The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

by Gary Keller

Where I’d had huge success, I had narrowed my concentration to one thing, and where my success varied, my focus had too.

“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.

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.

Going small is a simple approach to extraordinary results, and it works. It works all the time, anywhere and on anything. Why? Because it has only one purpose—to ultimately get you to the point.

The challenge is that life doesn’t line everything up for us and say, “Here’s where you should start.” Highly successful people know this. So every day they line up their priorities anew, find the lead domino, and whack away at it until it falls.

When you see someone who has a lot of knowledge, they learned it over time. When you see someone who has a lot of skills, they developed them over time. When you see someone who has done a lot, they accomplished it over time. When you see someone who has a lot of money, they earned it over time. The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.

If today your company doesn’t know what its ONE Thing is, then the company’s ONE Thing is to find out.

No one is self-made.

Everyone has one person who either means the most to them or was the first to influence, train, or manage them. No one succeeds alone. No one.

The ONE Thing sits at the heart of success and is the starting point for achieving extraordinary results.

THE SIX LIES BETWEEN YOU AND SUCCESS 1. Everything Matters Equally 2. Multitasking 3. A Disciplined Life 4. Willpower Is Always on Will-Call 5. A Balanced Life 6. Big Is Bad

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.

“The things which are most important don’t always scream the loudest.”

Not everything matters equally, and success isn’t a game won by whoever does the most. Yet that is exactly how most play it on a daily basis.

In fact, 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.

To-do lists tend to be long; success lists are short.

In other words, in the world of success, things aren’t equal. A small amount of causes creates most of the results. Just the right input creates most of the output. Selected effort creates almost all of the rewards.

Pareto points us in a very clear direction: the majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do.

Eric said that if I could do only one thing, then I should practice my scales. So, I took his advice and chose the minor blues scale. What I discovered was that if I learned that scale, then I could play many of the solos of great classic rock guitarists from Eric Clapton to Billy Gibbons and, maybe someday, even Eric Johnson. That scale became my ONE Thing for the guitar, and it unlocked the world of rock ’n’ roll for me.

BIG IDEAS 1. Go small. Don’t focus on being busy; focus on being productive. Allow what matters most to drive your day. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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 everything has to be done, that checking things off our list is what success is all about. We can’t be trapped in a game of “check off” that never produces a winner. The truth is that things don’t matter equally and success is found in doing what matters most.

When you try to do two things at once, you either can’t or won’t do either well. If you think multitasking is an effective way to get more done, you’ve got it backward. It’s an effective way to get less done.

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. So we double and triple up in the hope of getting everything done.

However, if you’re working on a spreadsheet and a co-worker pops into your office to discuss a business problem, the relative complexity of those tasks makes it impossible to easily jump back and forth. 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.

You simply can’t effectively focus on two important things at the same time.

Bounce between one activity and another and you lose time as your brain reorients to the new task. Those milliseconds add up. Researchers estimate we lose 28 percent of an average workday to multitasking ineffectiveness.

Multitaskers experience more life-reducing, happiness-squelching stress.

If we really lose almost a third of our workday to distractions, what is the cumulative loss over a career? What is the loss to other careers? To businesses?

“The people we live with and work with on a daily basis deserve our full attention. When we give people segmented attention, piecemeal time, switching back and forth, the switching cost is higher than just the time involved. We end up damaging relationships.”

IDEAS 1. Distraction is natural. Don’t feel bad when you get distracted. Everyone gets distracted. 2. Multitasking takes a toll. At home or at work, distractions lead to poor choices, painful mistakes, and unnecessary stress. 3. Distraction undermines results. When you try to do too much at once, you can end up doing nothing well. Figure out what matters most in the moment and give it your undivided attention.

Success is actually a short race—a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.

So when you see people who look like “disciplined” people, what you’re really seeing is people who’ve trained a handful of habits into their lives. This makes them seem “disciplined” when actually they’re not. No one is.

You don’t need to be a disciplined person to be successful. In fact, 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.

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.

Over time, the habit you’re after becomes easier and easier to sustain. It’s true. Habits require much less energy and effort to maintain than to begin (see figure 7). Put up with the discipline long enough to turn it into a habit, and the journey feels different.

The results suggest that 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.

Sustain the discipline long enough on one habit, and not only does it become easier, but so do other things as well. It’s why those with the right habits seem to do better than others. They’re doing the most important thing regularly and, as a result, everything else is easier.

BIG IDEAS 1. Don’t be a disciplined person. Be a person of powerful habits and use selected discipline to develop them. 2. Build one habit at a time. Success is sequential, not simultaneous. No one actually has the discipline to acquire more than one powerful new habit at a time. Super-successful people aren’t superhuman at all; they’ve just used selected discipline to develop a few significant habits. One at a time. Over time. 3. Give each habit enough time. Stick with the discipline long enough for it to become routine. Habits, on average, take 66 days to form. Once a habit is solidly established, you can either build on that habit or, if appropriate, build another one.

Think of willpower like the power bar on your cell phone. Every morning you start out with a full charge. As the day goes on, every time you draw on it you’re using it up. So as your green bar shrinks, so does your resolve, and when it eventually goes red, you’re done. Willpower has a limited battery life but can be recharged with some downtime. It’s a limited but renewable resource. Because you have a limited supply, each act of will creates a win-lose scenario where winning in an immediate situation through willpower makes you more likely to lose later because you have less of it. Make it through a tough day in the trenches, and the lure of late-night snacking can become your diet’s downfall.

“Willpower is like gas in your car. … When you resist something tempting, you use some up. The more you resist, the emptier your tank gets, until you run out of gas.”

To do our best, we literally have to feed our minds, which gives new credence to the old saw, “food for thought.” Foods that elevate blood sugar evenly over long periods, like complex carbohydrates and proteins, become the fuel of choice for high-achievers—literal proof that “you are what you eat.”

WHAT TAXES YOUR WILLPOWER • Implementing new behaviors • Filtering distractions • Resisting temptation • Suppressing emotion • Restraining aggression • Suppressing impulses • Taking tests • Trying to impress others • Coping with fear • Doing something you don’t enjoy • Selecting long-term over short-term rewards

So, 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.

BIG IDEAS 1. Don’t spread your willpower too thin. On any given day, you have a limited supply of willpower, so decide what matters and reserve your willpower for it. 2. Monitor your fuel gauge. Full-strength willpower requires a full tank. Never let what matters most be compromised simply because your brain was under-fueled. Eat right and regularly. 3. Time your task. Do what matters most first each day when your willpower is strongest. Maximum strength willpower means maximum success. Don’t fight your willpower. Build your days around how it works and let it do its part to build your life. Willpower may not be on willcall, but when you use it first on what matters most, you can always count on it.

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.

Time waits for no one. Push something to an extreme and postponement can become permanent.

When you gamble with your time, you may be placing a bet you can’t cover. Even if you’re sure you can win, be careful that you can live with what you lose. Toying with time will lead you down a rabbit hole with no way out. Believing this lie does its harm by convincing you to do things you shouldn’t and stop doing things you should.

Counterbalancing done well gives the illusion of balance.

No matter how hard you try, there will always be things left undone at the end of your day, week, month, year, and life. Trying to get them all done is folly. When the things that matter most get done, you’ll still be left with a sense of things being undone—a sense of imbalance. Leaving some things undone is a necessary tradeoff for extraordinary results.