Recently I had the opportunity to hear one of my favorite authors, Jay Papasan, speak. I first heard of Jay about a year ago, when I chose the book he co-authored, “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Amazing Results”, as part of my self-created summer of learning series. Out of the ten professional books I read last summer, it was my favorite. It was brilliant in its simplicity and prescriptive in recommended action. This is a long blog, but so much wisdom in this book.
One of the best parts of my job is having the opportunity to meet people I admire. I was able to introduce Jay to a group of women that are part of a book club I started at work, and since then, my team has brought him back to speak to our leadership team and our broader team. Each time, I leave inspired and energized.
The subtitle of the book is “The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results.” And the premise of the book is so simple: There is ONE thing that sits at the heart of success and is the starting point for achieving extraordinary results. Finding the ONE thing, and focusing on it, is the key to success and can be found by asking a simple question: “What’s the ONE thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?” The question can be applied to all facets of life – personal growth, work, relationships, spiritual, financial and more.
Focus is the over-arching thematic of the book. Importantly, the key to success isn’t in all the things we do, but in the handful of things we do well. The book encourages you to do what matters most, every day. The first step is knowing – with crystal clear clarity – what matters most. And when you know what matters most, everything else makes sense, including how you spend your time. I love the push to live a life of no regrets, which requires knowing your purpose and prioritizing accordingly.
I found this particularly compelling because it is so easy to pinball through the day. As the book describes, 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”. I often fall guilty of “cognitive tunneling”, where you become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of your eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks like cleaning out your inbox. Checking items off your to-do list misleads you to a feeling of success and accomplishment, when you may not be moving the most important ball forward – at all.
I highlighted nearly this entire book (seriously) but here are some of my favorite guideposts:
Know Your Purpose
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw
The centerpiece of the book is focused on knowing your purpose. That is your One Thing. Because the most productive people start with purpose and use it like a compass to guide them in determining their priorities, which drive their actions. It sounds so simple. But how many of us don’t know our purpose? Or might know, but not for sure? Or do know, but are waiting for the right time or circumstances? This matters so much because as the book describes, “A life lived on purpose is the most powerful of all – and the happiest. Purpose is the straightest path to power & the ultimate source of personal strength. The prescription for extraordinary results is knowing what matters to you and taking daily doses of actions in alignment with it.”
It makes logical sense that we only have 24 hours in a day, and without a clear path toward purpose we can just get lost in the weeds. We all should know the answer to our Big Why. Which is simply “What’s the ONE thing I can do in my life that would mean the most to me and the world?”
What will get me up in the morning and keep me going? What gets me excited about life?
But its not enough to just know your purpose. And, candidly, I’m still working on this part. But once we know it, purpose has the power to shape our lives only in direct proportion to the power of priority we connect it to. So we must know our purpose. Set a future goal and methodically work back to what you can be doing right now to work toward it. As the book wisely suggests, “Connect today to all your tomorrows.” And then seek mastery, which requires a purposeful approach and a mindset of the forever apprentice. You author your own destiny and take ownership of your outcomes.
The Importance of Focus
“It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” Henry David Thoreau
Knowing your top priority (your ONE thing) – which is of course, connected to your purpose, and building your day, week, life around it is the key. The book recommends creating a success list, not a to-do list. The success list is purposefully created around extraordinary results that shoot you in a specific direction vs. a long list featuring the randomness of life.
Setting yourself up for success is critical – doing your most important work early in the day, creating bunkers of space to protect you from distractions, and holding yourself accountable are key. And we must say no – so hard! – to anything that pulls away our focus from our top priority. Time blocking is another tool that I’ve started doing. This is where you block calendar blocks to harness your energy and center it on your most important work or priority. As the book says, “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.”
