The One Thing

"The way to get the most out of your work and your life is to go as small as possible."

— Gary Keller; Jay Papasan, The ONE Thing (2013)

Introduction

The One Thing
Full title	The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
Author	Gary Keller; Jay Papasan
Language	English
Subject	Productivity; Time management; Personal development
Genre	Nonfiction; Self-help
Publisher	Bard Press
Publication date	1 April 2013
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover, paperback); e-book; audiobook
Pages	240
ISBN	978-1-885167-77-4
Goodreads rating	4.1/5  (as of 16 November 2025)
Website	the1thing.com

📘 The ONE Thing is a 2013 self-help book by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, published by Bard Press, which argues that extraordinary results come from concentrating on a single priority. It centers on a single tool—the Focusing Question, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”—and on time blocking as the daily practice that makes that focus real. The book is arranged in three parts (“The Lies,” “The Truth,” and “Extraordinary Results”) in brief chapters that end with “Big Ideas” recaps and a direct, coaching register. Trade reviewers described the prose as energetic and prescriptive—Publishers Weekly praised its “appealing style and energy” while noting its coach’s verve. The title debuted strongly: the authors’ company reported it reached #1 on the Wall Street Journal business list, #2 on the New York Times Advice/How-To list, and sold more than 60,000 copies in its first month in May 2013.

Opening chapters

Chapter 1 – The ONE Thing

🎯 In June 1991, real estate entrepreneur Gary Keller sat in a movie theater watching the comedy City Slickers and was struck by the scene where the grizzled cowboy Curly holds up one finger and tells Mitch that the secret of life is “one thing.” Years later, after he and his partners had built a fast-growing real estate company that suddenly stalled, Keller found himself failing and desperate for help. He hired a coach, laid out both his personal and business problems, and listened as the coach studied his organizational chart and long-term ambitions. The coach concluded that turning the company around came down to a single decisive move: replace fourteen key people with the right hires, joking that “Jesus needed 12, but you’ll need 14.” Jolted by the simplicity of the prescription, Keller “fired” himself as CEO so he could focus all his energy on finding those fourteen people, treating that search as his one professional priority. Within three years of lining up the right leaders in the right roles, the company entered a decade-long run of roughly 40 percent year-over-year growth and expanded from a regional player to an international contender. Working individually with top agents afterward, Keller noticed the same pattern when he coached: as long as he ended calls with a list of several action items, they often did some of them but not the most important ones. Out of frustration he kept shortening the list—from three actions, to two, and finally to a single prompt: “What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?” When his clients committed to that one action and ignored the rest until it was done, their results “went through the roof,” mirroring the breakthrough he had just engineered in his own business. Looking back, Keller realized that every time he had enjoyed huge success, he had gone small and narrowed his concentration to one thing, whereas his inconsistent results came when his focus was scattered. Most people overwhelm themselves by trying to do too much, spreading their limited time and energy over bloated to-do lists and then lowering their expectations when exhaustion sets in. A better approach is to distinguish between the many things you could do and the one thing you should do that most directly connects what you do with what you want, and then make that single highest-impact action the organizing priority of each day so that compounded focus, not sheer effort, drives long-term success. The ONE Thing is the best approach to getting what you want.

