The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller, Jay Papasan – Book Notes.

The ONE Thing

• Extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.
• 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.
• The key is over time success is build sequentially. Its one thing at a time.
• 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.
• It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?
• Make a habit that you don’t have a choice when it comes to doing stuff. If the time comes to do it. Do it.
• If a to-do list isn’t built around success, then that’s not where it takes you. If your to-do list contains everything, then it’s probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.
• The majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do.
• No matter how many to-dos you start with, you can always narrow it to one.
• Go small. Don’t focus on being busy; focus on being productive. Allow what matters most to drive your day.
• Go extreme. Once you’ve figured out what actually matters, keep asking what mattes ost until there is only one thing left.
• Multitaskers were just lousy at everything
• 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.
• Researchers estimate that workers are interrupted every 11 minutes and then spend almost a third of their day recovering from these distractions.
• You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.
• Why would we ever tolerate multitasking when we’re doing our most important work?
• Success is actually a short race – a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.
• Success is making right habits.
• Put up with the discipline long enough to turn it into a habit, and the journey feels different.
• It takes an average of 66 days to acquire a new habit.
• Self-help circles tend to preach that it takes 21 days to make a change, but modern science doesn’t back that up.
• 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.
• There are degrees of willpower strength..so how do you put your willpower to work? You think about it. Pay attention to it. Respect it.
• What Taxes your willpower
  • Implementing new behaviours
  • 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
• Do your most important work – your ONE Thing – early, before your willpower is drawn down.
• 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
• On the journey to achieving big, you get bigger. Big requires growth, and by the time you arrive, you’re big too!
• As you experience big, you become big.
• Fear the lack of living to your fullest.
• “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?“
• Apply this question for: …for my spiritual life, …for my physical health, ..for my personal life, …for my key relationships, …for my job, …for my business, …for my finances etc
• If you want the most from your answer, you must realize that it lives outside your comfort zone.
• The research and experience of others is the best place to start when looking for your answers
• Your big ONE Thing is your purpose and your small ONE Thing is the priority you take action on to achieve it.
• There is a natural rhythm to our lives that becomes a simple formula for implementing the ONE Thing and achieving extraordinary results: purpose, priority, and productivity.
• The more productive people are, the more purpose and priority are pushing and driving them.
• Dr. Martin Seligman, ….believes there are five factors that contribute to our happiness: positive emotion and pleasure, achievement, relationships, engagement, and meaning. Of these, the believes engagement and meaning are the most important. Becoming more engaged in what we do by finding ways to make our life more meaningful is the surest way to finding lasting happiness. When our daily actions fulfill a bigger purpose, the most powerful and enduring happiness can happen.
• The prescription for extraordinary results is knowing what matters to you and taking daily doses of actions in alignment with it.
• Sticking with something long enough for success to show up is a fundamental requirement for achieving extraordinary results.
• What you do in any given moment determines what you experience in the next.
• hyperbolic discounting – the farther away a reward is in the future, the smaller the immediate motivation to achieve it.
• Goal setting to the NOW: someday goal -> five-year goal -> one-year goal -> monthly goal -> weekly goal -> daily goal -> right now
• Connect one goal with the next over time until you know the most important thing you must do right NOW
• Connect today to all your tomorrows. It matters.
• …students who visualized the process performed better across the board…
• People tend to be overly optimistic about what they can accomplish, and therefore most don’t think things all the way through. Researchers call this “planning fallacy.” 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. This is why Goal Setting to the now really works.
• In 2008….those who wrote down their goals were 39.5 % more likely to accomplish them.
• …putting together a life of extraordinary results simply comes down to getting the most out of what you do, when what you do matters.
• …the most successful people are the most productive people.
• Productive people get more done, achieve better results, and earn far more in their hours…
• If disproportionate results come from one activity, then you must give that one activity disproportionate time.
• Focusing question : Today, what’s the ONE Thing I can do for my ONE Thing such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
• To achieve extra ordinary results and experience greatness, time block these three things int he following order:
  • Time block your time off.
  • Time block your ONE Thing.
    • block time as early in your day
    • My recommendation is to block four hours a day
    • …Be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon
  • Time block your planning time.
    • Take a look at your some day and five-year goals
    • Block an hour each week to review your annual and monthly goals.
    • Based on where I am right now, what’s the ONE Thing I need to do this week to stay on track for my monthly goal and for my monthly goal to be on track for my annual goal?
• Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing – Peter Drucker
• Four proven ways to battle distractions and keep your eye on your ONE Thing
  • Build a bunker
  • Store provisions
  • Sweep for mines (get rid of distractions)
  • Enlist support
• If, ultimately, you continue a tug-of-war to make time blocking take place, then use the focusing question to ask: What’s the ONE Thing I can do to protect my time block every day such by doing it everything else I might do will be easier or unnecessary.
• The people who achieve extraordinary results don’t achieve them by working more hours. They achieve them by getting more done in the hours they work.
• The Three commitments to your ONE Thing
  • Follow the path of mastery
    • Time on a task, over time, eventually beats talent every time.
  • Move from “E” (Entrepreneurial) to “P” (Purposeful):
    • The path of mastering something is the combination of not only doing the best you can do at it, but also doing it the best it can be done.
    • 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.
    • You have to be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things if you want breakthroughs in your life.
    • The Purposeful person follows the simple rule that “a different result requires doing something different”. Make this your mantra and breakthroughs become possible.
  • Live the accountability cycle
• The four thieves of productivity
  • Inability to Say “No”
  • Fear of Chaos
    • When you strive for greatness, chaos is guaranteed to show up.
    • When you argue for your limitations, you ge to keep them.
  • Poor Health Habits
    • The highly productive person’s daily energy plan
      • Meditate and pray for spiritual energy
      • Eat right, exercise, and sleep sufficiently for physical energy
      • Hug, kiss, and laugh with loves ones for emotional energy.
      • Set goals, plan, and calendar for mental energy.
      • Time block your ONE Thing for business energy.
  • Environment Doesn’t Support Your Goals
    • Surround yourself only with people who are going to lift you higher – Oprah Winfrey
• Your journey toward extraordinary results will be built above all else on faith. It’s only when you have faith in your purpose and priorities that you’ll seek out your ONE Thing.
• Go live a life worth living where, in the end, you’ll be able to say, “I’m glad I did,” not “I wish I had.”
• 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.
• …live your life to minimize the regrets you might have at the end.
• …Bronnie Ware’s 2012 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
  • I wish that I’d let myself by happier – too late they realized happiness is a choice
  • I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends – too often they failed to give them the time and effort they deserved
  • I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings – too frequently shut mouths and shuttered feelings weighed too heavy to handle
  • I wish I hadn’t worked so hard – too much time spent making a living over building a life caused too much remorse
  • The most common regret: I wish I ‘d had the courage to live a life true to myself not the life others expected of me – half filled dreams and unfulfilled hopes.
• Put yourself together, and our world falls into place. When you bring purpose to your life, know your priorities, and achieve high productivity on the priority that matters most every day, your life makes sense and the extraordinary becomes possible.
• The ONE Thing forces you to think big, work things through to create a list, prioritize that list so that a geometric progression can happen, and then hammer away on the first thing – the ONE Thing that starts your domino run.

http://www.the1thing.com/