The ONE Thing

Leaving some things undone is a necessary tradeoff for extraordinary results. But you can’t leave everything undone, and that’s where counterbalancing comes in. The idea of counterbalancing is that you never go so far that you can’t find your way back or stay so long that there is nothing waiting for you when you return.

Right NOW is all we have to work with. Our past is but a former now, our future a potential one. To drive this point home, I started referring to the way to create a powerful priority as “Goal Setting to the Now” to emphasize why we were creating a priority in the first place.

Everyone has one person who either means the most to them or was the first to influence, train, or manage them. No one succeeds alone. No one.

To stay on track for the best possible day month, year, or career, you must keep asking the Focusing Question. Ask it again and again, and it forces you to line up tasks in their levered order of importance. Then, each time you ask it, you see your next priority.

Messes are inevitable when you focus on just one thing. While you whittle away on your most important work, the world doesn’t sit and wait. It stays on fast forward and things just rack up and stack up

So if achieving balance is a lie, then what do you do? Counterbalance. Replace the word “balance” with “counterbalance” and what you experience makes sense. The things we presume to have balance are really just counterbalancing.

With a stretch approach this was your maximum, but now it is your minimum. It’s not all you’ll do, but it becomes the hilltop where you’ll stand to see if you can spot what might come next. This is called trending, and it’s the second step. You’re looking for the next thing you can do in the same direction that the best performers are heading or, i

The problem with living in the middle is that it prevents you from making extraordinary time commitments to anything. In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets its due.

Bronnie Ware’s 2012 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying