a wide range of professions (lawyers, accountants, nonprofit employees, marketers, etc.) and a variety of countries. Those who wrote down their goals were 39.5 percent more likely to accomplish them. Writing down your goals and your most important priority is your final step to living by priority.
• Goal Set to the Now. Knowing your future goal is how you begin. Identifying the steps you need to accomplish along the way keeps your thinking clear while you uncover the right priority you need to accomplish right now

15 LIVE FOR PRODUCTIVITY 

“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

• putting together a life of extraordinary results simply comes down to getting the most out of what you do, when what you do matters.
• Productive people get more done, achieve better results, and earn far more in their hours than the rest. They do so because they devote maximum time to being productive on their top priority, their ONE Thing. They time block their ONE Thing and then protect their time blocks with a vengeance.
• I’ve discovered that, no matter how hard I try, I can’t use more time as my main means of doing more. It’s just not physically possible for me. So, given my constraints, I’ve had to find a way to be highly productive in the hours I can put in.
• So, go to your calendar and block off all the time you need to accomplish your ONE Thing. If it’s a onetime ONE Thing, block off the appropriate hours and days. If it’s a regular thing, block off the appropriate time every day so it becomes a habit. Everything else—other projects, paperwork, e-mail, calls, correspondence, meetings, and all the other stuff— must wait.
• If disproportionate results come from one activity, then you must give that one activity disproportionate time.
• “Today, what’s the ONE Thing I can do for my ONE Thing such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” When you find the answer, you’ll be doing the most leveraged activity for your most leveraged work. This is how results become extraordinary.
• After you’ve time blocked your time off, time block your ONE Thing. Yes, you read that right. Your most important work comes second. Why? Because you can’t happily sustain success in your professional life if you neglect your personal “re-creation” time. Time block your time off, and then make time for your ONE Thing.
• To experience extraordinary results, be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon.
• Block an hour each week to review your annual and monthly goals.
• Walter Elliot said, “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.”
• The most effective thing I did was to put up a sheet of paper that said, “Until My ONE Thing Is Done—Everything Else Is A Distraction!”
• So when stuff pops into your head, just write it down on a task list and get back to what you’re supposed to be doing. In other words, do a brain dump. Then put it out of sight and out of mind until its time comes.

16 THE THREE COMMITMENTS 

“Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.” —George Halas

• First, you must adopt the mindset of someone seeking mastery. Mastery is a commitment to becoming your best, so to achieve extraordinary results you must embrace the extraordinary effort it represents.
• Second, you must continually seek the very best ways of doing things. Nothing is more futile than doing your best using an approach that can’t deliver results equal to your effort.
• And last, you must be willing to be held accountable to doing everything you can to achieve your ONE Thing.
• When you can see mastery as a path you go down instead of a destination you arrive at, it starts to feel accessible and attainable.
• I believe the healthy view of mastery means giving the best you have to become the best you can be at your most important work. The path is one of an apprentice learning and relearning the basics on a never-ending journey of greater experience and expertise.
• we become masters of what is behind us and apprentices for what is ahead. This is why mastery is a journey.
• Knowledge begets knowledge and skills build on skills.
• According to legend, as Kano approached death, he called his students around him and asked to be buried in his white belt. The symbolism wasn’t lost. The highest-ranking martial artist of his discipline embraced the emblem of the beginner for his life and beyond, because to him the journey of the successful lifelong learner was never over.
• Many realize that although they are giving their best effort, they aren’t doing the best that could be done, because they aren’t willing to change what they are doing. The path of mastering something is the combination of not only doing the best you can do at it, but also doing it the best it can be done. Continually improving how you do something is critical to getting the most from time blocking.
• It’s called moving from “E” to “P.” When we roll out of bed in the morning and start tackling the day, we do so in one of two ways: Entrepreneurial (“E”) or Purposeful (“P”).
• But when you’re going about your ONE Thing, any ceiling of achievement must be challenged, and this requires a different approach— a Purposeful approach.
• Highly productive people don’t accept the limitations of their natural approach as the final word on their success. When they hit a ceiling of achievement, they look for new models and systems, better ways to do things to push them through. They pause just long enough to examine their options, they pick the best one, and then they’re right back at it.
• You can’t put limits on what you’ll do. You have to be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things if you want breakthroughs in your life.
• The Purposeful person follows the simple rule that “a different result requires doing something different.” Make this your mantra and breakthroughs become possible.

