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“Be like a postage stamp— stick to one thing until you get there.” —Josh Billings
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is? Mitch: No. What? Curly: This. [He holds up one finger.] Mitch: Your finger? Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*t. Mitch: That’s great, but what’s the “one thing”? Curly: That’s what you’ve got to figure out.
“What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”
“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.
Success starts to feel out of reach, so they settle for less. Unaware that big success comes when we do a few things well, they get lost trying to do too much and in the end accomplish too little. Over time they lower their expectations, abandon their dreams, and allow their life to get small. This is the wrong thing to make small.
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.
Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life.
find the lead domino, and whack away at it until it falls.
extraordinary success is sequential, not simultaneous.
The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.
No one is self-made.
No one succeeds alone. No one.
“Success demands singleness of purpose.” — Vince Lombardi
“truthiness,” a word comedian Stephen Colbert coined as “truth that comes from the gut, not books”
Henry David Thoreau said, “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?”
Success is actually a short race—a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.
In any discussion about success, the words “discipline” and “habit” ultimately intersect.
When you discipline yourself, you’re essentially training yourself to act in a specific way. Stay with this long enough and it becomes routine—in other words, a habit.
The trick to success is to choose the right habit and bring just enough discipline to establish it.
When you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything.
Habits require much less energy and effort to maintain than to begin
Put up with the discipline long enough to turn it into a habit, and the journey feels different.
Once a new behavior becomes a habit, it takes less discipline to maintain.
takes an average of 66 days to acquire a new habit. The full range was 18 to 254 days,
some evidence of a halo effect around habit creation.
Build one habit at a time. Success is sequential, not simultaneous.
Give each habit enough time. Stick with the discipline long enough for it to become routine.
When we tie our success to our willpower without understanding what that really means, we set ourselves up for failure. And we don’t have to.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way” has probably misled as many as it’s helped.
Willpower is always on will-call is a lie.
Willpower is so important that using it effectively should be a high priority.
Although character is an essential element of willpower, the key to harnessing it is when you use it.
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.
runt
willpower is a mental muscle that doesn’t bounce back quickly. If you employ it for one task, there will be less power available for the next unless you refuel.
Foods that elevate blood sugar evenly over long periods, like complex carbohydrates and proteins, become the fuel of choice for high-achievers—literal
make doing what matters most a priority when your willpower is its highest. In other words, you give it the time of day it deserves.
When it comes to willpower, timing is everything. You will need your willpower at full strength to ensure that when you’re doing the right thing, you don’t let anything distract you or steer you away from it. Then you need enough willpower the rest of the day to either support or avoid sabotaging what you’ve done.
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.
Don’t spread your willpower too thin.
Monitor your fuel gauge.
Time your task. Do what matters most first each day when your willpower is strongest.
bunk.
A balanced life is a lie.
laments
We hear about balance so much we automatically assume it’s exactly what we should be seeking. It’s not. Purpose, meaning, significance—these are what make a successful life. Seek them and you will most certainly live your life out of balance, criss-crossing an invisible middle line as you pursue your priorities.
Extraordinary results require focused attention and time. Time on one thing means time away from another....
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shod.
Ralph E. Gomory’s preface in the 2005 book Being Together, Working Apart: Dual-Career Families and the Work-Life Balance, we went from a family unit with a breadwinner and a homemaker to one with two breadwinners and no homemaker.
