Book Review: The One Thing

I just finished reading The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. The book came out in 2012. Gary Keller is one of the founders of the real estate empire, Keller Williams. And this book is a distillation of what he’s learned over the years.

Like most business books of this type, it’s filled with stories. If I could ding it for anything, it’s that there were just too many for me. But this is a critique that could be made of most business books that have come out in the last 30 years.

What I did like was the emphasis on focus. The idea is that you do just one thing at a time.

Shocking I know. But hear me out…

Yes, we all know the advice to do one thing at a time, but we’re too afraid to let go of what’s already in motion. And so our focus becomes a half-measure.

Consider this. Most of us would say that focusing on one thing is important, but so is making sure your house is in order. This seems reasonable.

But The One Thing pushes up against this conventional wisdom. You must accept that when you are deeply focused on one thing, other aspects of your life will become chaotic - you must be ok with that.

I’d never heard that before. Very few books would say having chaos is a good thing in life. But when you’re so focused on that one thing, you might not care.

This level might mean some fundamental changes in who you are, and who you hang out with (if you even hang out at all).

In a recent newsletter that I’ve been thinking about as well, Justin Welsh reflected on his desire to expand his business into something more complicated until a colleague said to keep it simple (which is often the advice he gives to others). He reduced his ideas down to one thing.

So the book is still very relevant to entrepreneurs today.

In any case, we’re in a world that loves to add zeros. When someone says 7-figure entrepreneur, we imagine mostly zeros.

But instead, we should imagine ones.

What’s the one thing we need to get done to get to the next step?