3. LIVE THE ACCOUNTABILITY CYCLE 

• There is an undeniable connection between what you do and what you get. Actions determine outcomes, and outcomes inform actions. Be accountable and this feedback loop is how you discover the things you must do to achieve extraordinary results.
• Taking complete ownership of your outcomes by holding no one but yourself responsible for them is the most powerful thing you can do to drive your success.
• Accountable people absorb setbacks and keep going. Accountable people persevere through problems and keep pushing forward. Accountable people are results oriented and never defend actions, skill levels, models, systems, or relationships that just aren’t getting the job done. They bring their best to whatever it takes, without reservation.
• When life happens, you can be either the author of your life or the victim of it. Those are your only two choices— accountable or unaccountable.
• The accountable manager immediately tunes in: What’s happening here? She investigates exactly what she’s up against.
• The accountable manager looks for solutions. More important, she assumes she’s a part of the solution: What can I do? The moment she finds the right tactic, she acts. Circumstances won’t change by themselves, she thinks, so let’s get on with it!
• Highly successful people are clear about their role in the events of their life. They don’t fear reality. They seek it, acknowledge it, and own it.
• One of the fastest ways to bring accountability to your life is to find an accountability partner. Accountability can come from a mentor, a peer or, in its highest form, a coach.
• 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.”
• BIG IDEAS Commit to be your best. Extraordinary results happen only when you give the best you have to become the best you can be at your most important work. This is, in essence, the path to mastery—and because mastery takes time, it takes a commitment to achieve it.
• Be purposeful about your ONE Thing. Move from “E” to “P.” Go on a quest for the models and systems that can take you the farthest. Don’t just settle for what comes naturally—be open to new thinking, new skills, and new relationships.

17 THE FOUR THIEVES 

“Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.” —John Carmack

THE FOUR THIEVES OF PRODUCTIVITY

 Inability to Say “No” Fear of Chaos Poor Health Habits Environment Doesn’t Support Your Goals

• Here’s the thing. When you say yes to something, it’s imperative that you understand what you’re saying no to.
• “One-half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.”
• Messes are inevitable when you focus on just one thing.
• Focusing on ONE Thing has a guaranteed consequence: other things don’t get done.
• When you strive for greatness, chaos is guaranteed to show up. In fact, other areas of your life may experience chaos in direct proportion to the time you put in on your ONE Thing.
• Depending on your situation, your time block might initially look different from others’. Each of our situations is unique. Depending on where you are in your life, you may not be able to immediately block off every morning to be by yourself.
• mom used to say, “When you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them,”
• “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” — William James
• High achievement and extraordinary results require big energy. The trick is learning how to get it and keep it.
• A. Christakis and University of California, San Diego associate professor James H. Fowler wrote the book on how our social networks unmistakably impact our well-being. Their book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, connects the dots between our relationships and drug use, sleeplessness, smoking, drinking, eating, and even happiness. For instance, their 2007 study on obesity revealed that if one of your close friends becomes obese, you’re 57 percent more likely to do the same. Why? The people we see tend to set our standard for what’s appropriate.
• No one succeeds alone and no one fails alone. Pay attention to the people around you. Seek out those who will support your goals, and show the door to anyone who won’t. The individuals in your life will influence you and impact you—probably more than you give them credit for.
• Screenwriter Leo Rosten pulled everything together for us when he said, “I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.”

18 THE JOURNEY 

“To get through the hardest journey we need take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping.”

• Think small and your life’s likely to stay small. Think big and your life has a chance to grow big. The choice is yours.
• Actions build on action. Habits build on habit. Success builds on success. The right domino knocks down another and another and another. So whenever you want extraordinary results, look for the levered action that will start a domino run for you.
• “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” — T. S. Eliot
• “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” —Mark Twain
• Go live a life worth living where, in the end, you’ll be able to say, “I’m glad I did,” not “I wish I had.”
• A life worth living might be measured in many ways, but the one way that stands above all others is living a life of no regrets.
• For me, very few books cause tears, much less require a handkerchief, but Bronnie Ware’s 2012 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying did both.
  • Bronnie found that common themes surfaced again and again. The five most common were these: I wish that I’d let myself be happier—too late they realized happiness is a choice; I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends—too often they failed to give them the time and effort they deserved; I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings—too frequently shut mouths and shuttered feelings weighed too heavy to handle; I wish I hadn’t worked so hard—too much time spent making a living over building a life caused too much remorse.
  • The most common regret was this: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  • Half-filled dreams and unfulfilled hopes: this was the number-one regret expressed by the dying. As Ware put it, “Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.”
  • “When people look back on their lives, it is the things they have not done that generate the greatest regret…. People’s actions may be troublesome initially; it is their inactions that plague them most with long-term feelings of regret.”

YOUR PERSONAL LIFE 

• Let the ONE Thing bring clarity to the key areas of your life. Here’s a short sampling. What’s the ONE Thing I can do this week to discover or affirm my life’s purpose… ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do in 90 days to get in the physical shape I want… ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do today to strengthen my spiritual faith… ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to find time to practice the guitar 20 minutes a day… ? Knock five strokes off my golf game in 90 days… ? Learn to paint in six months… ?
• YOUR FAMILY Use the ONE Thing with your family for fun and rewarding experiences. Here are some options. What’s the ONE Thing we can do this week to improve our marriage… ? What’s the ONE Thing we can do every week to spend more quality family time together… ? What’s the ONE Thing we can do tonight to support our kid’s schoolwork… ? What’s the ONE Thing we can do to make our next vacation the best ever… ? Our next Christmas the best ever… ? Thanksgiving the best ever… ?
• YOUR JOB Put the ONE Thing to work taking your professional life to the next level. Here’s a few ways to get started. What’s the ONE Thing I can do today to complete my current project ahead of schedule… ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do this month to produce better work… ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do before my next review to get the raise I want… ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do everyday to finish my work and still get home on time… ?