That ONE Thing

Acheive more by doing less

by Pete Mockaitis

So what do you mean by the one thing and what comes up against that? - [Narrator] This book was born from a hypothesis. You know, I got the chance to start writing books with Gary Keller back in 2002. And I've watched him build a company from then 6,700 independent contractors to the largest in the world with 148,000. And the thing that he does well is identify the priority. And so this idea that the greatest successes in his career have always come when he increased his focus instead of doing more things, did fewer. And we then spent five years with two full-time researchers trying to make sure that our hypothesis lined up with the facts. So the big idea, and it's nothing new and we didn't claim that it was anything new is, you know just like with the magnifying glass in the sun, right? If you focus your efforts to fewer things or one thing in this case then you truly have the ability to do something at an extraordinary level. If you divide your efforts between many things not only does that stress you out you don't tend to do any of them that well. And so there's always exceptions to every rule but the great vast majority of people will benefit from this idea of let's just do fewer things with more effect than a whole bunch of stuff with side effects and by side effects. I mean, stress, poor results, mistakes. I mean, there's just a lot that goes on when we try to get be all things to all people and get everything done instead of just focusing on what matters.

Start with One Habit

by Pete Mockaitis

[Interviewer] Could you maybe light a fire with some inspiration in terms of sharing a tale or two from some people or readers or clients who made the shift? Like where were they before, what'd they do, and then what kind of extraordinary results did they see? - [Interviewee] We have a question, yeah. What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything will be easier or unnecessary? And that has a lot of back history behind it but it's a specific question to try to get you to that answer. And I can tell you that when most people and almost I'd say 99% of the people that I've taught or worked with and that's now numbering in the tens of thousands you're looking up, they know the answer and they feel guilty for not doing it. You know, what's the one thing I can do for my marriage? They know that it's I just need to listen to my wife, you know? Or I just need to, you know, put up my dirty clothes in my morning. So I think most people do know their answers or they just haven't paused for the brief amount of time it takes to arrive at it. And then we teach people to kind of go all in. You know, if you know that this is important to you, my marriage, my family, my business, you fill in the blank, my health, you identify that one thing and then you try to make that thing just habitual. And so we launched a course earlier this year called Time Blocking Mastery where we walk people through 10 weeks of trying to build a habit. And one of the big findings in that research is, you know, every book that I'd ever read said that it took 21 days or 30 days to form a habit. But the actual science suggests that it's more like 66 days, a lot longer. And so I've watched people and I'll say the number one thing that I've seen, regardless of the habit, is when people take control of a small amount of their time, you know, they're just going to take 10 minutes to meditate in the morning or they're going to exercise for 30 minutes with their wife three days a week, they make a stand. They go all in. Like everything in my life is going to support this one thing. When they take control of that 30-minute sliver of time it gives them the confidence to start taking control of everything else. And I could go through example after example after example but that's been the generic experience as people focusing on one thing. They put it on their calendar so that they have to do it every single day. That's what we call the time blocking. You make an appointment with yourself to do something, not with someone else but to do something. And then you keep that commitment until it becomes a habit. And you know, there's BJ Fogg is a researcher at Stanford University, he taught 10,000 people how to floss their teeth using a similar method. And he just told them to floss one tooth every day. And the reality is if somebody pulls off the string to do one tooth, right, they're probably going to finish it. But he also understood the idea of momentum. And if you really just don't want to do it but you don't want to break the streak of doing it day-in and day-out, you can do one and say I did it. But over time he got 10,000 people. So it just one of those things that we all know we should be doing and we're not and there's just a few tricks and trade. So the two big ones are time block it or BJ Fogg would say piggyback it, right? Attach it to an existing habit. He said after I've brushed my teeth I will floss this tooth. I would say, you know, that's definitely how a lot of my habits work.

