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by
Gary Keller
Read between
September 21 - October 9, 2015
What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?
When you want the absolute best chance to succeed at anything you want, your approach should always be the same. Go small.
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.
When you go as small as possible, you’ll be staring at one thing. And that’s the point.
a single domino is capable of bringing down another domino that is actually 50 percent larger.
Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life.
Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.
The most successful companies know this and are always asking: “What’s our ONE Thing?
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
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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.
Henry David Thoreau said, “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?
success isn’t a game won by whoever does the most.
Most inboxes overflow with unimportant e-mails masquerading as priorities. Tackling these tasks in the order we receive them is behaving as if the squeaky wheel immediately deserves the grease.
Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.
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.
No matter how many to-dos you start with, you can always narrow it to one.
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. We can’t fall prey to the notion that
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“To do two things at once is to do neither.” —Publilius Syrus
high multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy.
When you try to do two things at once, you either can’t or won’t do either well.
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.
spend almost a third of their day recovering from these distractions.
It always takes some time to start a new task and restart the one you quit, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever pick up exactly where you left off. There is a price for this. “The cost in terms of extra time from having to task switch depends on how complex or simple the tasks are,” reports researcher Dr. David Meyer. “It can range from time increases of 25 percent or less for simple tasks to well over 100 percent or more for very complicated tasks.” Task switching exacts a cost few realize they’re even paying.
You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.
You can actually give attention to two things, but that is what’s called “divided attention.” And make no mistake. Take on two things and your attention gets divided. Take on a third and something gets dropped.
Researchers estimate we lose 28 percent of an average workday to multitasking ineffectiveness.
Multitaskers make more mistakes than non-multitaskers.
multitasking slows us down and makes us slower witted.
Success is actually a short race—a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.
we often say, “I just need more discipline.” Actually, we need the habit of doing it. And we need just enough discipline to build the habit.
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.
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. Self-help circles tend to preach that it takes 21 days to make a change, but modem science doesn’t back that up.
Be a person of powerful habits and use selected discipline to develop them.
willpower isn’t on will-call.
willpower is a timing issue. When you have your will, you get your way.
Willpower has a limited battery life but can be recharged with some downtime.
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.
when our willpower is low we tend to fall back on our default settings.
You make doing what matters most a priority when your willpower is its highest.
if you want to get the most out of your day, do your most important work—your ONE Thing—early, before your willpower is drawn down.
Never let what matters most be compromised simply because your brain was under-fueled. Eat right and regularly.
A balanced life is a lie.
we went from a family unit with a breadwinner and a homemaker to one with two breadwinners and no homemaker.
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.
The reason we shouldn’t pursue balance is that the magic never happens in the middle; magic happens at the extremes.
success lies at the outer edges, but we don’t know how to manage our lives while we’re out there.