Chapter 2 – The Domino Effect

🧩 On Domino Day in November 2009, production company Weijers Domino Productions lined up more than 4,491,863 dominoes in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, and a single fingertip push unleashed a 112-minute chain reaction that released about 94,000 joules of energy—the equivalent of an average man doing 545 push-ups. Each standing domino in that setup represented a small store of potential energy, and as the wave traveled down the line, those tiny bits of stored energy compounded into something awe-inspiring. Decades earlier, in 1983, physicist Lorne Whitehead had published a paper in the American Journal of Physics showing that a domino can knock over another domino 50 percent larger than itself, meaning a sequence can grow in size as it falls. In 2001, a researcher at San Francisco’s Exploratorium recreated Whitehead’s idea with eight plywood dominoes, starting with a two-inch tile and ending with one nearly three feet tall, and observers watched as a gentle tick at the start ended “with a loud SLAM.” Keller runs the mental math to show the implication of this geometric progression: by the 10th domino, you would be toppling something almost as tall as NFL quarterback Peyton Manning; by the 18th, you would rival the Leaning Tower of Pisa; by the 23rd, the Eiffel Tower; by the 31st, Mount Everest; and by the 57th, you would reach from the earth to the moon. This compounding effect makes clear that a tiny, well-aimed push can ultimately tip over something unimaginably big if the sequence is set up right. Translating that metaphor to life, toppling dominoes is simple in principle—line them up and knock over the first one—but in the real world life does not line them up for you. Highly successful people therefore start each day by lining up their own priorities, finding the lead domino that most deserves their effort, and hitting it with focused action until it falls. When they repeat this process over time, what starts as a linear series of actions becomes a geometric progression of results, just like Whitehead’s expanding domino line. Whether the arena is business, learning, skills, or wealth, everything impressive anyone has built has been assembled this way: by doing the right thing, and then the next right thing, over time. Goals like knowledge, skills, accomplishments, or money all accrue “over time,” so the key is to recognize that big achievements are not simultaneous but sequential and to harness the compounding power of focused effort by treating each day as an opportunity to find and knock down the next most important domino. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.

Chapter 3 – Success Leaves Clues

👣 Gary Keller begins by observing that the most successful companies in history usually become known for one product or service that defines them or generates the lion’s share of their profits. Kentucky Fried Chicken grew from Colonel Harland Sanders’s single secret fried chicken recipe, Coors built a 1,500 percent expansion between 1947 and 1967 on one product from one brewery, Intel’s microprocessors account for most of its net revenue, and Starbucks’s core remains a cup of coffee even as it layers on other items. Even when the money comes from something else, the pattern holds: Google’s revenues are driven by advertising, but its defining ONE Thing is search, and the Star Wars franchise earns more from toys and merchandise than tickets, yet the movies themselves are the engine that makes the rest possible. The same pattern appears at the personal level, where most extraordinary careers trace back to one pivotal person who made all the difference. Walt Disney had his brother Roy, who first got him work at an art studio and later provided business discipline; Sam Walton had his father-in-law, L. S. Robson, who funded his first Ben Franklin store and quietly put up $20,000 to secure a crucial expansion lease; and Albert Einstein had his mentor Max Talmud, who fed the young prodigy scientific and philosophical texts over weekly dinners. Oprah Winfrey credits her father and his household for “saving” her and points to adviser Jeffrey Jacobs, who told her to form her own production company rather than just sign talent contracts, a move that made Harpo Productions possible. Even artists who look self-made, like the Beatles, benefited from a key collaborator—in their case producer George Martin, whose musical skills shaped their arrangements and earned him the nickname “the Fifth Beatle.” Beyond people, extraordinary lives are also built on one passion or one skill pursued deeply, such as painter Pat Matthews committing to one painting a day or Italian tour guide Angelo Amorico turning his love for his country into a high-touch travel business. Keller highlights runner Gilbert Tuhabonye, whose passion for running carried him from winning Burundi national championships to escaping a 1993 school massacre, earning All-America honors at Abilene Christian University, and eventually coaching hundreds of Austinites while using a charity race called “Run for the Water” to fund wells in his homeland. The most sweeping example is Bill Gates, whose teenage love of computers led him to develop one core skill—programming—meet one key partner—Paul Allen—and form one company—Microsoft—after a letter to Altair 8800 maker Ed Roberts yielded their first big break, and who later channeled his fortune with Melinda into one foundation that concentrates on vaccines as the best way to save lives in poor countries. Across companies, relationships, passions, and whole lives, outsized success grows out of a narrow focus on one defining thing, one key ally, or one dominant skill, and by recognizing these “ones” and aligning efforts around them, people give themselves the best chance to build something extraordinary, remembering that No one succeeds alone. No one.

