Own Your One Thing

You may not have heard of Gary Keller, author of the One Thing, but you may have seen real estate signs from his massive Keller Williams real estate company in your neighborhood. So one thing we can say for sure about his One Thing approach - it really seems to work!

It takes time and focus and practice, but sooner or later almost every goal setter is able to hone in on their most important goal or objective. This is a critical step in the goal setting journey - you now have your north star, the organizing dream that gets you excited day after day, week after week.

For Keller - this vision is also crucial, but he goes further and offers a compelling series of strategies to actually execute on reaching your One Thing.

Today, let’s focus on the most critical mindset for goal execution - getting your tasks prioritized. One of the most difficult planning phases for reaching any goal is to step back and organize the steps and tasks one after the other in terms of what needs to happen before what. In project management speak, we call these task dependencies. It’s always critical with any goal or project to begin at the beginning!

For Keller, he calls this task ordering the dominoes approach. You may have also heard the simple mantra “crawl, walk, run”. While this organizing and prioritizing of work can seem frustrating and unnecessary for all the “just do it” people on your team, it is incredibly valuable and leveraged time well spent!

There is a huge element of faith and concentration needed to see ahead of time how each step will play out in your goal success journey. And of course, nothing will go as planned. Some dominoes will fall over, and not hit the next domino in line. That simply means you need to reconsider the task or step and try again.

The other challenge in sequential planning is that there simply might be gaps in your row of dominoes that you can’t see or imagine right now. This is where you need to shorten your field of vision and “do what you can do, with what you have”. In other words - if you can only clearly see a sequence of the next five steps, then go ahead and do those five steps. This is especially true for big and innovative goals where there is uncertainty about how to achieve the end result.

By getting in the habit of thinking ahead and carefully imagining your goal task sequence, soon you will be toppling one domino after another, building incredible momentum in the process!