[book] The One Thing By Gary Keller (6/10)

[dude]

The One Thing: by Gary Keller

The simple truth behind extraordinary results,

Do you know the saying “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” ITS WRONG! Andrew Carnegie said it too his advice was “put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.” It’s way easier to watch and protect one basket than to watch and protect 10 of them. This book is all about this statement. The One Thing says that (if you want extraordinary results) you have to choose one thing and fully develop that talent or skill. If you just want average results scatter your focus in a couple directions and get average at a couple of skills.

If you look at great achievers you realize that they are only really good at one thing you can’t be fantastic at everything. You can’t be the dalai lama in spirituality, the bill gates in technologie, the elon musk in technological progress and the messi in soccer and the oprah winfrey of life advice. You have to choose the most important thing and put everything else in the background.

This philosophy applies to two levels. First the macro level, the big picture and second the micro level, your current goal or activity.

The macro:

this is the big picture of your life. The overarching theme or skill of your life that you dedicate too. This might be: swimming like Michael Phelps, Steel like Andrew Carnegie, Animation like Walt Disney, Chicken like the KFC, Martial arts, Meditation, Marketing or Psychologie. And with the last two examples you can go even deeper with Marketing you can completely focus on YouTube or Facebook ads to become the go-to guy for that particular marketing avenue. Within Psychologie you can also choose a specialization like child psychologist or neuropsychologist. To really narrow down your focus.

This doesn’t mean you have to do it your whole life but as the writer says magic happens at the extremes. So when you have a long period of your life where you fully immerse yourself in ONE subject and only focus on that you’re results will sky rocket.

The question to ask on the macro level is: What is my ONE thing?

 

The Micro:

This apply’s the the small tasks and goal’s in your life. I don’t know if you are familiar with the 80/20 principle. It says that almost 80 percent of your result come from 20 percent of your actions. In this book he takes the 80/20 principle to the extreme and says that there is only one thing that is most effective. So to apply the principle here we have to discover what action actually matters in our current situation. and Gary Keller has a perfect question we can ask ourselves to discover it:

What’s the ONE THING I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Or to hone it down to a particular category health, key relationships, spiritual life, business or personal finances.

What’s the one thing I can do today to improve my health?

What is the one thing we can do every week to spend more quality family time together?

What’s the one thing I can do everyday to cultivate more awareness?

What’s the one thing I can do to make our product the best?

These are some examples for question’s you can ask yourself to get your current one thing.

But what if I don’t know what to do? Than pick a direction and work away at it with time comes clarity and soon you will realize if this thing is something for you or you’ll discover a new thing. change your focus.

The last thing I want to say is, if you look at apple they always had a one thing, but it shifted. The first few years they had the macintosh, than the macbook pro, than the Ipad and then the Iphone. They switched their one thing up every couple of years and still became very successful. The key thing to take away from their success is that you can have a set of skills and be very good at all of them as long as you have periods where you only focus on a certain skill, fully develop it and then move to the next one. This way you can build a very special and unique skill set and be very successful too. But always keep your current one thing central.

“Success comes when you do A few things well.”

 

PS. If you liked this check out my YouTube channel

Edited April 7, 2017 by dude
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