The ONE Thing Read online

  —General George S. Patton

  Often, the line between passion and skill can be blurry. That’s because they’re almost always connected. Pat Matthews, one of America’s great impressionist painters, says he turned his passion for painting into a skill, and ultimately a profession, by simply painting one painting a day. Angelo Amorico, Italy’s most successful tour guide, says he developed his skills and ultimately his business from his singular passion for his country and the deep desire to share it with others. This is the story line for extraordinary success stories. Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.

  Gilbert Tuhabonye’s one passion is running. Gilbert is an American long-distance runner born in Songa, Burundi, whose early love of track and field helped him win the Burundi National Championship in the men’s 400 and 800 meters while only a junior in high school. This passion helped save his life.

  On October 21, 1993, members of the Hutu tribe invaded Gilbert’s high school and captured the students of the Tutsi tribe. Those not immediately killed were beaten and burned alive in a nearby building. After nine hours buried beneath burning bodies, Gilbert managed to escape and outrun his captors to the safety of a nearby hospital. He was the lone survivor.

  “Success demands singleness of purpose.”

  — Vince Lombardi

  He came to Texas and kept competing, honing his skills. Recruited by Abilene Christian University, Gilbert earned All-America honors six times. After graduation he moved to Austin, where by all accounts he is the most popular running coach in the city. To drill for water in Burundi, he cofounded the Gazelle Foundation, whose main fundraiser is—wait for it—“Run for the Water,” a sponsored run through the streets of Austin. Do you see the theme running through his life?

  From competitor to survivor, from college to career to charity, Gilbert Tuhabonye’s passion for running became a skill that led to a profession that opened up an opportunity to give back. The smile he greets fellow runners with on the trails around Austin’s Lady Bird Lake symbolizes how one passion can become one skill, and together ignite and define an extraordinary life.

  The ONE Thing shows up time and again in the lives of the successful because it’s a fundamental truth. It showed up for me, and if you let it, it will show up for you. Applying the ONE Thing to your work—and in your life—is the simplest and smartest thing you can do to propel yourself toward the success you want.

  ONE LIFE

  If I had to choose only one example of someone who has harnessed the ONE Thing to build an extraordinary life, it would be American businessman Bill Gates. Bill’s one passion in high school was computers, which led him to develop one skill, computer programming. While in high school he met one person, Paul Allen, who gave him his first job and became his partner in forming Microsoft. This happened as the result of one letter they sent to one person, Ed Roberts, who changed their lives forever by giving them a shot at writing the code for one computer, the Altair 8800—and they needed only one shot. Microsoft began its life to do one thing, develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, which eventually made Bill Gates the richest man in the world for 15 straight years. When he retired from Microsoft, Bill chose one person to replace him as CEO— Steve Ballmer, whom he met in college. By the way, Steve was Microsoft’s 30th employee but the first business manager hired by Bill. And the story doesn’t end there.

  Bill and Melinda Gates decided to put their wealth to work making a difference in the world. Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, they formed one foundation to do ONE Thing: to tackle “really tough problems” like health and education. Since its inception, the majority of the foundation’s grants have gone to one area, Bill and Melinda’s Global Health Program. This ambitious program’s one goal is to harness advances in science and technology to save lives in poor countries. To do this they eventually settled on one thing— stamp out infectious disease as a major cause of death in their lifetime. At some point in their journey, they made a decision to focus on one thing that would do this—vaccines. Bill explained the decision by saying, “We had to choose what the most impactful thing to give would be... . The magic tool of health intervention is vaccines, because they can be made inexpensively.” A singular line of questioning led them down this one path when Melinda asked, “Where’s the place you can have the biggest impact with the money?” Bill and Melinda Gates are living proof of the power of the ONE Thing.

  ONE THING

  The doors to the world have been flung wide open, and the view that’s available is staggering. Through technology and innovation, opportunities abound and possibilities seem endless. As inspiring as this can be, it can be equally overwhelming. The unintended consequence of abundance is that we are bombarded with more information and choices in a day than our ancestors received in a lifetime. Harried and hurried, a nagging sense that we attempt too much and accomplish too little haunts our days.

  We sense intuitively that the path to more is through less, but the question is, Where to begin? From all that life has to offer, how do you choose? How do you make the best decisions possible, experience life at an extraordinary level, and never look back?

  Live the ONE Thing.

  What Curly knew, all successful people know. The ONE Thing sits at the heart of success and is the starting point for achieving extraordinary results. Based on research and real-life experience, it’s a big idea about success wrapped in a disarmingly simple package. Explaining it is easy; buying into it can be tough.

  So, before we can have a frank, heart-to-heart discussion about how the ONE Thing actually works, I want to openly discuss the myths and misinformation that keep us from accepting it. They are the lies of success.

