Jay Papasan:
2025 is just around the corner. And here’s the thing with The ONE Thing over the last 13 years, I always know that January, February, March are gonna be our best months. More people buy the book, more people listen to the podcast, more people reach out to us for training. Why? Because they want to launch their year on a really great trajectory. They wanna come out of the gate on the right foot. A lot of people start off their year with lots of motivation, but they don’t know how to make it sustainable.
There’s a lot of research on how this works out for people. The company Strava, that’s like for mountain bikers and runners, they track everybody’s goals. They’ve been tracking this for years and they’ve decided most people will actually fail at their New Year’s resolution before the second week of February. In fact, so many people will fail by January 18th that they called it Quitters Day. Today, I want to talk to you about setting goals with purpose so you can lay the foundation for your future.
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Let’s get started and let’s talk about the mistakes that people make. Well, first and foremost, people try to take on too much. You have a big goal for your year and you start with big action. When I think about the habits that I hear people say, “Oh, I’m gonna get in shape this year,” the problem with these goals is that there are a whole nest of habits. If you’re gonna get in great shape for the summer swimsuit season, you’re probably gonna have to change your diet, which means you’re gonna have to change the way you shop. You’re also gonna have to change the way you prepare food and the portions. Right there, just on the diet side, I can identify at least five habits that will be necessary for your success long-term.
Now, let’s talk about working out. When are you gonna work out? How often are you gonna work out? Will you have to start going to bed earlier so you can get up earlier? Will you have to get a gym membership? This big goal of getting in shape is actually a lot of little tiny habits that are tied together, and it’s that tangle is where people get tripped up so quickly. How do we simplify? How do we narrow it down to the one keystone activity that’ll drive all of the others, that’ll make them happening just be like dominoes falling down.
So first lesson, first mistake to avoid, you’ve got big goals, but you’re not gonna go big. You’re gonna start small. Number two, you get too many rewards from social. I’ve seen it again and again. Just watch all your friends’ posts on Instagram and Twitter, wherever it is that you watch. People are gonna say, “This year I will…” and they will state some big goal. They’re gonna run a marathon, they’re gonna do this, I’m gonna lose this much weight. And they get showered by all kinds of encouragement and praise from their friends.
The challenge is that researchers have shown that you get so much social reward from sharing your big goals, a lot of people never take action. When we share them for social recognition, we actually undermine our own motivation to take action because we’ve already gotten so much reward. So that’s mistake number two.
Number three, they don’t actually have control of their time or their attention. This thing that they wanna do is not completely within their control. We wanna identify something that you have 100% control over. Do you know when you can do that? And do you have control of that time? If it’s something… let’s say you work in an office, if it’s something that you have to do during office hours, are you gonna have to hide while you’re doing this and cover up your screen? Is this something that your boss is gonna be okay with you doing? Is it something you need to do before or after work?
So, making it really clear what it is that you need to do that will lead to all of your success and also making sure that you can control your time to actually do the activity, this is a tiny little detail that a lot of people miss that will absolutely undo their best intentions.
The final one is that they have aspiration but not motivation. And let me distinguish between the two of those. They aspire to be bigger, they aspire to be better, they aspire to be more successful, wealthier, skinnier, you name it, but there’s no core motivation. When someone on my team, when someone in one of our trainings says, “I want to do this,” I usually will say, “Awesome, I love the big thinking. Just out of curiosity, what will happen if you fail?”
What will happen if you fail? It’s such a simple question, but if there is no consequence, there’s usually not a lot of core motivation. I kind of call this, they’re chasing vitamins, not aspirin. A lot of times our core motivation is not just about the good that we will get but also the pain that we get to avoid. So, when you’re thinking about your big goal for the year, ask yourself, is this something that I’m doing because it’s aspirational and I’m just trying to be bigger and better than I was this year, which is a great thing to do, but can I identify a core motivation? Is this something that’s truly tied to my identity when we’ll talk about that? Is this something that I need to do in order to be true to myself? Or is there a bigger cost?