Part I – The Lies: They Mislead and Derail Us

Chapter 4 – Everything Matters Equally

⚖️ In the late 1930s, Western Electric consultant Joseph Juran cracked a supposedly unbreakable coded message that General Motors managers were passing through a card reader, and that late-night success led him to a bigger discovery. Studying compensation research based on Vilfredo Pareto’s work, he saw that a minority of causes produced a majority of results and named it Pareto’s Principle—the “vital few and trivial many” that would later be popularized as the 80/20 rule. In real life this means that a few customers generate most of the profit, a handful of investments produce most of the returns, and a short success list beats a long to-do list every time. Keller recalls how, in 2001, his executive team brainstormed 100 ways to improve their industry standing, narrowed that list to ten, and finally chose a single big move—writing a book on elite performance—that became a million-copy bestseller and transformed the firm’s reputation. The same pattern appears in personal productivity: traditional to-do lists mix the trivial and the vital, seducing people into checking off easy tasks while the few things that truly matter wait. Applying extreme Pareto means repeatedly shrinking the list—from many options to a critical few and then to one essential action that carries disproportionate power. A long list pulls attention in all directions; a short success list aims it like a laser and turns work into a domino line where one well-chosen task topples many others. In this view, greatness is less about doing more and more about being ruthless in deciding what deserves your time at all. Regardless, doing the most important thing is always the most important thing.

Chapter 5 – Multitasking

🔀 At Stanford University, Clifford Nass and his colleagues sat 262 students down, sorted them into high and low media multitaskers, and expected the self-proclaimed jugglers to shine—only to discover they were “suckers for irrelevancy” who were outperformed on every task. Their experiments, along with decades of cognitive research, show that what looks like multitasking is really rapid task switching, with the brain burning time and energy every time it shifts focus. In office life this plays out as workers who are interrupted roughly every 11 minutes and then spend almost a third of their day recovering, ping-ponging between e-mail alerts, drop-by questions, and social media pings. Psychologist David Meyer has measured how switching between complex tasks can double completion time, while people grow more error-prone and start misjudging how long work actually takes. The illusion of “monkey mind” productivity is so strong that employers still praise multitasking, even though it reliably produces more mistakes, more stress, and less meaningful output. On the road, Matt Richtel’s Pulitzer-winning “Driven to Distraction” series documented how talking or texting while driving mimics the impairment of drunkenness and contributes to hundreds of thousands of crashes a year. Everyday examples—missing a key point in a meeting while glancing at a phone, or half-listening to a partner while scanning a screen—show that divided attention also damages relationships. The healthier pattern is to treat full attention as a scarce resource: choose one thing, build a bunker against interruptions, and give that work your full prefrontal spotlight until it is done or the clock runs out, because Though multitasking is sometimes possible, it’s never possible to do it effectively.

Chapter 6 – A Disciplined Life

🧗 When people complain that they “just need more discipline,” they usually need only a few right habits, each built with a short, intense burst of discipline and then maintained almost on autopilot. Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps illustrates selective discipline: as a boy diagnosed with ADHD who once spent time by the lifeguard stand for disruptive behavior, he later channeled his energy into training seven days a week, up to six hours a day, and turned that single habit into 22 Olympic medals. Research from University College London shows that new behaviors become automatic over time, with an average “habit line” around 66 days and easier actions taking less time while harder ones take more. Psychologists Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng found that students who successfully adopted one demanding habit, like a structured exercise program, often saw ripple effects—less stress, better diet, reduced impulse spending, even fewer dirty dishes—because practicing discipline in one area raised the bar in others. In this framing, so-called “disciplined people” are not iron-willed superheroes; they are ordinary individuals who protected a narrow band of behavior until it ran on its own. The path is to pick one behavior that truly matters, protect time for it, and suffer the early discomfort long enough for it to become part of who you are. Once that habit is in place, you can either deepen it or move on to the next, letting accumulated routines carry more and more of the load and letting Harness the power of selected discipline to build the right habit, and extraordinary results will find you.

