The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results Hardcover – April 1, 2013

The ONE Thing is a transformative book. I’m a multi-hyphenate Creative living with ADHD, so do a lot of things, but I don’t make a living from any of those things. I have never once in my life had writer’s block… I get the opposite of writer’s block… too many irons in the fire, too many projects going simultaneously, never having an idea what ideas or projects are worth my time, at which are just half baked ideas which will never be more than half baked ideas. But, like the old KFC commercials used to say, “We do ONE THING… we do chicken right.”Gary’s Focusing Question is the Key.Buy this book.

Great book. I read it as part of 75 hard. Super motivational. I’m using the time blocking idea. I love how he keeps stacking one thing on top of one thing on top of one thing. There are multiple one things going on at the same time. Prioritizing your health and your family while you are doing. Your one thing is another one thing. One of my favorite sentences in the book is when you say yes to one thing you’re saying no to everything else. So true.

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 -+--- SeriousInsights High -+--- LowPractical High ---+- Low*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy, and is the author of the recently released ‘Executive Update.

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 BadThe 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 GoalsWell…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!