Think about that diet, that getting in shape. There’s the person who’s doing it, aspirationally, so they can look really good when they get to the beach. And there’s the other person who’s doing it because their doctor says that if you don’t make a change this year, you won’t be here for the next set of holidays. That’s a different level of motivation when we know that maybe we’re staring a bigger outcome, a negative outcome that we want.
So let’s just recap. Four biggest mistakes that we see over the last 13 years as people come out of the gate trying to do too much too soon. Number two, they make it way too socially important. They put too much out in social, social media and their networks, about the size of their goal. It’s competitive and they want all the social rewards versus the actual rewards and that actually can undo them. Number three, they don’t actually control their time or their attention to do the activities needed for the result. So they’re coming out of the gate with an aspiration they can’t control. And finally, they don’t actually have a core deep motivation. There is no cost to failure. It is purely vitamins, not aspirin. They’re not fixing something. They’re not walking away from pain. And I’m not saying that you can’t do both. There are things that we can aspire to that we can be highly motivated to do as well. And it’s just an extra step in that journey.
So those are the biggest mistakes. So how do we solve them? So we told the story of Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld, if you know him from the show Seinfeld, one of the most popular comedies of all time, huge celebrity, he still does and did at the time, stand up, just randomly do stand up. There was an engineer who wrote about this on Lifehacker who ran into Jerry Seinfeld randomly backstage at an open mic for comedians. And of course he’s like, “Well, I’ve got to take advantage of this.” So he went up and said, “Mr. Seinfeld, I really want to become a comedian, what should I do?”
And Seinfeld was just so clear, he had the perfect answer. He said, “It’s really easy. Go get a giant calendar that has all the days of the year. Every single day, I want you to write one joke. One joke. And when you do, you’re gonna put a red X over that day.” One joke every day. Good or bad, it’s just you wrote it, right? He didn’t say, “Write a great joke every day.” He said, “Write one joke every day.” And over time, you’ve got this chain and you’ll say it’s not about doing the thing, it’s about not breaking the chain.
People love a streak, you love a streak. You hate breaking it on yourself. It’ll make you take a bigger stand around doing that thing. It’s incredibly powerful. And I’ve listened to interview after interview after interview with Jerry Seinfeld since reading that story and putting it in the book. And I’ll tell you, he still tells people he does this every day. He’s got his yellow legal pads. He thinks about what he did at the grocery store yesterday, who he saw at the coffee shop, and he’ll write at least one joke every single day.
If that can help, that tiny action can help build someone as powerful and successful as Jerry Seinfeld, what would your one thing, your first domino do for you? That’s what we want for you. We want you to start with something that’s incredibly small, that’s actually incredibly simple, that you probably could trip over and do tomorrow. We call it the first domino. And in the world of habits where we’re going, that’s often called a keystone habit. What is the keystone habit that lies at the foundation of all of this other stuff that happens?
Now, if you remember in the book, if you’ve read the book, we have this idea of exponential dominoes because people always said, it can’t just be one thing, you’ve got to do a lot of things. And that is true. The idea of the one thing is that you can only have one priority at any given moment. What’s your one thing right now? And over time, our priorities will shift to different things. But if you do them right and you line them up, it’s like lining up dominoes. When you line them up perfectly, what happens when you knock over the first one? Well, they all fall down. That’s the perfect metaphor for what we’re trying to get people to do is to figure out what the first domino is, where do I start, and how do I align as many things behind it so that I can get many outcomes from that single activity, right?
One of our researchers found an article from 1983 in the American Journal of Physics, and it was by a guy named Lauren Whitehead. And if you’ve been snooping around the internet and looked up falling dominoes, you’ve probably seen a video of this guy setting up dominoes that got progressively larger and knocking them down. And his article was about the physics of a domino fall. And he found out that any domino can knock over one that’s 50% larger. So the first domino is two inches tall. It’ll knock over one that’s three inches tall. And that three inch domino will knock over one that’s four and a half inches. And if I go beyond that, I have to get out in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet because I’m an English, French major here. But you get the drift. Each one will knock over one that’s 50% larger.