Chapter 7 – Willpower Is Always on Will-Call

🪫 At Stanford’s Bing Nursery School in the late 1960s and early 1970s, psychologist Walter Mischel sat four-year-olds in front of a marshmallow, cookie, or pretzel and told them that if they could wait 15 minutes without eating it, they would earn a second treat; on average the children lasted less than three minutes, and only about three in ten managed to hold out the full time. Follow-ups over the next three decades showed that the “high delayers” later scored about 210 points higher on the SAT, handled stress better, and were less prone to addiction and obesity than the kids who grabbed the first sweet, revealing how strongly self-control predicts long-term success. Willpower turns out to be like the battery bar on a phone—full in the morning, depleted by each act of self-control, and empty by night—so drawing on it blindly is a recipe for failure. Baba Shiv’s experiment at Stanford had 165 undergraduates memorize either a two-digit or seven-digit number; those burdened with the longer number were almost twice as likely to pick chocolate cake over fruit salad, showing how even a small extra mental load drains self-control and nudges people toward short-term comfort. Israeli parole boards offered another stark illustration: across 1,112 hearings with eight judges, favorable rulings peaked around 65 percent right after morning and afternoon breaks and dropped to nearly zero just before them, as decision fatigue pushed judges back to the “no” default that kept prisoners locked up. Studies of blood sugar showed that demanding tasks literally burn glucose in the prefrontal cortex, and that a glass of real-sugar lemonade between tasks restored performance while a Splenda placebo did not. Everyday challenges like resisting distraction, managing emotions, or doing work we dislike all punch holes in the willpower fuel tank, so people who ignore its limits end up making their toughest choices when they are least able to choose well. Treating willpower as a limited, renewable resource and scheduling the most mentally demanding, high-impact work for the time of day when it is strongest turns self-control from a vague hope into a concrete plan, which is why Do what matters most first each day when your willpower is strongest.

Chapter 8 – A Balanced Life

🧘 The modern craving for “work–life balance” rests on a myth, because in real life nothing stays in perfect equilibrium; what looks like balance is always a matter of constant adjustment. For most of human history survival work and life were the same—if you did not hunt, farm, or tend livestock, you did not eat—until surplus food allowed specialization, industrialization pushed people into factories, and the phrase “work–life balance” finally emerged in the mid-1980s as dual-career families struggled to juggle jobs and home. A LexisNexis survey of major newspapers found only 32 mentions of “work–life balance” from 1986–1996 but 1,674 in 2007, showing how quickly the idea spread even as people felt more overwhelmed. Living in the comfortable “middle” keeps everything equally shortchanged: when you try to give all areas of life equal time, nothing gets the focus needed for extraordinary results. Real progress comes at the extremes, where you go long on what matters most and accept that other things will temporarily receive less attention. Stories of a teacher who died just as she retired, leaving a closet full of never-sewn “travel clothes,” and a businessman who finally sold his company only to find he could not buy back the years he had promised his family, drive home how dangerous it is to treat time as something you can always make up later. Counterbalancing replaces the balance myth: at work you deliberately let other tasks slide while you stay deeply out of balance on your ONE Thing, and in your personal life you make frequent, shorter corrections so that family, health, friends, and integrity never stay neglected long enough to crack like glass. Work is the “rubber” ball that tends to bounce back after a drop, while those four personal spheres are fragile, so awareness and quick counter-moves are nonnegotiable at home even as you run long, focused stretches at work. Instead of chasing a perfectly level life, you use purpose to pick what should take precedence now and accept the messiness that comes with serious focus, knowing that An extraordinary life is a counterbalancing act.

