The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results

by Gary Keller

“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.

The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.

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.

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.

Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list—a list that is purposefully created around extraordinary results.

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.

The trick to success is to choose the right habit and bring just enough discipline to establish it.

You make doing what matters most a priority when your willpower is its highest.

do your most important work—your ONE Thing—early, before your willpower is drawn down.

magic happens at the extremes.

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,

What you build today will either empower or restrict you tomorrow.

The research and experience of others is the best place to start when looking for your answer.

It’s not all you’ll do, but it becomes the hilltop where you’ll stand to see if you can spot what might come next. This is called trending, and it’s the second step.

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.

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.

students who visualized the process performed better across the board—they

Productive action transforms lives.

the most successful people are the most productive people.

If disproportionate results come from one activity, then you must give that one activity disproportionate time.

Resting is as important as working.

block four hours a day.

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.

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.

Accountable people achieve results others only dream of.

When life happens, you can be either the author of your life or the victim of it.

Highly successful people are clear about their role in the events of their life.

When you say yes to something, it’s imperative that you understand what you’re saying no to.

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

“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.”