And he built them out of wood. And he described it, the 10 dominoes that started with a two inch domino, by the 10th domino, it was as large as a door. And he said, what began with the gentle tick ended with a large slam. And when people see this, it’s kind of overwhelming that it can grow that fast, that quickly. And if you were to take those dominoes and if you could physically keep building them, and we have a really cool graphic in the book, that two inch domino in the beginning, by the 18th would knock over one as tall as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. By the 20 or 30, it would knock over one as tall as the Eiffel Tower. If you keep going by 31, it would be a domino 3000 feet above Everest. And by 57, it would go from the earth to the moon.
You start small, but the momentum builds. And then you have this magical exponential results that start to show up. And that’s the metaphor of the book. When you’re doing the right thing, that small thing in the beginning, over time, not only do you get better at it and, therefore, your results start to multiply, but there’s also the momentum of everything that came before it that makes it that much more powerful. And I could show you in case study, after case study, after case study, that people, whether it’d be an individual pursuing their craft, their profession, their sport, that does this progressive thing that gets more powerful over time, and it looks like nothing is happening until it’s happening so fast, it kind of takes your breath away.
And the same for business success. All of those overnight successes, we did the research. On average, those companies are usually 10 to 12 years old. They didn’t just happen overnight. You just noticed them overnight, but they were building it and building momentum in the background, learning with each repetition so that they could get powerful and show up the way they do today.
So this idea is to find your first domino. Whatever your big goal is for 2025 and beyond, can you work backwards, right? Hey, I want to knock over that domino that’s as big as the Eiffel Tower this year. Awesome. We’re gonna start with the two inch domino. Can you figure out what that looks like? What is the activity that would naturally lead to building up momentum?
Now, a lot of people don’t know the answer right off the top of their head. It might take a little experimentation. I can tell you with a lot of reps and a lot of coaching and training, people get surprisingly close when they start to ask the question. If that is my goal, what would be the first step? A lot of people can be surprisingly accurate. They’re gonna be in the territory. So, I’m gonna encourage you if you’re thinking, “Oh man, that sounds hard,” trust me. I’ve worked literally with thousands of people – our organization has worked with many times more – to help them identify that first domino. And by and large, if you work through the process, you’re either gonna nail it or gonna get very close. So trust your own answers. Don’t doubt yourself on this.
Why do we focus on something so small that seems so insignificant when we’re shooting for something so big? Well, first and foremost, let’s go back to the mistakes. If it’s something small, it might take a relatively small amount of time, which means you can control your time enough. Can you put in 30 minutes today? Can you put in 10 minutes today to take that small action that is now a little tiny step of progress, a little extra momentum that gets you one domino further? It gets a little bigger and a little bigger. So it’s manageable, it’s doable. You’re setting yourself up for success.
I know a lot of you overachievers out there, you’re gonna have to check yourself at the gate here. You wanna come out charging. I’ve seen it again and again. You look at that line of dominoes and you see the Eiffel Tower, and you go, “Well, that’s really big.” Well, what about the leaning tower? That sucker’s already leaning. I’m just gonna strap on my football helmet and pads, and I’m gonna charge into that sucker. And what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna, like, blow your shoulder out. It’s not gonna work. No matter how fast you can get going from where you are, you have to build up more momentum over more time to get to that level, but our ambition actually undoes us. So as big as you’re thinking, I’m gonna come back to the thesis here, start small. You’re gonna start with the first domino.
So number one, it’s manageable, it’s doable. Two, there’s this thing called the Pygmalion effect. Now the Pygmalion effect, if you’ve seen My Fair Lady, that was adopted from the original play, is this idea that when someone believes in us, we start to believe in ourselves. We’re flipping it a little bit here. When you start to believe in yourself, you will believe in yourself. You’ll start to trust yourself. When you say things like, “I’m the kind of person who does. I’m going to do X. I’m gonna start this,” because you have a history of actually doing those things, you’re more likely to move forward and do them again. You’ve begun to believe in yourself instead of saying, “I’m just kidding myself.” So allow the Pygmalion effect to kick in for yourself.