Chapter 9 – Big Is Bad

🗻 Folk tales about the Big Bad Wolf and cultural clichés that pair “big” with danger have trained many people to flinch from large ambitions, a reflex Keller calls “megaphobia.” That fear shows up as shrinking thinking: people assume big goals mean crushing pressure, endless hours, and inevitable burnout, so they either never aim high or quietly sabotage their own attempts. Yet history and business examples tell another story: Sabeer Bhatia arrived in the United States with $250 and an outsized dream, built Hotmail into the fastest-growing webmail service of its time, and sold it to Microsoft for about $400 million; Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on his first brewery; J. K. Rowling planned seven years at Hogwarts before writing chapter one; and Sam Walton thought so big about Wal-Mart that he set up his estate plan long before the company exploded. Big thinking also powers social change, as when Candace Lightner turned the drunk-driver death of her daughter into Mothers Against Drunk Driving, helping save more than 300,000 lives, or when six-year-old Ryan Hreljac’s school project grew into the Ryan’s Well Foundation, bringing clean water to hundreds of thousands of people. Psychologist Carol Dweck’s research on “growth” versus “fixed” mindsets shows that people who believe abilities can be developed welcome difficult goals as chances to grow, while those who see talent as fixed retreat to safe, small targets to avoid failure. A “box” metaphor makes the point: whatever you believe about what, how, and with whom you can act becomes a mental container that limits your actions and results, so if you build a small box—say, a modest income or narrow impact—you end up designing systems and relationships that can never get you beyond that ceiling. Asking big, specific questions like “What can I do to double sales in six months?” forces you to look for new models and bold actions instead of incremental tweaks that leave the status quo intact. Thinking as big as you possibly can and then backing into the ONE Thing you must do now to move toward that possibility lets your life expand to fill a much larger container instead of being cut down by fear, so Don’t let small thinking cut your life down to size.

Part II – The Truth: The Simple Path to Productivity

Chapter 10 – The Focusing Question

❓ In June 1885, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie stood before students at Curry Commercial College in Pittsburgh and described the “great secret” of his success: put all your eggs in one basket, watch that basket, and refuse to scatter your energy, thought, and capital across countless ventures. Mark Twain’s advice echoes this, warning that the secret of getting ahead is to get started and to break overwhelming tasks into small, manageable steps. Chinese wisdom goes further, reminding us that a single wrong first step on a thousand-mile journey lands us thousands of miles from where we meant to go. Out of these insights comes a realization that life itself is a question, and daily choices are the answers we write. Powerful questions shape powerful answers, so the habit that matters is learning to ask better ones. A single, repeatable line concentrates that power: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” Framed broadly, it becomes a strategic compass for an entire life, career, or business; framed narrowly—“right now,” “this week,” “today”—it turns that compass into a map for the next step. Repeated over and over, the question lines up the first domino and the next so that each answer builds directly on the last. When this question guides the day, actions stop being a scattered list and become a chain of highly leveraged moves, and life itself becomes the cumulative answer to one well-framed prompt. One of the most empowering moments of my life came when I realized that life is a question and how we live it is our answer.

Chapter 11 – The Success Habit

🔁 A high-achieving entrepreneur starts every morning the same way: before checking e-mail or taking phone calls, he quietly asks himself the ONE Thing question and lets the answer determine what will dominate his calendar. He uses it at the office to decide which project gets his prime hours and again at home to decide how to show up as a spouse and parent that day. Over time the question spreads into every major area of his life—spiritual life, physical health, personal growth, key relationships, job, business, and finances—by reframing it for each domain and adding a concrete time frame. “What’s the ONE Thing I can do this week to improve my marriage?” sits beside “What’s the ONE Thing I can do this year to move my career forward?” and “What’s the ONE Thing I can do today for my health?” Each answer then gets time-blocked so it is not just intention but appointment. Because habits do not appear overnight, he leans on research from University College London showing that new behaviors take, on average, 66 days to become automatic and supports himself with visual reminders, digital prompts, and partners who ask the question with him. As the question gets asked and acted on day after day, his to-do lists shrink into success lists and his results become more disproportionate in the areas that matter most. What began as a one-line experiment hardens into the default way of thinking about every decision. If we do, then the Focusing Question is the most powerful success habit we can have.

