All about the one thing
What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

You’ll want to write that down… because the whole entire book is based around that single question, and thepower of organizingevery area of your life around ONE Thing (per area).

The Domino Effect

The key to success is figuring out your ONE most important thing in your business/career/life over the long-run. Think of this as your “someday” goal.  Once you’ve figured that out, you need to identify how many dominoes you need to line up - and then knock down - in order to achieve it. Simple right? … actually, yeah. It is. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.

The ONE Thing In Action

American businessman Bill Gates is a great example of The ONE Thing lifestyle in action.

Bill’s ONE passion in high school was computers.

This led him to develop ONE skill, computer programming.

In high school, he got ONE job in the computer programing field.

Which led to him eventually starting ONE company - Microsoft.

Bill’s company, Microsoft focussed on ONE thing -- the development and sale of BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800,

which eventually made Bill the ONE richest man in the world for 15 years in a row.

After Bill retired from Microsoft, he and his wife Melinda formed ONE foundation that focused on ONE Thing: to tackle some of the world’s “really tough problems” like health and education.

The majority of the foundation’s money went to ONE area, their Global Health Program -- which had ONE goal: the use science and technology to save lives in poor countries…

To do this, they settled on find a solution to the ONE major cause of death -- infectious disease...

The ONE solution they came up with was vaccination. Because it’s the ONE most impactful thing they can put their money towards to solve their ONE ultimate focus: to tackle some of the world’s “really tough problems.” (See how it all ties together?)

USE THE 80/20 PRINCIPLE.

(Then Go Even Deeper And Narrower)

“...As fast as we were growing, we were still not acknowledged by the top people in our industry. I challenged our group to brainstorm 100 ways to turn this situation around. It took us all day to come up with the list. The next morning, we narrowed the list down to ten ideas, and from there we chose just one big idea. The one that we decided on was that I would write a book on how to become an elite performer in our industry. It worked. Eight years later that one book had not only become a national bestseller, but also had morphed into a series of books with total sales of over a million copies. In an industry of about a million people, one thing changed our image forever.”

In case you’re not familiar with Gary Keller (author of this book), he’s the founder of Keller-Williams Real Estate. And the quote above is an example of how he dug into the 80/20 Principle to take Keller-Williams to the top of their industry. Keller tells us we don’t need a To-Do List, we need a Success List -- a list purposely designed around your highest leverage activities… how do you find your highest leverage activities? By using the good ol’ 80/20 principle.

How The 80/20 Principle Works

If you haven’t heard of the 80/20 principle (aka Pareto’s Principle), it’s pretty simple: the 80/20 principle says that the MINORITY of your effort leads to the MAJORITY of your results…

20% of your customers usually account for 80% of your profits.

20% of your investments usually account for 80% of your returns.

20% of your habits usually result in 80% of your success.

It’s not necessarily about the exact numbers (80%; 20%) as much as it’s about the simple truth behind them, which is this: a SMALL percentage of what you do accounts for  a LARGE percentage of the results you experience.

So what are those handful of things that you can extract from your to-do list that would have the BIGGEST impact on your results? Figure out those high-leverage activities, and you’ve just turned your to-do list into a success list.

And once you’re done doing that, Keller recommends that you take your success list and whittle that down even further - taking the 20% of the 20% of the 20% until you’ve gotten it down to the vital few.

*Note: checkout the FlashNotes for The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch for a deeper dive on this rule

IDENTIFY WHAT'S MOST IMPORTANT & GIVE IT YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION.

“...what’s happening when we’re actually doing two things at once? It’s simple. We’ve separated them. Our brain has channels, and as a result we’re able to process different kinds of data in different parts of our brain. This is why you can walk and talk at the same time. There is no channel interference. But here’s the catch: you’re not really focused on both activities. One is happening in the foreground and the other in the background.
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