FOCUS ON ONE THING HOW TO

It’s a means to an end not an end in itself. You must recognize, too, that your one thing will always produce a result. Remember Einstein’s famous missive that “not all things that can be counted count.” That means that you shouldn’t try to fix some things simply because you’ll know when you have. What does success look like to you? Is it your net profits, number of customers, market share, or something else?Īll of those things are measures of success, though they’re not necessarily the best ones. Instead, solve one thing.īefore you can decide what your one thing is, however, you must first of all define what success is for you. In other words, don’t try to solve everything. There are a lot of problems that you could solve, or even that you must solve, but Blue, Keller, and Papasan all say that you must find that one thing that if you solve it will make everything else easier or unnecessary. It’s easy to get caught up tinkering with the smaller stuff because you can make progress on them without ever really tackling the thing - the one thing - that matters most.

That means, according to Blue, that you have to define the problem as narrowly as you can.īig problems consist of smaller ones but big problems can often be distilled into one that, if solved, would fix a lot of other things, too. You have to find and pursue that one thing, and then focus on just it.

FOCUS ON ONE THING HOW TO

And so their one thing - indeed, the only thing - that they had to get absolutely right was how to do that.Īccording to Blue, they put two-thirds of their staff onto solving this one problem. And to do that, they determined that they had to grow their network. Instead of looking at how you do things, they suggest that you think about what you want to do - your goals, or more specifically, just one goal.Īllen Blue, co-founder of LinkedIn, says that that platform was intended to be a people-search engine. Keller and Papasan adopt a completely different approach. It was to help you to re-examine and re-design how you did your work at all levels in your organization, so that you could improve each part to create a more efficient whole. This is what business process re-engineering was intended to do. For example, how could you streamline your assembly line? What steps could you remove or combine? Or how could you reorganize your staff responsibilities so that fewer people could accomplish more. Typically, you’d think about this in terms of your processes. In their book, The One Thing, Gary Keller, co-founder of Keller Williams, and Jay Papasan, writer and business executive, ask this question: “What is the one thing such that by doing it everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?”

Focus on one thing