Own Your ONE Thing!

“What's the one thing I can do, such that by doing it everything else is easier or unnecessary?”

That's it.

- Gary Keller

What if there was one question that could dramatically accelerate your goal achievement while lowering your stress levels? It sounds almost too good to be true!

In yesterday’s Daily ROCKET, we highlighted a handful of key questions that can help chart your daily course for Remembering Your Future Self. Today, we are going to focus on just one question that can radically sharpen you focus on Owning Your ONE Thing.

“What’s the one thing I can do, such that by doing it everything else is easier or unnecessary?”

This question drives Gary Keller’s Own Your ONE Thing strategy, and when understood and applied is a driving force for both efficiency and concentration. It is this combination that makes it such a powerful heuristic. In other words, the back half of the question throws a spotlight on constantly optimizing and streamlining of your activities: How can I make this task, process and habit easier and more efficient and/or not do the activity at all?

Then, as you zero in on these various constraints and points of potential optimization across your life, combine your thinking with a forcing function that picks the ONE thing that will yield the highest results. For example, you might see a way to optimize how to water your backyard vegetable garden, and a way to optimize your stock market portfolio. Both might be worth doing, but an optimized stock portfolio should probably take precedence, and ultimately could free up a lot more time to concentrate on your garden!

As you begin working with this question throughout the course of your day, it should lead to a pleasant and deeper form of activity rather than a stressful level of hyper-activity. By constantly pushing the next ONE thing to the top of your list, you can work calmly knowing that you are working on the highest and best task, at that moment. This moment by moment approach to Owning Your ONE Thing acts as a powerful compass across the days and weeks.

At first, this type of concentrated high purpose activity might be difficult, since our multi-tasking world has short-circuited our natural concentration. Author Christian Larsen shares some important guidance on the nature of concentration:

The mind that concentrates well does not work in the commonplace sense of that term; wear and tear have been eliminated; there is no strenuous action; there is no desire to force or drive things through; and no tendency whatever towards the high strung or keyed up condition. On the contrary, all action is smooth, orderly, easy and harmonious; and work has become a keen pleasure.

“What’s the one thing I can do?
Does it help everything else become easier or unnecessary?”

If you find your goals are generating a great deal of friction or delay, learn to step back and apply this framework to focus your concentration on the ONE Thing that will unlock progress and lower resistance! The full force of your concentration on these high value activities will accelerate your progress at incredible rates! Buckle up!!!