Quick Tip – Find Your One Thing

Rank your priorities and focus on the top – Issue #75

“What’s the One Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” – Gary Keller

Focus is a powerful tool. The people who achieve the greatest success tend to be the ones who have an almost maniacal focus on one goal. When they wake up every day, making progress toward that goal is all that matters.

You may or may not enjoy Stephen King’s books, but you have to admit that he is a prolific and successful author. He has published 83 novels and written over 200 short stories.

How can he crank out so many books? Well, he is very rigid about his writing habits and tightly focused on one thing: writing 2,000 words every single day.

Every weekday. Every weekend. Every holiday.

He isolates himself and follows the same routine every day. When it is time to write, he tries to sit in the same seat and arranges his work in the same manner.

Focus.

He finishes the first drafts of his books in no more than three months. If you’ve ever tried to write a book, you know how impressive that it is.

You may be thinking, “That’s nice. I’m glad that he can focus on one thing and spend so much time writing. But that’s because he’s Stephen King.”

Well, he doesn’t have this luxury of focus because he’s “Stephen King.” He’s become the successful Stephen King that everyone knows because he has that focus.

We all have busy lives with a million and one things demanding our time. Some of those things are necessary, but many are self-imposed. We could put our phones and laptops away at night and refuse to be distracted by social media, messages, and Netflix.

Find your one thing that you want to achieve more than anything else. Find the smallest, most important thing you can focus on now that will set up the next thing you can focus on tomorrow.

Carve away all of the unnecessary distractions and devote your time and energy to that goal. Success takes focus, steady progress, and patience.

Choose one thing and give it everything that you have.