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by
Gary Keller
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April 11, 2017 - March 19, 2022
Over time, myths and mistruths get thrown around so often they eventually feel familiar and start to sound like the truth. Then we start basing important decisions on them.
Analogies and axioms are not data nor evidence.
They appeal based on feelings. Feeling truthful is not the same as being the truth.
Not everything matters equally, and success isn’t a game won by whoever does the most.
In the 19th century, Pareto had written a mathematical model for income distribution in Italy that stated that 80 percent of the land was owned by 20 percent of the people. Wealth was not evenly distributed. In fact, according to Pareto, it was actually concentrated in a highly predictable way.
The Pareto Principle
Pareto points us in a very clear direction: the majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do.
“To do two things at once is to do neither.” —Publilius Syrus
To quote Nass, “Multitaskers were just lousy at everything.”
Multitasking is a lie.
for even computers can process only one piece of code at a time. When they “multitask,” they switch back and forth, alternating their attention until both tasks are done.
Computers CAN multitask but it is called multithreading. Even this is still a bad analogy if a human could do it. A human can walk and talk at the same time, but only focus on one. A computer that is multithreading is really not "paying attention" to any one of the threads, but just executing code (not paying attention).
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.
A Buddhist would call this monkey mind.” We think we’re mastering multitasking, but we’re just driving ourselves bananas.
Task switching exacts a cost few realize they’re even paying.
The fact of the matter is that aiming discipline at the right habit gives you license to be less disciplined in other areas. When you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything.
Willpower
What the hell. The Stanford experiment on Willpower showed some people do have it on will call. The study does not support anything else. The author did a poor job tying the study to their ideas here.
The more we use our mind, the less minding power we have.
Eh. Maybe Willpower is like muscles. Perhaps It takes pushing and barrier breaking in order to strengthen willpower.
If your brain were a car, in terms of gas mileage, it’d be a Hummer.
This analogy is pointless.
The “last in, first out” theory is very much at work inside our head.
What follows is not what "last in, first out" means. What the hell is going on with analogies in this book?
The studies concluded that willpower is a mental muscle that doesn’t bounce back quickly.
This is NOT the conclusion of the study. The study only concludes that brain function requires calories. It did not speak to recovery rate of willpower after utilization.
which gives new credence to the old saw, “food for thought.”
Corny. Not useful.
The default decision for a parole judge is no.
This is NOT the result of the study. This study proved the judges favored negative outcomes when hungry. It does not say or prove that rejecting parole was the default state.
Good decisions depend on more than just wisdom and common sense.
The study did not quantify "good" vs "bad" decisions. Clearly some of the parole requests should be denied. The study showed that hungry judges favored rejection of parole. That is not necessarily right or wrong, but merely a trend. The leaps to conclusions this author makes is gobsmacking.
do your most important work—your ONE Thing—early, before your willpower is drawn down.
I agree with this idea but the author has done nothing in this chapter to support the idea cogently.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the ramp-up of technology parallels the rise in the belief that something is missing in our lives.
So we gonna just make grandiose assertions with no supporting material? Pure sophistry.
The number of times “work-life balance” is mentioned in newspaper and magazine articles has exploded in recent years.
So. What. Why is this chart here? What point does it support?
In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets its due.
Not necessarily. Some items dont need full attention. More baseless assertion.
Pursuing the extremes presents its own set of problems.
Pointless chart
Time waits for no one. Push something to an extreme and postponement can become permanent.
Really? That's all the effort the author is going to put in so that the vignette can be tied to the point of the chapter? Bad.
When you gamble with your time, you may be placing a bet you can’t cover.
Corny. Such a flippant way to present this idea.
time. To achieve an extraordinary result you must choose what matters most and give it all the time it demands.
Yes. Definitely. But the author has done nothing to support the point.
Big is bad is a lie.
Few think this way in such broad stroke way. I feel the beginnings of a strawman argument being created here.
He created Hotmail. Microsoft, a witness to Hotmail’s meteoric rise, eventually bought it for $400 million.
As of 2011, Hotmail ranked as one of the most successful webmail service providers in the world, with more than 360 million active users.
How does "thinking big" manifest itself in action such that one could possibly experience success like this? Just "think big", whatever that means to you? Seems flimsy.
Transferring the wealth of one of the greatest companies ever built as tax-free as possible requires thinking big from the beginning.
That's not thinking big. That's called planning. /sigh
To live great, you have to think big.
One of the most vacuous, meaningless sentences you'll find.
Most of all, I learned that the ONE Thing is the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results.
The personal anecdotal evidence is not compelling.
Voltaire once wrote, “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”
Voltaire's quote here doesn't really align with the [bs] idea the author is pushing in the previous sentence.
The more than 2,000-year-old Socratic Method, teaching through questions,
Just going to reference the Socratic Method and then not go into any real depth with it or how it relates to a point? Awful
Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and I could move the world,”
Wow. What does this quote have to do with any of this?
If we do, then the Focusing Question is the most powerful success habit we can have.
What? Why would it be the most powerful? Next to no support for this proposition.
Over time, you’ll develop your own sense of when to use the big-picture question and when to use the small-focus question.
Then why read this book? Why is the focus question necessary at all?
I view these as the cornerstones of my life and have found that when I’m doing what’s most important in each area, my life feels like it’s running on all cylinders.
Well, geez, if I haven't taken your personal story as evidence yet, maybe this would finally convince me.
?
Seems like all the preceding questions about the ONE thing, should just be ONE thing rather than a litany of questions.
If you don’t understand and believe, you won’t take action.
If it's in my own demented brain, why wouldn't I [think I] understand and believe?
A college professor once told me,
Seriously? This is an impressive enough reference to include it here with no other supporting data or explanation?
With typically only 1/9 of an iceberg above water,
50% thru the book... I wonder if this book as missed any analogies or euphamisms.
Live for productivity.
This is NOT what A Christmas Carol espouses. At all.
To Dickens, our purpose determines who we are.
Where does the author get this interpretation? This is not Dickensian at all.
A life lived on purpose is the most powerful of all—and the happiest.
A twisted and errant interpretation of the meaning of A Christmas Carol
psychologists observed 262 students
Most studies would call this an insignificant 'n' number
Those who wrote down their goals were 39.5 percent more likely to accomplish them.
Compared to what? What was the control group and those results?
