Nick Hutchison breaks down Gary Keller's The ONE Thing into five lessons: success builds like dominoes, the Pareto Principle means 20% of actions drive 80% of results, discipline becomes easier through habit, opportunity cost matters when choosing what to focus on, and nurturing positive thoughts wins over negative ones.
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Hello and welcome to episode number 16 of the brand new video series 5 Lessons Learned, brought to you by BookThinkers, where each and every week I'm going to discuss the top 5 lessons learned from a book that I've read and loved. This week I'm going to discuss The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. This book is about the surprisingly simple truths behind extraordinary results. I've used the lessons from this book everywhere over the past year, and I highly recommend this book to everyone. So without further ado, let's jump into lesson number 1. Lesson number 1 is that extraordinary success is sequential. What that means is that it's not happening simultaneously, one domino at a time. If you can picture one domino, when you knock over that domino, it's going to trigger a lot of other things to happen later on down the road. It's one domino at a time, it's one step at a time, it's sequential. All the dominoes don't fall at once. You need one single action to kick things off, and once you have momentum, you're pretty hard to stop. So that's lesson number 1: success is sequential, it does not happen simultaneously. Lesson number 2 has to do with the Pareto Principle. The Pareto principle, for those of you that aren't familiar with it, states that 80% of our success is going to come from just 20% of our actions, right? So in other words, extraordinary results are disproportionately created from fewer actions than people think. Just a set of your actions create most of your results. So what do we do? How do we find the one thing that's going to kick things off for us? What's the first domino? Well, you go into that 20% and you say, 80% of my success comes from this. So within that block of 20%, within that subset of actions, what 20% of those actions then create 80% of the success within that bracket? So you keep limiting yourself, you keep narrowing in on one action. And when you go through this a few times, you'll find that most of your success comes from just one action. That's the first domino. You need to double down on that, narrow things down. Success doesn't come from a list of 1,000 things that you complete, it comes from a subset of those actions that create the most results. So that's lesson number 2, narrowing in on that one thing using the Pareto principle. Lesson number 3 is that success actually takes much less discipline than you think it does. I always thought, okay, wow, this is pretty intimidating. I need to apply such an intense amount of discipline for the next 40 years of my life to achieve the amount of success I have. That's going to take a lot of willpower. It's not true because success isn't about doing everything right. It's about doing the right things. And when you establish the right things and you do them repeatedly in a short period of time with a lot of intensity, Then all of a sudden what happens, you form a habit. And once you form a habit, there's no more willpower involved. You just get up, you get out of bed, you do your routine, it's part of your habit, and you don't need to fight yourself every morning to become successful. Much less intimidating once you understand that principle. So that's number 3, it doesn't take as much discipline as you think it does. Lesson number 4 is one that I love talking about, and that's understanding opportunity cost. When you choose the one thing that you're going to do, the one thing that's going to set off all the other dominoes, it's imperative to understand what you're saying no to. Because if you choose one thing and that one thing is not the one that's going to bring you the most results, then you're forfeiting ground. You're giving up an opportunity to have more success later on down the road because you're lazy up front and you don't take the time to fully understand the decision you're making. So, opportunity cost is so important. Every time you say yes, it's imperative to understand what you're saying no to. Lesson number 5 is a fun one, and it's a passage that is directly out of the book. I'm going to read it here, and I love the message. I love what we're talking about. So, here it goes. One evening, an elder Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside of all of us. He said, my son, the battle is between 2 wolves. One is fear. It carries anxiety, concern, uncertainty, hesitancy, indecision, and inaction. The other is faith. It brings calm, conviction, confidence, enthusiasm, decisiveness, excitement, and action. The grandson thought about it for a moment and then meekly asked his grandfather, which wolf wins? And the old Cherokee replied, the one you feed. I love this message. Basically, in the way that I'm taking it, it's saying that if you use positive neuro-linguistic programming, meaning you focus and concentrate on positivity all the time, you only drink clear water, never muddy water, right? You filter out all the bad stuff and you just focus on good, positive, growth-oriented content. You're going to have good results. If you feed the positive side of yourself and then you program your brain, you will have great results. So that's lesson number 5, it's feed your brain positivity, filter out the bad stuff. If you've made it this far, thank you so much and we hope that you've enjoyed the top 5 lessons today. From The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. We loved this book, so definitely go out there and grab yourself a copy. If there's a book that you'd like to see us review, please DM us, message us, just comment. We'd love to review any book that you send our way. And then last but not least, if you'd like to connect with us a little bit more, check out bookthinkers.com.
