1: Start with The Focusing Question

Free Course: The One Thing 1: Start with The Focusing Question

The One Thing presents us with a simple path to success: Determine the ONE most important priority in each of the major categories of your life — and then work backward from there; chunking down your ONE thing into smaller single things that you can do this year, this month, this week, this day, and in this very moment.

But how do you figure out what’s most important?

You use the Focusing Question:

What’s the ONE Thing you can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

☝️ You’ll want to write that down…

Because the entire book revolves around that single question – and the power of organizing every area of your life around ONE Thing (per area).

The Domino Effect

The key to success is to first identify the ONE thing that matters most in each of the important areas of your life (personal, business, career, health, etc).

Think of these as your long-term or “someday” goals.

Once you’ve figured that out, line up your dominos—and knock ’em down one-by-one—until you’ve arrived at your goal.

Simple right? …Actually, yeah it is. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.

The ONE Thing in Action

Bill Gates is a great example of The ONE Thing lifestyle in action. I’ve got my fair share of opinions about him, and I’m sure you do too, but let’s set them aside for a bit for the sake of this example:

↓ Bill’s ONE passion in high school was computers.

↓ This led him to develop ONE skill, computer programming.

↓ In high school, he got ONE job in the computer programming field.

↓ Which led to him eventually starting ONE company – Microsoft.

↓ Bill’s company, Microsoft focused on ONE thing — the development and sale of BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800,

↓ which eventually made Bill the ONE richest man in the world for 15 years in a row.

↓ After Bill retired from Microsoft, he and his then-wife Melinda formed ONE foundation that focused on ONE Thing: to tackle some of the world’s “really tough problems” like health and education.

↓ The majority of the foundation’s money went to ONE area, their Global Health Program — which had ONE goal: the use of science and technology to save lives in poor countries…

↓ To do this, they settled on finding a solution to the ONE major cause of death — infectious disease…

↓ The ONE solution they came up with was vaccination. Because it’s the ONE most impactful thing they can put their money towards to solve their ONE ultimate focus: to tackle some of the world’s “really tough problems.”

☝️ See how it all ties together?

That’s it for this lesson.

Next up, we’ll go a little deeper – by looking at how you can use the Focusing Question to find your ONE Thing at any given moment.