The key ideas

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

Gary Keller, Jay Papasan, 2013

You're busy from morning to night, yet your big goals somehow don't move. Gary Keller, founder of one of America's largest real estate companies, explains why: we spread ourselves across everything at once. His answer sounds simple and takes courage. Find the one thing that matters most and give it your best hours, while everything else waits.

Who it is for

For anyone whose to-do list is longer than the day, and whose important things keep getting put off. And for everyone who works hard but feels stuck in place.

It's not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it's that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.

Fourteen people instead of everything else

Gary Keller built a successful company in less than ten years. Then everything started going wrong. He worked harder than anyone, took on every task, and still the business stalled while his own life fell apart. So he asked an experienced coach for help. The coach studied the company's org chart for a long time, then told Keller he had to do exactly one thing: find fourteen strong people for the key positions.

Keller did just that. He stepped down as CEO and focused only on finding those people. Within a few years his company, Keller Williams, was growing about forty percent a year, and it kept up that pace for almost a decade. Later it became one of the largest real estate networks in the world.

Keller wrote the book about this with Jay Papasan. Its idea fits in a single line: extraordinary results depend on how narrow you can make your focus. Not doing more, but doing less, and only what truly moves everything else.

Next, you'll see why success is built one domino at a time, which six familiar beliefs Keller calls lies, and which single question helps you choose what matters most, for today and for your whole life.

A small domino knocks down a huge one

In 1983 the physicist Lorne Whitehead described a simple experiment. A falling domino can knock over not just one of the same size, but one about one and a half times bigger than itself. Line them up so each domino is larger than the last, and the growth becomes explosive.

Keller and his co-author worked out where this leads. The eighteenth domino would be as tall as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The twenty-third would be taller than the Eiffel Tower. And the fifty-seventh would almost reach from the Earth to the Moon. It all starts with a domino just a couple of inches tall. Each one falls from the smallest push, and together they travel an incredible distance.

This is the book's central idea. Success is built sequentially, not simultaneously. You can't knock over all the dominoes at once. You can only knock over one, the right one, and it will push the next.

The mistake is expecting a breakthrough in everything at once: work, health, money and relationships. Keller suggests looking each day for the one domino that will start the chain, and pushing it until it falls.

Read in Livria

About the author

Gary Keller founded the real estate company Keller Williams in Texas and grew it into one of the largest in the world. Jay Papasan, his co-author, ran the company's publishing arm for many years.

All books by this author: Gary Keller, Jay Papasan

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results Quiz

Terms from the book

  • Jobs
  • Multitasking
  • Pareto
  • Baumeister
  • Mischel
  • Willpower
  • Habit
  • Lally
  • Juran
  • Patterson
  • Pareto Principle
  • Keller Williams: An American real estate company that Gary Keller founded in 1983 in Austin, Texas. Over time it became one of the largest real estate networks in the world.
  • Whitehead: Lorne Whitehead, a Canadian physicist. In 1983 he described in a scientific paper how a falling domino can knock over another one about one and a half times its size.
  • Juggler: A performer who tosses and catches several objects in a row. Keller uses the juggler as an image: at any given moment, a juggler catches and throws only one ball.
  • Curly: The cowboy in the 1991 American comedy City Slickers, played by Jack Palance. Keller quotes his words about the one thing that matters in life.
  • Focusing Question: The book's main tool: what's the one thing you can do such that, by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary? This is Keller's own wording.
  • Time block: A stretch of your calendar set aside in advance for one task and protected from meetings, calls and email. Keller suggests giving your one thing about four hours a day.

All terms

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