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25 Helpful Insights That Will Help You Complete Your Most Urgent and Important Work Each Day
Never do the second most important thing first. That’s just such simple, fantastic advice, and if I had to boil down Gary Keller’s book to just one sentence, that would be it. Your One Thing is whatever it is absolutely critical for you to do next, and ideally, it would be in service of your larger One Thing, which would be what you’d like your entire life to be about.
For example, my One Thing is reading (or, at least that’s one major focus of my life), and so any time that I spend doing something else besides reading is time that I am never going to get back, that I could have used to advance in the area that’s most important to me — reading. Your One Thing could be baseball, or winning a sales competition at your firm, or painting. Whatever it is, everything else is a distraction.
Gary Keller is himself one of the most successful real estate agents and entrepreneurs in America, and so his One Thing was selling houses, before his One Thing became teaching. His work is very similar — and complimentary to — Greg McKeown’s work, especially his book, Essentialism. Being an essentialist is all about subordinating all the things you could do, to the few things that are actually essential.