  Once we banish these from our minds, we can take up the ONE Thing with an open mind and a clear path.

  1

  THE LIES

  THEY MISLEAD AND DERAIL US

  “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

  —Mark Twain

  THE TROUBLE WITH “TRUTHINESS”

  In 2003, Merriam-Webster began analyzing searches on their online dictionary to determine the “Word of the Year.” The idea was that since online searches for words reveal whatever is on our collective minds, then the most searched-for word should capture the spirit of the times. The debut winner delivered. On the heels of the invasion of Iraq, it seems everyone wanted to know what “democracy” really meant. The next year, “blog,” a little made-up word that described a new way to communicate, topped the list. After all the political scandals of 2005, “integrity” earned top honors.

  Then, in 2006, Merriam-Webster added a twist. Site visitors could nominate candidates and subsequently vote on the “Word of the Year.” You could say it was an effort to instill a quantitative exercise with qualitative feedback, or you could just call it good marketing. The winner, by a five-to-one landslide, was “truthiness,” a word comedian Stephen Colbert coined as “truth that comes from the gut, not books” on the debut episode of his Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report. In an Information Age driven by round-the-clock news, ranting talk radio, and editorless blogging, truthiness captures all the incidental, accidental, and even intentional falsehoods that sound just “truthy” enough for us to accept as true.

  The problem is we tend to act on what we believe even when what we believe isn’t anything we should. As a result, buying into The ONE Thing becomes difficult because we’ve unfortunately bought into too many others—and more often than not those “other things” muddle our thinking, misguide our actions, and sidetrack our success.

  Life is too short to chase unicorns. It’s too precious to rely on a rabbit’s foot. The real
solutions we seek are almost always hiding in plain sight; unfortunately, they’ve usually been obscured by an unbelievable amount of bunk, an astounding flood of “common sense” that turns out to be nonsense. Ever hear your boss evoke the frog-in-boiling-water metaphor? (“Toss a frog into a pot of hot water and it will jump right back out. But if you place a frog in lukewarm water and slowly raise the temperature, it will boil to death.”) It’s a lie—a very truthy lie, but a lie nonetheless. Anyone ever tell you “fish stink from the head down”? Not true. Just a fish tale that actually turns out to be fishy. Ever hear about how the explorer Cortez burned his ships on arriving at the Americas to motivate his men? Not true. Another lie. “Bet on the jockey, not the horse!” has long been a rallying cry for placing your faith in a company’s leadership. However, as a betting strategy, this maxim will put you on the fast track to the pauper’s house, which makes you wonder how it ever became a maxim at all. Over time, myths and mistruths get thrown around so often they eventually feel familiar and start to sound like the truth.

  Then we start basing important decisions on them.

  The challenge we all face when forming our success strategies is that, just like tales of frogs, fish, explorers, and jockeys, success has its own lies too. “I just have too much that has to be done.” “I’ll get more done by doing things at the same time.” “I need to be a more disciplined person.” “I should be able to do what I want whenever I want.” “I need more balance in my life.” “Maybe I shouldn’t dream so big.” Repeat these thoughts often enough and they become the six lies about success that keep us from living The ONE Thing.

  THE SIX LIES BETWEEN YOU AND SUCCESS

  Everything Matters Equally

  Multitasking

  A Disciplined Life

  Willpower Is Always on Will-Call

  A Balanced Life

  Big Is Bad

  The six lies are beliefs that get into our heads and become operational principles driving us the wrong way. Highways that end as bunny trails. Fool’s gold that diverts us from the mother lode. If we’re going to maximize our potential, we’re going to have to make sure we put these lies to bed.

  4 EVERYTHING MATTERS EQUALLY

  “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Equality is a worthy ideal pursued in the name of justice and human rights. In the real world of results, however, things are never equal. No matter how teachers grade—two students are not equal. No matter how fair officials try to be—contests are not equal. No matter how talented people are—no two are ever equal. A dime equals ten cents and people must absolutely be treated fairly, but in the world of achievement everything doesn’t matter equally.

  Equality is a lie.

  Understanding this is the basis of all great decisions.

  So, how do you decide? When you have a lot to get done in the day, how do you decide what to do first? As kids, we mostly did things we needed to do when it was time to do them. It’s breakfast time. It’s time to go to school, time to do homework, time to do chores, bath time, bedtime. Then, as we got older, we were given a measure of discretion. You can go out and play as long as you get your homework done before dinner. Later, as we became adults, everything became discretionary. It all became our choice. And when our lives are defined by our choices, the all-important question becomes, How do we make good ones?

  Complicating matters, the older we get, it seems there is more and more piled on that we believe “simply must get done.” Overbooked, overextended, and overcommitted. “In the weeds” overwhelmingly becomes our collective condition.

