The One Thing (book)

🔗Connect

🔼Topic:: Focus

✒️ Note-Making

💡Clarify

🔈 Summary of main ideas I’m not saying there will only be one thing, or even the same thing, forever. I’m saying that at any moment in time there can be only ONE Thing, and when that ONE Thing is in line with your purpose and sits atop your priorities, it will be the most productive thing you can do to launch you toward the best you can be.

🗒️Relate

⛓ Life lessons, action items

🔍Critique

✅ by following this method, what will happen?

❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong...

🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...

🗨️Review

💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style...

I'm only on the first chapter but it already seems that his usage of the "one thing" is on the borderline between cynical and zealous, and even conspiratorial. It gives "the secret" vibes and I don't like it. I understand the logic behind "the one thing", and I hope that the rest of the book would be more calm and collected.

The main issue with this book is that it's not embedded in reality. Although he does offer some counter arguments but its not as strong as it should be, and there's not enough emphasis on implementation. Its also not really a "story", but a bullet list.

📒 Notes

Introduction

THE ONE THING

• 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.

THE DOMINO EFFECT

• Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life.
• The domino effect applies to the big picture, like your work or your business, and it applies to the smallest moment in each day when you’re trying to decide what to do next. Success builds on success, and as this happens, over and over, you move toward the highest success possible.
• The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.

SUCCESS LEAVES CLUES

• No one succeeds alone. No one.
• 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.

THE LIES THEY MISLEAD AND DERAIL US

Focusing on the "one thing" will help separate between our todo list and what's really important. Multitasking doesnt exist, multitasking is splitting your concentration and there is a cost in terms of term and concentration to switch between tasks. Willpower is Limited and you can't summon it as you like. You don't need a lot of will power to succeed, just enough to create good habits.

EVERYTHING MATTERS EQUALLY

• Lacking a clear formula for making decisions, we get reactive and fall back on familiar, comfortable ways to decide what to do.
• 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.
• While to-dos serve as a useful collection of our best intentions, they also tyrannize us with trivial, unimportant stuff that we feel obligated to get done—because it’s on our list.
• Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.
• Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list—a list that is purposefully created around extraordinary results.
• the majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do.
• No matter the task, mission, or goal. Big or small. Start with as large a list as you want, but develop the mindset that you will whittle your way from there to the critical few and not stop until you end with the essential ONE. The imperative ONE. The ONE Thing.

MULTITASKING

• multitasking is neither efficient nor effective. In the world of results, it will fail you every time.
• 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.
• 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.
• You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.

A DISCIPLINED LIFE

• Success is actually a short race—a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.
• success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right.
• When you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything.
• Sustain the discipline long enough on one habit, and not only does it become easier, but so do other things as well.

WILLPOWER IS ALWAYS ON WILL-CALL

• 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.
• willpower is a timing issue. When you have your will, you get your way. Although character is an essential element of willpower, the key to harnessing it is when you use it.
• Willpower is like a fast-twitch muscle that gets tired and needs rest. It’s incredibly powerful, but it has no endurance.
• Foods that elevate blood sugar evenly over long periods, like complex carbohydrates and proteins, become the fuel of choice for high-achievers—literal
• When our willpower runs out, we all revert to our default settings. This begs the question: What are your default settings?
• So how do you put your willpower to work? You think about it. Pay attention to it. Respect it. You make doing what matters most a priority when your willpower is its highest.
• Willpower is depleted when we make decisions to focus our attention, suppress our feelings and impulses, or modify our behavior in pursuit of goals.
• do your most important work—your ONE Thing—early, before your willpower is drawn down.
• Don’t fight your willpower. Build your days around how it works and let it do its part to build your life.

A BALANCED LIFE

• The act of living a full life by giving time to what matters is a balancing act.
• The problem with living in the middle is that it prevents you from making extraordinary time commitments to anything. In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets its due.
• Knowing when to pursue the middle and when to pursue the extremes is in essence the true beginning of wisdom. Extraordinary results are achieved by this negotiation with your time.
• Time waits for no one. Push something to an extreme and postponement can become permanent.
• 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,
• In your personal world, awareness is the essential ingredient. Awareness of your spirit and body, awareness of your family and friends, awareness of your personal needs—none of these can be sacrificed

BIG IS BAD

• if you fear big success, you’ll either avoid it or sabotage your efforts to achieve it.
• No one knows their ultimate ceiling for achievement, so worrying about it is a waste of time.
• It’s about bold ideas that might threaten your comfort zones but simultaneously reflect your greatest opportunities. Believing in big frees you to ask different questions, follow different paths, and try new things. This opens the doors to possibilities that until now only lived inside you.
• the only actions that become springboards to succeeding big are those informed by big thinking to begin with.
• What you build today will either empower or restrict you tomorrow.
• As you experience big, you become big.
• You must be open to the possibility that your life and what you accomplish can become great. Achievement and abundance show up because they’re the natural outcomes of doing the right things with no limits attached.
• Don’t fear big. Fear mediocrity. Fear waste. Fear the lack of living to your fullest.
• thinking big isn’t the absence of doubts, but moving past them.
• it would be accurate to say that we fail our way to success.

EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS UNLOCKING THE POSSIBILITIES WITHIN YOU

The whole point of the book is to give you clary. Out of all your tasks, goals, and directions in life, pick one. One goal, One task, and the rest will be better. Given limited resources, energy and time, choose the action with the highest marginal benefit. Life's Mission

1. block a time in the calendar for yourself Time Blocking, your own personal peace and wellbeing. You must have physical and mental health to function.
2. block time for your "one thing". Four hours, no excuses, no interruptions, no rescheduling.
3. Block time for your weekly review Periodical Review

Create your "one purpose", from there prioritize the tasks that will bring you there, and the outcome of that would be productivity. The harmony between goals and tasks are the domino blocks that eventually will make your goals come true.

To always maintain your focus, ask yourself the guiding question, which is "What's my one thing..." right now/for the next year... and block the time for it.

THE PATH TO GREAT ANSWERS

• The Focusing Question helps you identify your ONE Thing in any situation. It will clarify what you want in the big areas of your life and then drill down to what you must do to get them.
• A big, specific question leads to a big, specific answer, which is absolutely necessary for achieving a big goal.
• If you want the most from your answer, you must realize that it lives outside your comfort zone.
• your first ONE Thing is to search for clues and role models to point you in the right direction.
• The research and experience of others is the best place to start when looking for your answer.

EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS UNLOCKING THE POSSIBILITIES WITHIN YOU

• Your big ONE Thing is your purpose and your small ONE Thing is the priority you take action on to achieve it.

LIVE WITH PURPOSE

• our purpose sets our priority and our priority determines the productivity our actions produce.
• A life lived on purpose is the most powerful of all—and the happiest.
• One of our biggest challenges is making sure our life’s purpose doesn’t become a beggar’s bowl, a bottomless pit of desire continually searching for the next thing that will make us happy. That’s a losing proposition.
• Happiness happens on the way to fulfillment.
• Becoming more engaged in what we do by finding ways to make our life more meaningful is the surest way to finding lasting happiness.
• Purpose is the straightest path to power and the ultimate source of personal strength—strength of conviction and strength to persevere.

LIVE BY PRIORITY

• Live with purpose and you know where you want to go. Live by priority and you’ll know what to do to get there.
• Your “present now” and all “future nows” are undeniably determined by the priority you live in the moment.
• We need a simple way of thinking to save us from ourselves,
• Connect today to all your tomorrows. It matters.
• Visualizing the process—breaking a big goal down into the steps needed to achieve it—helps engage the strategic thinking you need to plan for and achieve extraordinary results.

LIVE FOR PRODUCTIVITY

• Every minute of every day, the question is never will we be doing something, but rather what that something is we’ll be doing.
• Time blocking is a very results-oriented way of viewing and using time. It’s a way of making sure that what has to be done gets done.
• Time block your time off.    2.  Time block your ONE Thing.    3.  Time block your planning time.
• When you intend to be successful, you start by protecting time to recharge and reward yourself.
• it’s your job to protect your time blocks from all those who don’t know what matters most to you, and from yourself when you forget.

THE THREE COMMITMENTS

• First, you must adopt the mindset of someone seeking mastery.
• Second, you must continually seek the very best ways of doing things.
• you must be willing to be held accountable to doing everything you can to achieve your ONE Thing.
• we become masters of what is behind us and apprentices for what is ahead. This is why mastery is a journey.
• More than anything else, expertise tracks with hours invested.
• Highly productive people don’t accept the limitations of their natural approach as the final word on their success. When they hit a ceiling of achievement, they look for new models and systems, better ways to do things to push them through.
• Look for the better models and systems, the ways that can take you farther. Then adopt new thinking, new skills, and new relationships to help you put them into action.
• Accountable people persevere through problems and keep pushing forward.
• Highly successful people are clear about their role in the events of their life. They don’t fear reality. They seek it, acknowledge it, and own it.

THE FOUR THIEVES

• If you don’t make your life about what you say yes to, then it will almost certainly become what you intended to say no to.
• When you strive for greatness, chaos is guaranteed to show up.
• Move past your fear of chaos, learn to deal with it, and trust that your work on your ONE Thing will come through for you.
• when you spend the early hours energizing yourself, you get pulled through the rest of the day with little additional effort.
• Your environment must support your goals.
• No one succeeds alone and no one fails alone. Pay attention to the people around you. Seek out those who will support your goals, and show the door to anyone who won’t.
• What is around you will either aim you toward your time block or pull you away.
• “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.”

THE JOURNEY

• living the largest life possible requires you not only to think big, but also to take the necessary actions to get there.
• I’m not saying there will only be one thing, or even the same thing, forever. I’m saying that at any moment in time there can be only ONE Thing, and when that ONE Thing is in line with your purpose and sits atop your priorities, it will be the most productive thing you can do to launch you toward the best you can be.
• when you’re aiming for success you can’t just skip to the end.
• A life worth living might be measured in many ways, but the one way that stands above all others is living a life of no regrets.
• Put yourself together, and your world falls into place.
• You are the first domino.

PUTTING THE ONE THING TO WORK

• If you try to do everything, you could wind up with nothing. If you try to do just ONE Thing, the right ONE Thing, you could wind up with everything you ever wanted.