Chapter 12 – The Path to Great Answers

🛣️ A sales leader wondering how to grow can ask “What can I do to increase sales?” or “What can I do to increase sales by 5 percent this year?”—questions so small or vague that almost any effort would qualify as success. Asking instead, “What can I do to double sales in six months?” suddenly permits only a handful of bold, specific answers. This illustrates a simple matrix: small and broad prompts yield modest, fuzzy outcomes, while big and specific questions force creative, focused thinking. Once the right question is set, she must decide what kind of answer to pursue: a doable answer that fits her current skills, a stretch answer that pushes the edge of her abilities, or a possibility answer that lies completely outside her comfort zone. To find that possibility answer, she studies role models and research, as K. Anders Ericsson did when he analyzed elite violinists and discovered the 10,000-hour pattern behind expert performance. She benchmarks the best existing practices in her industry, treating today’s high watermark as tomorrow’s starting line, then looks for trends and designs a new approach that rides just ahead of that curve. Because such an answer demands new skills and systems, she accepts that she will have to reinvent parts of herself and her business to implement it. Asking and answering big, specific questions in this way becomes an engine for continuous innovation rather than a one-off brainstorming exercise, because Extraordinary results require a Great Answer.

Part III – Extraordinary Results: Unlocking the Possibilities Within You

Chapter 13 – Live with Purpose

🎯 On a cold Christmas Eve in 1843 London, Ebenezer Scrooge goes to bed a joyless miser whose life revolves around counting coins in his office and sitting alone with his money at night. Haunted first by his dead partner Jacob Marley and then by spirits of the past, present, and future, he is forced to watch how his choices have left him isolated and how they will condemn both him and the people around him to needless suffering. Awakening to discover it is still Christmas morning, he seizes the second chance, secretly sending a prize turkey to Bob Cratchit’s family, pledging generous charity in the streets, and asking to be welcomed at his nephew’s festive table. Over time he becomes a benefactor, raising Bob’s wages, finding doctors for Tiny Tim, and using his wealth to lift up the very people he had once exploited or ignored. Where he once saved money and used people, he now uses money to save people, turning his business acumen into a tool for compassion. The contrast shows how a change in purpose—from hoarding to helping—reorders every decision, from how you spend your time to how you spend your income. Purpose here means choosing a “Big Why” that is larger than comfort or status and letting that answer guide your goals, your career, and even the level of wealth you aim for, so that happiness comes not from what you acquire but from what your efforts allow you to contribute. Happiness happens on the way to fulfillment.

Chapter 14 – Live by Priority

📌 Lewis Carroll’s Alice meets the Cheshire Cat at a fork in the road and asks which way she ought to go, only to be told that if she does not care where she ends up, it does not much matter which path she takes. Once you do care—once you have a purpose—you must replace “What shall I do?” with “What should I do?” and connect your future destination to what you tackle today. Goal Setting to the Now walks backward from a vague “someday” vision to a five-year target, a one-year milestone, this month, this week, today, and finally the ONE Thing you can do right now, like lining up nested dominoes or Russian dolls. This structure helps override Hyperbolic discounting, the tendency to trade a big future win for a smaller immediate reward simply because it is close at hand. In studies where students who visualized the study process rather than just the exam outcome started earlier, studied more often, and earned higher grades, the advantage came from focusing on the next concrete step rather than the distant finish line. Writing down annual and monthly targets, then reviewing them weekly and daily, turns aspiration into a chain of specific commitments your present self can actually keep. Treating each day as an opportunity to choose the ONE Thing that keeps your week, month, year, and someday vision aligned makes every focused action a small promise kept to your future self. There can only be ONE.

Chapter 15 – Live for Productivity

⚙️ The morning after his terrifying night with the spirits, Scrooge proves his transformation by racing to buy an enormous turkey for the Cratchits, pledging money to a charity collector he had scorned the day before, and shocking Bob Cratchit with both a raise and a warmth he had never shown. That burst of decisive behavior illustrates that purpose and priority only become a new life when they are translated into productive action. In modern offices, professionals swear by different calendars and apps, yet the real measure of a time-management system is the income and results it produces, because everyone has the same hours to spend. The most productive people carve out large, uninterrupted blocks of time for their ONE Thing, letting “everything else” crowd into the leftover space instead of the other way around. They treat these morning blocks—often four hours—as nonnegotiable appointments with themselves and push meetings, e-mails, and small tasks to the afternoon. Ideas like Paul Graham’s distinction between a maker’s long, quiet stretches and a manager’s hour-by-hour schedule, and Jerry Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” calendar of daily X’s, show how consistent time blocking builds momentum and mastery. To support this, the chapter recommends blocking vacations and rest first, then your daily ONE Thing, and finally weekly planning time that links present tasks to annual and someday goals. Protecting these blocks means learning to say no, building a distraction-free bunker, and immediately rescheduling any block you are forced to erase so your most important work never quietly disappears. The people who achieve extraordinary results don’t achieve them by working more hours.