I remember we had Ed Millett at our big convention in 2023. And he’s got a big personality, he’s got lots of one-liners, but the one-liner that I remember most is he said that people with the most confidence are those that keep the promises they make to themselves. And that really struck home to me. Are you the kind of person that makes commitments to themselves and then keeps them?
So first and foremost, we want it to be manageable. We want you to build confidence as you go. And this will morph into what we call identity goals. When you start to do something every single day, you’ll start to say, I’m a blank person. So think about right now, what’s your favorite beverage when you wake up? Are you a tea person? Are you a coffee person? Are you a green smoothie person? Doesn’t matter, but we start to identify with that choice, that little tiny choice that we make on a daily basis, it starts to seep into our personalities.
And this is a little bit of a chicken and egg. I get it. Our identity often determines our habits, but here’s the thing, you can also choose habits that will determine our identity. Most of what we do is actually by default. I remember Gretchen Rubin, I interviewed her and she shared that as much as 70% of what you do every single day is driven below the conscious level. These choices you’re making, they’re habitual. They’re just that groove that you’ve gotten into that you don’t have to think about because our brains are designed to use as little energy as possible. So why think about it when I can just do the same thing again today? And over time, that becomes who we are and who people see us as.
The inverse of that is instead of living a life by default, we can live one by design. We’re here to talk about goals for 2025, right? We’re not here to talk about a life-by-default. If you allow your existing identity, who you are today, to determine all of your habits for tomorrow, you’re not going anywhere, folks. You’re right where you belong, and that’s where you will likely stay unless something lucky happens. But if you aspire to do more, to have a bigger life, to have more fulfillment, then you’re going to have to adopt the behaviors, the habits of people who naturally accomplish those things. And over time, those will have to become a part of your identity. You are not living a life by default. Your identity has determined many of the habits that you have today, but you have a choice and can determine new ones for your future and also assume a new identity in the process.
So right now, I’m just gonna pause and say, you’re not gonna make the mistakes. You’re going to look at your goals and you’re going to identify, what’s my first domino? And this is going to be the ultimate power move for your 2025 goals. Everybody else is going to rush into the year. They’re going to feel overwhelmed by all the things that they’re trying to take on, all the change that you’re trying to create in their lives, and they don’t even imagine all the secondary impacts of that. They’ve made these changes in their lives and now it affects the people they work with and they live with, and they didn’t anticipate the complexity of it.
But that’s not going to be you. You’re going to pick this first domino. You’re gonna identify it. You might use the focus in question from The ONE Thing. What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier and necessary. You’re gonna identify that first domino, and you’re gonna build not just your 2025 around it, but I believe it’ll become the foundation for years to come.
Now, we’re gonna take a quick break and on the other side, I’m gonna walk you through example after example from my life and from our business of how these tiny habits add up to so much more than you could possibly imagine.
All right, welcome back folks. We’ve talked about the mistakes, the four big ones that people make. We’ve talked about this idea that the number one thing you can do to avoid them is identify your first domino. And when you look at your goals, your big goal for the year, I wanna sell 200 houses. I wanna write this program and build my SaaS company. I wanna write the great American novel. I wanna get a promotion at work. I wanna double the income in my business. You’re gonna work backwards and identify one small activity, so much smaller than you can possibly imagine, that’s going to be your first domino. And the commitment you’re going to make is to live that domino, knock it over every single day. And over time, I promise you, it’ll get bigger. But you don’t want to start there. You want to start with success, and you want to build momentum and confidence in yourself.
Now, I started tracking my habits in 2013 after the book came out. I realized we’d written this book for the world. And I need to live completely in alignment with it. That’s just who we are. Gary’s very clear. We can’t tell people to do things that we’re not trying to do ourselves. We may not be succeeding, but we’ve got to be giving it our best effort or we’re not really authentic. So in 2013, I identified, I believe it was six habits, a writing habit, a reading habit, a networking habit, a financial habit, a health habit, and a teaching habit. And those were the habits that I was gonna start tracking and try to commit to.