It also works for personal goals. For years I’ve struggled to consistently prioritize work-outs. They would often get trumped for family or work commitments. But this fall, I’m running a marathon and needed to consistently follow a training plan to ensure I’m prepared and protect against injury. These tools have really worked. My One Thing this summer has been marathon training. It has worked for me because of its simplicity. It feels totally unnatural to put marathon training at the top of my priority list. But here’s what I figured out. I know I will take care of my family. I know I will not drop important balls at work. But I often will short-change myself. So my One Thing that takes priority each day – for now – is whatever needs to be done for marathon training – it could be a morning run, it could be leaving work a bit early for a PT appointment, but my One Thing is getting done. It has totally worked.
Don’t Fear Big. Fear Mediocrity. Fear Waste.
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” TS Eliot
Success means so many different things to different people, but ultimately success means knowing at the depths of your soul, “This is where I’m meant to be right now, doing exactly what I’m doing.” And when we think about success, we must shoot for the moon. The moon is reachable if you prioritize everything and put all of your energy into accomplishing the most important thing. This idea hit me between the eyes – “Don’t fear big. Fear mediocrity. Fear waste. Fear the lack of living to your fullest. Only living big will let you experience your true life and work potential. Thing big, aim high, act bold.”
So, so powerful.
Am I taking enough risks to shoot for the moon? I love the reminder to not run from big, but run toward it. Because the biggest failure in life is not failure in the traditional sense, but settling. Settling for mediocrity. Wasting potential. Big is good. And we are all worthy of big.
Multitasking is Impossible
“To do two things at once is to do neither.” Publilius Syrus
This one I am so guilty of. At work, my days are often filled with meetings and my inbox overflows with emails. Texts come pouring in through-out the day and then at home, I want to be present and focused with those I love the most. Yet, life has to be planned and managed too. Somehow, to get it all done it is so easy to try to do multiple things at once. Send mail in meetings. Do conference calls while driving. Write while having a conversation. Check my phone while present with my family. Guilty, guilty, guilty. And as the book describes, when you try to do two things at once, you either can’t or won’t do either well.
I love this message “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.” Profound! At work this takes a toll. Workers (not just me!) change windows or check mail 37 times an hour. They are interrupted every 11 minutes and spend almost 1/3 of their day recovering from distractions, because the costs of task switching are real. It is hard to re-gain focus when interrupted. This is why most experts suggest doing your most important work first thing, ideally while your brain is fresh and before you have the opportunity to get interrupted. You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus EFFECTIVELY on two things at once.
And at home, it’s even more depressing. Don’t we want our kids to remember us as totally present? Focused. Attentive. I do. So less multi-tasking. More singular focusing.
Prioritize, Don’t Balance
“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” FM Alexander
I love the honesty of the book. It calls our lofty goals for balance a big fat lie. Because the problem with balance is that it requires you to “live in the middle.” When you live in the middle, nothing extraordinary happens – anywhere. If we try to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged.
Instead, a successful life is often defined by living out your purpose, your meaning, and making a significant impact – either personally, professionally or both. Because “Magic never happens in the middle. Magic happens at the extremes.”
If we want to really see extraordinary, it will require an extraordinary commitment. This likely requires you to get out of balance. For me, at times the priority has been a special life moment – graduation, birthday, summer vacation memory. At other times, it’s been a major product launch or event that tipped the scales at work. I trust that I’m prioritizing and making the right trade-offs – but I agree balance is impossible and I’ll keep seeking the magical moments.
And when we prioritize, we are disciplined. Discipline helps us build habits that lead to extraordinary results. This takes patience and diligence (it takes an average of 66 days to acquire a new habit) and often habits are best built one at a time. But over time, they require less energy and effort to maintain. Which is a really good thing because we all have finite willpower. I love good brain trivia and a fascinating fact in the book notes that the brain makes up 1/50th of our body mass but consumes 1/5th of the calories we burn for energy. Willpower can be powerful, but you must choose to harness it when it matters most.
So much goodness in this book. And Jay is an incredible human being and inspirational author. Even writing this blog I’m energized with its brilliance and reminded of the important lessons within. Because time really is finite.
And in the wise words of Mark Twain, “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.”
Here’s to knowing your One Thing. Or dreaming it. Or discovering it. And then making it happen.
The Redefining 