Chapter 16 – The Three Commitments

🤝 Jigoro Kano, founder of judo, asked to be buried in his white belt so that even at death he would be remembered as a lifelong beginner, a man forever on the path of mastery. That story anchors the first of three commitments: treating mastery not as a destination but as an ongoing journey where you keep relearning the basics, time-block practice, and steadily let “time on task, over time” carry you beyond natural talent. K. Anders Ericsson’s research on expert performance showed that about ten years and 10,000 hours of deliberate, focused work—roughly four hours a day on weekdays—let ordinary people achieve extraordinary skills when they protect those hours like appointments. The second commitment is to move from the default “Entrepreneurial” way of working, where you rely only on raw ability and enthusiasm until you hit a ceiling, to a “Purposeful” approach that constantly seeks better models, systems, and training to get things done the best they can be done. Instead of endlessly hacking at firewood with the same old axe, a purposeful person asks where to find a chainsaw, embraces uncomfortable new methods, and refuses to settle on the “OK Plateau” of good-enough performance. The third commitment is to live the accountability cycle: seeking reality, owning your role in it, finding solutions, and getting on with it, instead of avoiding reality, blaming others, making excuses, and waiting and hoping. Two managers facing a sudden drop in business dramatize the difference, as the accountable one studies the facts, changes tactics, and recovers, while the victimized one insists it is not his job and lets results slide. Because it is hard to see your own blind spots, it helps to enlist an accountability partner or coach—someone empowered to tell you the truth, expect progress reports, and help you benchmark and trend toward higher performance. Following the path of mastery, working purposefully instead of just naturally, and letting accountability guide your choices turns daily time blocks for your ONE Thing into a compounding engine for extraordinary results, because Time on a task, over time, eventually beats talent every time.

Chapter 17 – The Four Thieves

🦹 In the 1973 “Good Samaritan” study at Princeton University, seminary students were told either that they were late for a talk or had plenty of time, then walked past a man slumped in a doorway coughing and in distress; 90 percent of those who believed they were late failed to stop, even when their talk was literally about the parable of the Good Samaritan. That experiment shows how good intentions can be hijacked, and four recurring thieves similarly rob everyday productivity: the inability to say no, fear of chaos, poor health habits, and an environment that does not support your goals. Every yes must be defended by many nos, so protecting what you have committed to means saying no to anyone or anything that could derail you, as Steve Jobs did when he cut Apple’s product line from 350 offerings to ten. Fear of chaos appears when deep focus causes e-mail, errands, and secondary duties to pile up; yet anything built with intense passion, as Francis Ford Coppola notes, inevitably invites disorder, so progress depends on accepting a manageable level of mess while you work your time block. Poor health habits quietly drain energy when people sacrifice sleep, skip meals, and neglect exercise in the name of success, trading short-term output for long-term burnout; a daily energy plan of meditation or prayer, nutritious food, movement, connection with loved ones, and clear calendaring helps reverse that bargain. The last thief lurks in your surroundings: people whose attitudes, health habits, and success levels pull you down, and physical environments so full of distractions that you never reach your bunker for deep work. Research by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler shows that close friends’ obesity and happiness levels spread through a network, and studies of schoolchildren’s friendship circles show that having high-achieving friends raises grades; similarly, hanging out with success-minded people and building a distraction-resistant workspace creates an “upward spiral” for your own habits. Saying no often, accepting some chaos, managing energy deliberately, and taking ownership of your environment together keep these thieves from stealing the time and focus your ONE Thing requires, and remind you that Saying yes to everyone is the same as saying yes to nothing.

