Do you feel like you have so much to do that everything feels urgent and important, and you're not sure where to start?
In this episode, I explore the idea that not everything matters equally, and why focusing on the one most important thing can be the key to success.
Drawing on insights from the book "The One Thing" by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, I'll discuss the 80/20 principle, which suggests that 20% of tasks can lead to 80% of success.
I'll also talk about the guiding principle of the book, which is to ask the question, "What's the one thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary?"
Yesterday, in episode 121, I talked about the idea of willpower, and how we may think we should have unlimited willpower, but in fact, we don't. That's the fourth of what Keller calls the "Six Lies Between You and Success." You can find that show here:
EPISODE 121 - Gary Keller's ONE THING and Optimizing Your Willpower
As always, thanks for listening.
You can find me here:
WEBSITE: https://www.thorchallgren.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/thorchallgren
You can find me here:
WEBSITE: https://www.thorchallgren.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/thorchallgren
"When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal." Do you have a life where everything feels urgent and important? And is everything really equal?
Welcome to Every Day a New Thought. Today I'm taking a second look at the book by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. It's called "The One Thing." This is a Wall Street Journal number one best seller. And I'm currently reading this book for my ministerial class. And there's a lot that resonated with me that I wanted to share on the show.
Yesterday, I started in episode number 121. And I talked about the idea of willpower, and how we may think we should have unlimited willpower, but in fact, we don't. That's the argument made by Keller. In fact, he has six points he makes in the first half of the book. And he calls them the six lies between you and success. So in yesterday's show, I talked about the fourth of the six lies that Keller cties, which is the lie that willpower is always on will call. So if you want to go back and listen to that show, I'm going to put it in the description below.
Today, I'm going to talk about the first so called lie, which is that everything matters equally. Now, remember, in this book, Keller and Papasan are building to make the point that you should find and focus on doing one thing, and that will lead you to having the most success. So in this chapter, he pushes back against the point that we should do everything. Because if you're going to focus on doing one thing, you first have to knock down what are many of the arguments as to why people say that's impossible, and one of them is that everything matters equally.
And Keller says in the book, "When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal." He says that we get so focused on a to do list where everything on that list is weighted equally, that we just end up doing all the stuff on the list whether it matters or not.
Instead, he says we should have a success list where you look at the things that are on your to do list and you ask which of these things will actually lead to my success. So it's here in the book where he introduces the idea of the 80/20 principle, and you probably are familiar with this. It's a fairly common idea. It originally comes from the Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, and he was in worked in the 19th century. And he put out this idea that in Italy, 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people. So that idea became known as the 80/20 principle.
And in the 20th century business people looked at this idea, the 80/20 idea, and they found multiple uses for it multiple places where they could see this principle in effect, in the book by Richard Koch, the 80/20 principle, he described it this way, he said, "The 80/20 principle asserts that a minority of causes inputs or effort usually lead to the majority of the results, output or rewards."
So the way that Keller applies this is to say, no, everything does not matter equally. He says, in fact that we should identify the 20% of the to dues that will lead to 80% of the success. That's where you want to start. Start with that 20%. So you figure out what is that. Once you do, he says, Keep narrowing it down, keep going until you find the one thing.
When you read the book, you'll see that his overall guiding principle is to ask this question, "What's the one thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary?" That's the guiding framework of the book, what's the one thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary?
So for me, the two big takeaways are, allow what matters most to drive your day. And once you've done that, once you've figured out what actually matters, keep asking what matters until there's only one thing left. So no, according to Keller, everything does not matter equally. Rather, doing the most important thing is always the most important thing.
Look for my next episode in the series, it's going to be number 126. And I'll put a link for that in the show description when that episodes out. In that show. I'm going to look at Gary Keller's thoughts on multitasking.
That's the show for today if you liked this episode please hit like if you're watching on YouTube if you're listening to the podcast please subscribe or follow the show on your favorite podcast app until tomorrow thanks for listening