The ONE Thing
It has been a week since I started reading “The ONE Thing” by Gary Keller. The book was on my reading list for a long time. It is a book on themes that I think about continuously, such as productivity, working without distractions on one thing until you are very good at it.
Generalist or specialist?
One of the most important things I’m uncertain about is whether focusing on one thing is good. I am by nature a generalist which means I want to do many things simultaneously. At the time of writing this, I am involved in several projects. I am building a simple trivia app with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I’m learning Solidity, a programming language for building things on the Ethereum blockchain.
I research and write on topics related to decentralized finance. At the moment, I’m working on an article about decentralized FX trading — how blockchain technology can change Forex trading and the protocols building in the field. I also backtest several currency trading strategies.
I love working on many things at the same time. On the other hand, I’m not sure that this is the correct way to do things. Starting reading “The ONE thing” may notsettle the question for me but hopefully it will provide some insights alone the way. I’ll summarize each chapter as I read the book. This will crystallize the concepts mentioned in the book.
The first chapter asks what seems like a rhetoric question. Why do some people achieve great things while others don’t? Why do some people tend to succeed more than others? The main reason is that they go small. What “going small” means is that you start doing what you should do and ignore all other things. Not all things in your life and career are of the same priority. Since your time is finite, you should only do things that matter and ignore everything else.
To conclude, in order to achieve you should be staring at ONE thing. And to do this, you should go as small as possible.
Domino effect. When you start doing things in this way, i.e, one thing at a time, you will get extraordinary results. Since you’ll focus all your energy and time on one thing, you’ll be working on it until it is done. This approach works because huge success is sequential not simultaneous.
Once you focus on ONE thing, your linear progress becomes geometric.
ONE thing is behind most stories of huge success. If you look at most successful men, you’ll see ONE passion, ONE skill, ONE business, or ONE person. As Vince Lombardi put it, success demands the singleness of the purpose.
The hard part is that the modern technologies created not only opportunities and possibilities but also problems and challenges. We are getting more and more information which can be overwhelming. Drowning in an information ocean, we don’t know which ONE goal out of several our goals we should pursue. Though we feel that to accomplish more we should focus on less, we don’t know where to start; and we cannot catch either of the proverbial rabbits by chasing both.
