The Book Recommendation you did not ask for

In the beginning of 2023 I finally managed to dig out The One Thing from the bottom of my embarrassingly long TBR list.

That was probably the best decision ever. If you are going to read only one book this year, let it be this one.

The biggest challenge facing modern man is the number of things competing for your time and attention. Family, friends, hobbies, social media, numerous bestseller books you'll never read, numerous TV shows you will never watch, a never ending stream of emails and notifications blasting your phone. It never ends!

It's quite easy to think that because everything feels so urgent, then it must be important. Nothing is further from the truth though. 80% of the things you are chasing and doing are unnecessary and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Your job is to figure out what the 20% that truly matters is, go all in on that 20% and ruthlessly cut out everything else.

Essential few > Trivial many.

Allow me to share one framework from this book you can use in this coming week to significantly improve your productivity, and help you focus on what truly maters. Keller and Papasan merge the Pareto Principle and the Domino Effect to create a potent combination that can catapult you to success beyond your wildest dreams.

This is how to go about it:

1. Take an audit of your current activities in the dimension of your life you want to improve (financial, physical, spiritual, business, job, relationships, etc.)
2. Using the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule), identify the 20% of activities that give you 80% of the results you want. Use the 80/20 rule 3 times in a row?and you will eliminate 99.2% of unimportant and unnecessary tasks.
3. From what's left, ask yourself: "What is the ONE thing I can do to make everything else easier or unnecessary?" That's your first domino. Push that first domino and watch what happens. Here is a satisfying visual reference.

Here is the thing, running around after every thing in life (like a footless chicken), is costing you energy, success, productivity and years of your life you will never get back.

Pick one thing. Focus. Execute. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.

Read The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. I promise you, it will make a difference in your life.

What's your key takeaway from this post?