The Ultimate Question

by Pete Mockaitis

We call it the focusing question. What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary? And to break it down it's what's the one thing, not two or three. You're asking your mind to come up with the singular best thing that you can do. Not that you could, should, or would. Because in any journey just start with what you can already do and get the feedback cycle going. That's that one tooth, or one pushup, or one mile. Start with that and then build on that. Such that by doing it just says that it's got to have some Prato's law in there, right? It's got to have some leverage. If you knock over one thing it's got to have multiple impacts on the other side. And the scale of that leverage is everything else gets easier and necessary. And it's a very specific question and we find that it gives people very specific answers. And while they may not be perfect, if they start doing that thing, they'll quickly get to the right solution. - [Host] All right, so when you say the one thing, you sort of mean within a domain. Like the one thing within marriage, within fitness, within my career. - [Guest] That's correct. It's ostensibly a business book, right? So most of the book we're writing about what's the one thing for your career, right? If you're a programmer you need to program. If you're a writer you need to be writing. You know, there's usually, if you're a violinist you need to be practicing, right? There's usually one activity that if you studied people who have truly reaped extraordinary results, whether they were conscious or not conscious, they put in the time on that thing and that's what made them extraordinary. So that was the fundamental thing. And companies tend to have one thing. You know, people look at Google now. It's called Alphabet. It's got so many different business. But what's the foundation of it all? - [Host] Search and AdWords. - [Guest] Yeah. - [Host] I said and, I said and. - [Guest] Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. But the and only happens if the first one happens. If the search had sucked they would have had no ad revenue. And with no ad revenue they couldn't have driverless cars and everything else that they're doing. But you can start seeing how great businesses. Not average ones, great businesses, tend to have one thing, a tip of the spear that makes everything possible, and if you can realize that about your business or your career you can give that thing disproportionate focus and give yourself disproportionate chances to succeed. Now outside of that I absolutely, we have a whole page dedicated to it. Page 114. That's like the only page I have memorized. Like the seven big areas of your life where you would take this philosophy. You know, I don't think that asking what's the one movie I can watch on Netflix tonight. I mean that's trivial, right? I'm OCD, I can go there and not be completely out of my mind, but for the average person that's a waste. But for your health, for your spiritual life, for your personal life, for your key relationships, for your job, your business, your finances, I mean those are all big, big buckets in our lives, and I would hope if we want to have an extraordinary life, we would want to have those things operating at a pretty high level. So we usually teach people just do one at a time but in the course of one year you could knock out, you know, five or six new habits. Right, 66 day challenge, I think it's five mathematically. You could knock out five of those areas and build a really powerful habit that would serve you for the rest of your life. And so I do think that's the super human trick you see the Tim Ferris's doing. They build things into ritual and to habit and then once they've got one thing down they add another and another, and we look up three or four years later and we think oh my gosh, that person's special. Well they look special now, but they just built on what most people had. Maybe a few extraordinary things tacked on, but the package is the combination of all of those things stacked on each other.

Prioritize your to-do list

by Pete Mockaitis

I want to talk about so many potential one things. Let's just zoom in on maybe some potential common issues for folks in their careers, and let's say a common challenge is, "Oh my gosh, I feel a sense of stress, overwhelm, "too many inputs and things coming at me all at once "that I got to deal with." In your experience working with folks, what are maybe a couple one things you've seen pop up for folks in that milieu that they were able to ritualize, habitualize, and rock and roll. - One of the first things we teach people to do is take their to-do list and bring priority to it. The reality of most people's to-do list, and the vast majority of workers use some form of to-do list whether it's an app or whatever, it's basically a long list of things that they know they need to do, because life is busy and they have to have that David Allen bucket, trusted bucket to remember all that stuff with, right? You have task list and all of that. We just say take three minutes, and then of all the things that you could do, identify the handful that really need to get done this week or that day. I usually look at my week, my month, those are separate little sessions. What do I have to get done this month to be on track for my year? What do I have to get done this week to be on track with my month? What do I have to get done today to get on track for my week? But you look at that long list, and you say, "Well, if I can only get one thing done to be on track "for my week, to be on track for my month, "blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what's that going to be?" Usually you know what it is, and so that just becomes your number one. Well, great. If I knock that sucker out, and I can do two things, what's the next thing, and that becomes number two. And when you give people three to five minutes, you don't want them to over-think it, you just kind of go with their instinct and what they know, most people will take a list that's two pages long down to four or five things that are clearly prioritized, and that simple act of identifying your priorities on a daily basis, and there's all kinds of journals that help people do this now. The Five-Minute Journal, there's lots of people who are on this same track, but that simple habit right there, boom. When everybody else is still on Facebook, you spent three minutes figuring out what really matters for you, and you're going to tackle that between all the distractions and meetings so that you know that those things get done. That would be massive for most people.