Now here’s the thing, all but one of them were existing. So, I was still following The ONE Thing. I wasn’t trying to build six habits at once. I was actually starting with just one and that was the networking habit. I had that time and opportunity to work in multiple businesses and I asked my coach, I said, “What is the one thing I can do to align all these dominoes? I’ve got my job here at this company. I’m running this company. I’m an owner in these companies. What’s the one activity I can commit to that would serve all of them?” And we agreed it would be opening doors and building relationships. We called it networking.
And originally I set out and I was going to go to all these conventions and we had identifying like FinCon and all these different places where I, an introvert, was going to go be completely miserable, hang out by the exit or maybe by the food line and try to talk to one person and call it networking. And the more I thought about it, the more I was filled with dread.
Long story short – and I’ve told this story before and I’ll make it probably a whole episode around the introverts networking method – I ended up saying my first domino is actually not to get on a plane and leave my family and do these things, I just need to try to meet one extraordinary person every week. And so, I set a goal of meeting 50 people and earning the right to add them to my database. And I remember my wife, you talk about small goals don’t matter. She’s a realtor. She looked at me and she goes, laughing, “That is the smallest goal I’ve ever heard of.” And I said, “You’re right, but I wanna build momentum,” just like we talked about. I wanna do something, and achieve something, and then get confidence and grow from that.
So the first year I set out to do 50. I got my assistant at the time to go through my LinkedIn. We sent out invites for meeting with coffee, so I could get to know people. No agenda. Just want to get to know you. And as soon as I did 50, we were doing it on Wednesday mornings. That was when I tried to do it every Wednesday morning at eight o’clock, meet someone at this coffee shop, a few people made me go to different places. And sometimes I had to do two in one week. But I remember I got to December, still had a few weeks left in the year and I hit my goal and I immediately quit. I was so relieved because it was very uncomfortable. Even doing this small thing, meeting one stranger a week was very uncomfortable for me.
But then the next year, I started again, and so many of the people I’ve met referred me to someone else. And the next year I did, I think 79. And the next year, I had 129 meetings on the calendar before I had to say, that’s enough. I can only do about one or one and a half of these a week and hit my goals.
Now let’s fast forward, started that in 2013, meeting one person and adding them to my database. I called it someone who was talented, someone who’s extraordinary. Today, when I look up, I’ve added 722 people to my database over that period of time. Now, some people showed up and they weren’t a good match. We didn’t stay in touch, but 722 relationships added over time. Sure, it was a tiny domino on a weekly basis. My wife could scoff because frankly she’s social and she could add 20 if she wanted to. But over time, I can see a thousand people in my database, it’s just over the horizon if I just keep doing it. And I’m committed to keep doing it.
So I looked up, we built our habits and we started tracking them. And I can tell you over the years, I’ve had mixed success, but the habit of having writing days, usually three to four every week, and a writing day was a block of at least three to four hours where I could go in and work on my books. I would have reading. I can’t write about things if I’m not reading. I would try to read at least one book a week. Back in 2002, I started tracking my net worth. That was my financial habit. That simple act of writing down my net worth.
Now, I’ll pause if you don’t know what net worth means. I didn’t when I started the journey either. It’s adding up all of your assets, the things you own, subtracting all your debt, the things you owe, and what’s left over, positive or negative, is your net worth. Not to be confused with our self-worth, this is our financial net worth. And that is the measurement that most wealthy people use to judge where they are on the journey. But by looking at it, adding up our credit card debt, our school debt, our car debt, any house debt that we had, and then looking at the value of those assets, and wow, it had so many gifts.
This one activity, this keystone habit, made me very aware of when we had our cash reserves. It made me very aware of when we bought some things, they go up in value, like our homes, and some of our stocks and investments. And then there were things that the moment you bought them, they went down in value. When you buy furniture, when you buy clothes, when you buy a new car, drive it off the lot. And I started to understand the difference between assets that grow over time and assets that go down. And that has helped us form an amazing foundation of making better financial decisions.
