The ONE Thing

Gary Keller’s The ONE Thing is a great primer on goal-setting, focus and discipline. If you only take one thing from this book, the question you need to ask for everything is simple and deceptively powerful:“What’s the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary?”‍Throughout The ONE Thing, Keller emphasises heavily the value of the 80/20 or Pareto principle in getting to what you want in life. This is also an underlying theme in Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. Both of these books teach you to live a disciplined life focused on the most important things, and to ignore the trivial distractions. Pareto’s law of 80% of outputs are driven by 20% of inputs is a predictable law of nature, not just an interesting theory. One of my favourite quotes from this book reads like a modern-day Chinese proverb:“If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one. ” —Gary Keller, The ONE Thing