The Five Big Ideas

1. Not everything matters equally.

2. Multitasking is a lie.

3. Discipline is a result of habit.

4. Willpower is a finite resource.

5. Big is bad.

Domino Effect

• Getting extraordinary results is all about creating a domino effect in your life.

• The key is over time. Success is built sequentially. It’s one thing at a time.

Everything Matters Equally

When everything feels urgent and important, everything seems equal. We become active and busy, but this doesn’t actually move us any closer to success. Activity is often unrelated to productivity, and busyness rarely takes care of business.

“The things which are most important don’t always scream the loudest.” — Bob Hawke

Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.

The majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do. Extraordinary results are disproportionately created by fewer actions than most realise.

No matter the task, mission, or goal. Big or small. Start with as large a list as you want, but develop the mindset that you will whittle your way from there to the critical few and not stop until you end with the essential ONE.

There will always be just a few things that matter more than the rest, and out of those, one will matter most.

Multitasking is a lie

When you try to do two things at once, you either can’t or won’t do either well.

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.

Researchers estimate that workers are interrupted every 11 minutes and then spend almost a third of their day recovering from these distractions.

A Disciplined Life

When you discipline yourself, you’re essentially training yourself to act in a specific way. Stay with this long enough and it becomes routine—in other words, a habit.

You can become successful with less discipline than you think, for one simple reason: success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right.

The trick to success is to choose the right habit and bring just enough discipline to establish it.

When you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything.

It takes an average of 66 days to acquire a new habit.

Those with the right habits seem to do better than others. They’re doing the most important thing regularly and, as a result, everything else is easier.

A Balanced Life

No matter how hard you try, there will always be things left undone at the end of your day, week, month, year, and life. Trying to get them all done is folly. When the things that matter most get done, you’ll still be left with a sense of things being undone—a sense of imbalance. Leaving some things undone is a necessary tradeoff for extraordinary results.

To achieve an extraordinary result you must choose what matters most and give it all the time it demands. This requires getting extremely out of balance in relation to all other work issues, with only infrequent counterbalancing to address them.

When you act on your priority, you’ll automatically go out of balance, giving more time to one thing over another.

What you build today will either empower or restrict you tomorrow.

Achievement and abundance show up because they’re the natural outcomes of doing the right things with no limits attached.

We overthink, over-plan, and over-analyse our careers, our businesses, and our lives; that long hours are neither virtuous nor healthy; and that we usually succeed in spite of most of what we do, not because of it. We can’t manage time. The key to success isn’t in all the things we do but in the handful of things we do well.

The Focusing Question

One of the most empowering moments of Keller’s life came when he realised that life is a question and how we live it is our answer.

How we phrase the questions we ask ourselves determines the answers that eventually become our life.

Extraordinary results are rarely happenstance. They come from the choices we make and the actions we take.

The Focusing Question always aims you at the absolute best of both by forcing you to do what is essential to success—make a decision.

To stay on track for the best possible day, month, year, or career, you must keep asking the Focusing Question.

The Focusing Question collapses all possible questions into one: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Live with Purpose

Our purpose sets our priority and our priority determines the productivity

Who we are and where we want to go determine what we do and what we accomplish.

How circumstances affect us depends on how we interpret them as they relate to our life.

Once we get what we want, our happiness sooner or later wanes because we quickly become accustomed to what we acquire.

Happiness happens on the way to fulfilment.

Live by Priority

Purpose without priority is powerless.

Live for Productivity

The most successful people are the most productive people.

If disproportionate results come from one activity, then you must give that one activity disproportionate time.

To achieve extraordinary results and experience greatness, time block these three things in the following order:

1. Time block your time off

2. Time block your ONE Thing

3. Time block your planning time

Resting is as important as working.

The most productive people, the ones who experience extraordinary results, design their days around doing their ONE Thing.

Block time as early in your day as you possibly can.

Keller’s recommendation is to block four hours a day.