Make appointments with yourself

by Pete Mockaitis

The other big thing is, how do I get more control of my time? 'Cause you said the word career, this is not business owners, right? These are people who work for other people. And I'm a manager, I screw people up all the time, because I'm empowered to walk by them and give them new assignments, right? And so, I think another tactic, right, that you can help people with is, they've identified their one thing. I would then encourage them to set an appointment with themselves to do it. Literally block off their calendar. Their coworkers will go, "oh, I wanted to set a meeting "with you between nine and 11, but you're busy. "Can you do something for me?" It's like, "I'm sorry, I already have another commitment." Nobody needs to know that that appointment isn't with another human being. If you have to go to an unused warehouse or a conference room in your building and hide, go do it, if that's where you have to go to do your work. But first and foremost, time lock it. There's some research that we added to the books. I don't know which edition people have. But it was published in a British journal called Health Psychology, they try to get people to do 20 minutes of exercise a day. Now I'm going to do the speed version. But they just told people to do it. And for two weeks, about 35% of those people did it. They gave another group motivation. They said, "if you do 20 minutes of exercise, "you'll have better heart health," blah blah blah blah blah. And again, 35, 38% did that. They had a third group, they gave them the same motivational pamphlet, but then they asked them to do one additional thing. They had to make a written commitment, on these days at this time at this place, I will exercise for 20 minutes. They had to write down when and where they were going to do the activity. Those people were 91% successful. - Hot dog. - Yeah. Thank you, hot dog, indeed. Right, so you get it. That's just a calendar invite. They had to actually navigate, yeah I want to do that, great. When? That simple act of thinking it through makes you three times more likely to do it. And the bonus here is, now when your boss says, "hey, I need you in my office," you say, "I'm sorry, I already got another meeting, "do I need to cancel it?" Most bosses won't say, no, no, I'll catch you on the other side, when are you coming out? 11, great, I'll see you then. They want to dump things, but they don't necessarily have to have it done now, they just want to know when it's going to happen. So giving people the empowerment to say, "awesome, I'm happy to take care of this for you, boss. "When do you need it, will next Tuesday do?" That's my standard answer, how about next Tuesday? And the assumption is, and if you ask him, do you want it done right now, they'll always say right now. - Oh, sure, love that. - You could say no, now, yes, later, is effectively what you're saying. So you time block it, then you have to do a little protecting of that time. And then for your average career person, entry-level employee, they're trying to make some hay in their career, they can buy themselves a couple of hours of freedom so that five days a week, they put in that couple, three hours maybe. Maybe it's just an hour, or maybe it's just 30 minutes. But they're going to be doing those essentials that will slowly make them essential. That's how people end up standing out. That's why people are given executive assistants. The company recognizes they're so good at that thing, that they don't want them doing the other stuff. And they pay a whole other human being to do that stuff for them. So it's been around, but people just don't recognize it as for what it is.

Establish morning rituals

by Pete Mockaitis

So with regard to scheduling that time, and I'm thinking in particular about this notion of identify the priorities, you know, one, two, three for the day, etc. That's come up many times in the fast faves as habits from guests. So would your proposal be that you determine a regular occurring time and place to do that, maybe in the morning or any pro tips, best practices for when and where work optimally? - [Guest] Yeah, and a lot of your young listeners may want to fight this, and I'll just tell them, if you're fighting this, what I'm about to say, you may be arguing for average. But if you really go out and study, and we spent five years studying successful artists, entrepreneurs, athletes, right? They understood something that we explained in the science that if you really want to do something, and you want to do it every day, the best time to do it is early in the morning. - [Interviewer] Okay. - [Guest] And I know, like, I've got young people in my life and they don't love the idea of getting up at the crack of dawn. But you listen, you read the biographies, and with rare exceptions, there's something magic that happens in the morning. You have the ability to focus. Far more ability than you do later in the day. There's less noise in your life, and you then have the ability to add rituals when there's no interference. So I usually encourage people to, you know, if they really want to make a big leap in their life, maybe start doing that hour of core activities before they even get to work. Now, if you really want it to happen, right? Now their boss can't even tell them not to do it. They can't have anyone else interfering with them, because they're not even at work yet. - [Interviewer] Alright. - [Guest] Right? And you read, and you listen to Tim Ferriss, and you listen to some of these guys, and they interview these people, and you hear they have some pretty serious rituals in the morning. They're reading, they're meditating, they're exercising. They're getting some really core, important stuff done, and they're having a great day before 8:00 a.m. So I learned this from Gretchen Rubin, and so, 'cause I've been on this morning thing for a while. And I'm a writer, right? I love, I would love to stay up 'til 2:00 a.m. every night binge watching shows and being creative. But I know now that as a career writer who's now written 11 books, sold over two and a half million copies, that the idea of being creative and actually putting out product are very different things. And when I started writing and treating it like a job and doing it in the morning is when the books started coming up. And Gretchen Rubin gave me an amazing cheat. If you really struggle to wake up early in the morning, and you want that extra hour, I can't remember the date, but when we fall back on daylight saving's time. - [Interviewer] Okay. - [Guest] So instead of grabbing an extra hour of snooze time, just keep getting up at the exact same time, but it'll be an hour earlier than the rest of the world. - [Interviewer] Brilliant. - [Guest] So with zero baggage, you can go from an 8:00 a.m. wake-up time to effectively a 7:00 a.m. without any change in your physical habits. - [Interviewer] Yeah, and the light will feel just the same and all that. - [Guest] But now you've bought yourself an hour to write that novel that you've always meant to write or to get the exercise in that you're not finding the time to do, or whatever that one thing is for your work, your health, or whatever, you've now bought yourself an hour, this runway, before the rest of the world usually is awake or interfering. There's nothing on Facebook, there's nothing on TV, this is just you time, and it tends to be very peaceful, and you can get a lot done.