Chapter 18 – The Journey

🛤️ A father, trying to buy quiet time, tore a magazine picture of the world into pieces and challenged his son to reassemble it, only to see the boy finish in minutes because, looking through the glass-top table, he had noticed a man printed on the back and realized that if he put the man together, the world would fall into place. That story serves as a metaphor for success starting on the inside: when you get your own purpose and priorities straight, your outer world aligns more easily. Keller suggests testing how big your life could be by taking your current income, multiplying it several times over, and honestly asking whether your current actions could reach that number in five years, then applying the same stretch thinking to spiritual growth, health, relationships, and contribution. Living large begins with imagining a bigger life, but the only way to reach it is to go small in the present: picking ONE Thing that matters most and giving it disproportionate time and effort, as planting one small apple tree and tending it can eventually yield an orchard. Actions build on action, habits on habits, and success on success, so you cannot skip to the last tile in the domino run; you must start the sequence with the first focused step and keep lining up the next. A Cherokee grandfather’s tale of two wolves—Fear and Faith—underscores that whichever mindset you “feed” with your choices will win, and that feeding Faith means trusting your purpose and priorities enough to act even when outcomes are uncertain. Research with the dying by hospice nurse Bronnie Ware shows that the greatest regrets late in life are not the mistakes people made but the chances they never took, especially the courage they did not show to live a life true to themselves rather than one others expected. Psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec likewise found that over time, inactions plague people more than actions. Knowing this, living each day with your ONE Thing at the top of your mind and schedule becomes a way to minimize future regret by always doing what matters most now, because You are the first domino.

—Note: The above summary follows the Bard Press hardcover first edition (1 April 2013; 240 pp.; ISBN 978-1-885167-77-4).

== Background & reception ==```

🖋️ Author & writing. Gary Keller is the co-founder and executive chairman of Keller Williams Realty; Jay Papasan is a senior content leader at the company. Before this book, Keller’s business writing included the national-bestselling The Millionaire Real Estate Agent (2004), positioning the new title as a general-audience guide rather than a real-estate manual. He has said the core idea arose from years of coaching when he shortened long task lists to one “Focusing Question.” A contemporaneous interview summarized the approach as prioritization plus distraction management. Reviewers also noted the coach-like tone.

📈 Commercial reception. Keller Williams reported that, as of 4 May 2013, the book had reached #1 on the Wall Street Journal business list, #2 on the New York Times Advice/How-To list, and sold more than 60,000 copies in its first month. WSJ also listed the title on its combined best-seller chart for the week ended 28 April 2013.

👍 Praise. Publishers Weekly highlighted the book’s “appealing style and energy.” The National called it a practical guide that “banishes multitasking and to-do lists to the bin,” foregrounding focus on the most important task. Quartz (via Yahoo syndication) likewise underscored the claim that highly successful people are known for “one thing.”

👎 Criticism. Kirkus Reviews judged that the book offers “encouraging bones of advice worth gnawing on” but is “absent substantial meat” and “skirted specifics.” Publishers Weekly similarly wrote that, despite its energy, “more intellectual substance would have helped.”

🌍 Impact & adoption. By May 2013 the authors had toured North America with a half-day seminar based on the book, reaching more than 12,000 business leaders. The title’s concepts have been included in corporate learning libraries via services such as GetAbstract. Public-sector and nonprofit teams have circulated one-page guides for staff training—for example, a Texas statewide program distributed a summary of the book’s core ideas for team use.

Related content & more

YouTube videos

Load video

YouTube

YouTube might collect personal data. Privacy Policy

Continue Dismiss

Animated summary — The ONE Thing

Load video

YouTube

YouTube might collect personal data. Privacy Policy

Continue Dismiss

Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing

CapSach articles

Digital Minimalism

Four Thousand Weeks

Make Your Bed

The Magic of Thinking Big

The Compound Effect

CS/Self-improvement book summaries

Enjoyed this page?

📚If this page The One Thing inspired or helped you today, a small coffee helps us keep creating and sharing more. Your support truly matters.👏

💖 Buy CapSach a Coffee >