  That’s when the battle for the right of way gets fierce and frantic. Lacking a clear formula for making decisions, we get reactive and fall back on familiar, comfortable ways to decide what to do. As a result, we haphazardly select approaches that undermine our success. Pinballing through our day like a confused character in a B-horror movie, we end up running up the stairs instead of out the front door. The best decision gets traded for any decision, and what should be progress simply becomes a trap.

  When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. We become active and busy, but this doesn’t actually move us any closer to success. Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business.

  “The things which are most important don’t always scream the loudest.”

  —Bob Hawke

  As Henry David Thoreau said, “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” Knocking out a hundred tasks for whatever the reason is a poor substitute for doing even one task that’s meaningful. Not everything matters equally, and success isn’t a game won by whoever does the most. Yet that is exactly how most play it on a daily basis.

  MUCH TO-DO ABOUT NOTHING

  To-do lists are a staple of the time-management-and-success industry. With our wants and others’ wishes flying at us right and left, we impulsively jot them down on scraps of paper in moments of clarity or build them methodically on printed notepads. Time planners reserve valuable space for daily, weekly, and monthly task lists. Apps abound for taking to-dos mobile, and software programs code them right into their menus. It seems that everywhere we turn we’re encouraged to make lists—and though lists are invaluable, they have a dark side.

  While to-dos serve as a useful collection of our best intentions, they also tyrannize us with trivial, unimportant stuff that we feel obligated to get done—because it’s on our list. Which is why most of us have a love-hate relationship with our to-dos. If allowed, they set our priorities the same way an inbox can dictate our day. Most inboxes overflow with unimportant e-mails masquerading as priorities. Tackling these tasks in the order we receive them is behaving as if the squeaky wheel immediately deserves the grease. But, as Australian prime minister Bob Hawke duly noted, “The things which are most important don’t always scream the loudest.”

  Achievers operate differently. They have an eye for the essential. They pause just long enough to decide what matters and then allow what matters to drive their day. Achievers do sooner what others plan to do later and defer, perhaps indefinitely, what others do sooner. The difference isn’t in intent, but in right of way. Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.

  Left in its raw state, as a simple inventory, a to-do list can easily lead you astray. A to-do list is simply the things you think you need to do; the first thing on your list is just the first thing you thought of. To-do lists inherently lack the intent of success. In fact, most to-do lists are actually just survival lists—getting you through your day and your life, but not making each day a stepping-stone for the next so that you sequentially build a successful life. Long hours spent checking off a to-do list and ending the day with a full trash can and a clean desk are not virtuous and have nothing to do with success. Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list—a list that is purposefully created around extraordinary results.

  To-do lists tend to be long; success lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; the other aims you in a specific direction. One is a disorganized directory and the other is an organized directive. If a list isn’t built around success, then that’s not where it takes you. If your to-do list contains everything, then it’s probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.

  So how does a successful person turn a to-do list into a success list? With so many things you could do, how do you decide what matters most at any given moment on any given day?

  Just follow Juran’s lead.

  JURAN CRACKS THE CODE

  In the late ’30s a group of managers at General Motors made an intriguing discovery that opened the door for an amazing breakthrough. One of their card readers (input devices for early computers) started producing gibberish. While investigating the faulty machine, they stumbled on a way to encode secret messages. This was a big deal at the time. S
ince Germany’s infamous Enigma coding machines first appeared in World War I, both code making and code breaking were the stuff of high national security and even higher public curiosity. The GM managers quickly became convinced that their accidental cipher was unbreakable. One man, a visiting Western Electric consultant, disagreed. He took up the code-breaking challenge, worked into the night, and cracked the code by three o’clock the following morning. His name was Joseph M. Juran.

  Juran later cited this incident as the starting point for cracking an even bigger code and making one of his greatest contributions to science and business. As a result of his deciphering success, a GM executive invited him to review research on management compensation that followed a formula described by a little-known Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto. In the 19th century, Pareto had written a mathematical model for income distribution in Italy that stated that 80 percent of the land was owned by 20 percent of the people. Wealth was not evenly distributed. In fact, according to Pareto, it was actually concentrated in a highly predictable way. A pioneer of quality-control management, Juran had noticed that a handful of flaws would usually produce a majority of the defects. This imbalance not only rang true to his experience, but he suspected it might even be a universal law—and that what Pareto had observed might be bigger than even Pareto had imagined.

  While writing his seminal book Quality Control Handbook, Juran wanted to give a short name to the concept of the “vital few and trivial many.” One of the many illustrations in his manuscript was labeled “Pareto’s principle of unequal distribution... .” Where another might have called it Juran’s Rule, he called it Pareto’s Principle.