My wife and I have been doing this together since 2002. Guess what? Over that period of time, because we’re doing this, and then taking action on the learnings, our net worth has grown by an average median, I’ll say, of 26% on average every single year since then. It started with a very small number, so don’t freak out. And so, a lot of the big growth happened early, but we still average even this far down the line, well over 10% per year. But the average over that many years, 22 years at this point, was 26.2, I believe, the median when I did the math last.
So one keystone habit, tiny, going through a couple of hours of work to add up all of our assets and our liabilities and figure out what’s the net here, that created a level of consciousness that helped us make so many better decisions to grow our wealth.
The health habit, my wife and I had started before I started setting these goals and tracking them to work out three times a week with a trainer. Long story that we’ll have to cover another time, but I look up today and we’ve had over 1800 workouts. And when I think about aligning the dominoes, waking up often before 5 a.m., sometimes 5.30 a.m. with my wife, it depended on how old our kids were, that we had to get up earlier or a little later because they slept in, but we would go to the driveway and do our workout. We’re doing hard things together. We have 1800 reps at least in doing this together. And I’ll tell you, it served as a, in some ways, like as it became fun, kind of like a mini date every morning where we got to do something fun together. We’re doing hard things and growing together.
There was a little bit of therapy that went on there where our poor trainers would hear a squabble and bicker early in the morning before we had coffee. But we talked. Three times a week, we talk about hard things. And over time, that habit takes less than an hour every morning to stumble into the gym or the driveway before we had a gym that we could actually do this activity has created all kinds of exponential results.
So going back a little over 10 years, read over 500 books. And for a writer, that’s a lot of dots that I get to connect. When I’m thinking about stories, I have a lot to pull from because I’ve kept this discipline over a long period of time. I could go through stat after stat after stat.
So I’m gonna walk you through this process one more time. You set your goals for the year. You need to ask the question, for my number one goal, what would be the first domino? And then try to make that thing into a habit. You only need to do one at a time. It’s called the one thing, not the 15 things. If you can do this, at least, 66 days, which is when research says it would form a habit, I usually only did one, maybe two habits a year. And it was really about five or six that stuck over this decade. And that have added up to almost all of my success, all the books that have written, the millions of copies that have sold, the opportunities to own businesses and run businesses, I tie back to these keystone habits.
Pick your first domino. You may tweak it over time. Sometimes, you’ll fail. I tried to meditate. I think I did 150 days in a row. I went into the holiday break in December, forgot about it, and didn’t even realize I’d forgotten about it for two months. I tried that for three straight years, 2015, ’16, and ’17. And finally, I just kind of looked at my coach and my wife and I said, “Maybe I’m not meant to do this. Maybe it’s not actually important to me because I keep messing it up.” And I kind of abandoned it and I’m okay with that. It was something I was trying on. It did not become a part of my habits and did not become a part of my identity. And I can’t tell you if I’m missing anything at all. So over time, you’re gonna try on things that don’t work, but you can also experiment and find a few keystone habits that might drive an enormous amount of success for you.
So to wrap this up, my challenge for you this week is I want you to look at your goal, your number one goal for 2025. And I want you to do your very best to identify your first domino and then try to make that a habit. If you have to get out your calendar like Jerry Seinfeld and put an X, we have them on the website, folks. Go to the1thing.com, resources, download your calendar and start building that habit around your first domino. I know that you’ll think, “Man, this feels so small,” I promise you, it may be small to begin with, but when everybody else has quit on January 18th or by the second week of February, because they took on too much, they were overwhelmed, tThey’re living Groundhog Day. They’re gonna come back next January and have to start all over again. But because you’re playing the tortoise, not the hare, you’re gonna come out of the gates doing something you can accomplish. You’re gonna do it this year. And next year you’ll get to build on it. And the next year you’ll get to build on it. And it’ll add up to so much more than you could possibly believe.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode about the power of small habits to do extraordinary things in your life. Next week, I bring on my wife, Wendy, and we talk about purpose and core values. Stuff that’s a little sticky for most people to figure out. Core values is the ultimate hack to tapping into your motivation. And guess what? If you’re going to build a habit, you need motivation. So tune in next week when Wendy and I unpack how to tap into your core values and motivation to get things done.
