The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results: Achieve your goals with one of the world's bestselling success books

The problem is we tend to act on what we believe even when what we believe isn’t anything we should.

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.

2. Go extreme. Once you’ve figured out what actually matters, keep asking what matters most until there is only one thing left. That core activity goes at the top of your success list.

Contrary to what most people believe, success is not a marathon of disciplined action.

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,

2. Counterbalance your work bucket. View work as involving a skill or knowledge that must be mastered. This will cause you to give disproportionate time to your ONE Thing and will throw the rest of your work day, week, month, and year continually out of balance. Your work life is divided into two distinct areas—what matters most and everything else

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?”

The research and experience of others is the best place to start when looking for your answer.

Happiness happens on the way to fulfillment.

To be precise, the word is priority—not priorities—and it originated in the 14th century from the Latin prior, meaning “first.” If something mattered the most it was a “priority.” Curiously, priority remained unpluralized until around the 20th century, when the world apparently demoted it to mean generally “something that matters” and the plural “p