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by
Gary Keller
Read between
September 21 - October 9, 2015
Do you really think you can ever get back a child’s bedtime story or birthday?
When you gamble with your time, you may be placing a bet you can’t cover.
In the world of professional success, it’s not about how much overtime you put in; the key ingredient is focused time over time.
To achieve an extraordinary result you must choose what matters most and give it all the time it demands. This requires getting extremely out of balance in relation to all other work issues, with only infrequent counterbalancing to address them.
The question of balance is really a question of priority. When you change your language from balancing to prioritizing, you see your choices more clearly and open the door to changing your destiny.
Start leading a counterbalanced life. Let the right things take precedence when they should and get to the rest when you can.
the only actions that become springboards to succeeding big are those informed by big thinking to begin with.
Think big. Avoid incremental thinking that simply asks, “What do I do next?
Don’t order from the menu.
As the ad reminds us, “People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the only ones who do.
Think big, aim high, act bold.
the key to success isn’t in all the things we do but in the handful of things we do well.
success comes down to this: being appropriate in the moments of your life.
Mark Twain agreed with Carnegie and described it this way: The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks and then starting on the first one.
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.
Voltaire once wrote, “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
How we phrase the questions we ask ourselves determines the answers that eventually become our life.
The Focusing Question always aims you at the absolute best of both by forcing you to do what is essential to success—make a decision. But not just any decision—it drives you to make the best decision. It ignores what is doable and drills down to what is necessary, to what matters.
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...
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
PART THREE: “... EVERYTHING ELSE WILL BE EASIER OR UNNECESSARY?
“Everything else will be easier or unnecessary” is the ultimate leverage test. It tells you when you’ve found the first domino.
Whether you seek answers big or small, asking the Focusing Question is the ultimate success habit for your life.
“Until my ONE Thing is done—everything else is a distraction.
The research and experience of others is the best place to start when looking for your answer.
A new answer usually requires new behavior
The best question—and by default, the best goal—is big and specific: big, because you’re after extraordinary results; specific, to give you something to aim at and to leave no wiggle room about whether you hit the mark.
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.
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.
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.
Becoming more engaged in what we do by finding ways to make our life more meaningful is the surest way...
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When our daily actions fulfill a bigger purpose, the most powerful and enduri...
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The prescription for extraordinary results is knowing what matters to you and taking daily doses of actions in alignment with it.
Knowing why you’re doing something provides the inspiration and motivation to give the extra perspiration needed to persevere when things go south.
Purpose provides the ultimate glue that can help you stick to the path you’ve set.
The surest path to achieving lasting happiness happens when you make your life about something bigger, when you bring meaning and purpose to your everyday actions.
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.
Right NOW is all we have to work with. Our past is but a former now, our future a potential one. To drive this point home, I started referring to the way to create a powerful priority as “Goal Setting to the Now” to emphasize why we were creating a priority in the first place.
What you do in any given moment determines what you experience in the next.
hyperbolic discounting—the further away a reward is in the future, the smaller the immediate motivation to achieve it.
your ONE Thing “right now” is nested inside your ONE Thing today which is nested inside your ONE Thing this week, which is nested inside your ONE Thing this month...
To understand how Goal Setting to the Now will guide your thinking and
Check out figure 24 for an important flowchart (previous page)
