The One Thing Book Summary

The One Thing Book Summary Preview

Ever had one of those days where you promised yourself you’d do something, but you continue to put it off instead? Maybe you promised you’d go to the gym, but you skip the workout and head home instead. Or maybe you’ve been trying to get a passion project off the ground, but you can’t seem to find the time to work on it. 

The key to following through with your goals might be simpler than you think. In fact, simplicity is the aim of The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. This book helps you narrow your focus to one primary thing at which you can excel. Then, it guides you through developing the tools to successfully get the one thing you’re most passionate about getting.

Ready for some extraordinary results? First, you’ve got to dream big.

Dream Big

Think of your biggest, wildest dream. For this exercise, the bigger the better.

Now that you have that dream in mind, what if I asked you to go ahead and achieve it? 

Most people would argue that attempting to reach that dream is useless because the dream feels impossible to achieve. It's too big. You might wonder why anyone bothers to have big dreams at all since the likelihood of achieving them might feel smaller and smaller with each passing day. 

However, failing to dream big leads to, well… smaller things. Which can be ok, but why strive for that?

JK Rowling, when she first wrote Harry Potter, wasn’t thinking to herself that she would just write a single book. Even as she was writing the very first book, she knew there would be seven. Arthur Guinness, when purchasing his first brewery, got a lease for 9,000 years. Neither of them failed to dream big, and it paid off BIG time. 

Thinking big is scary. Having dreams is scary. Especially if you’ve experienced failure. However, if it weren’t for thinking big, much of our scientific expansion wouldn’t have happened. A man on the moon seemed impossible at one point, but because of expansive thinking, it became possible.

Let yourself dream big, or you risk missing possibilities and opportunities. 

Dream big, and determine what you would like to accomplish. This is ONE thing on which you want to focus all of your energy.

Got it? Good! Let's step into action!

Know how to prioritize your to-do list

Every item on your to-do list is not equally important. 

When Joseph M. Juran was working for General Motors, he noticed most of the errors made in the manufacturing of cars were from only a few specific production flaws. A few flaws created a lot of mistakes. Juran called this finding the “Pareto Principle” After Pareto, an economist, who had shown that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people. His findings were echoed when Juran realized that 20% of the errors had caused 80% of the flaws. He speculated that the 80/20 principle could be a universal law.

This principle has been found replicated in many things, from nature to sales records (20% of...

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