Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan. And this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that leads to extraordinary results.
Here I am after 477 episodes of the podcast, stepping into the podcast host chair. I’m super excited about this change. The podcast has already almost 6 million downloads. The book is still going strong. We’ve sold 3.6 million copies in over 40 languages. It’s every author’s dream.
And now I get to step into this role and hopefully help curate some really great content to connect what you’re trying to live with The ONE Thing, with what we’ve seen out in the world, teaching and training and working with our listeners and our community members. How do we make The ONE Thing relevant for a whole new generation of readers? How do we keep it relevant for our fans like you, who’ve been listening to the podcast since the very beginning?
So, I got some great advice. I’m into coaching. I went out and we interviewed 50 of our longest running fans of the show, listeners, book readers, coaching clients, corporate customers, you name it, community members. These are people who have been living The ONE Thing and trying to live The ONE Thing for a very long time, and they had a lot to offer.
And here’s what we asked them. What is it you love about The ONE Thing? What is it you’ve loved about the podcast? How has it impacted your life? What do you need from it today? And when you think about your future, what do we need to deliver for you so that this is the best possible investment of your time?
We know that there are lots of podcasts competing for your attention. And if you can only listen to one, well, we’re called The ONE Thing, we want to be that one for you. So we’ve made three commitments based on those interviews with you, our listeners. How can we serve you better?
One, we’re going to do more actionable, practical content. That’s really the kind of genesis of how Gary and I became writing partners. We’re both intensely curious. We want to find out how to do things the best way possible, but we also don’t want to be in some ivory tower being intellectuals about it. I’m a nerd. I like that stuff, but I want to put it to use. So it’s not knowledge for knowledge’s sake, it’s knowledge for doing’s sake. We want to be practical and pragmatic.
And that’s what this podcast is going to be for you. It’s also going to be conversational. And right now, I’m doing a solo episode, so how is this conversational? I feel like I’m talking to those 50 core listeners, clients, and fans that we talked to when we were researching where we needed to go. It is a conversation.
Sometimes it will come from questions from our training, sometimes questions from our listeners. We’re trying to listen to what it is you need and make sure that this podcast delivers. Sometimes it will also be a conversation with someone else. If we’re going to bring someone on to this show, it’s because we can extract lessons on how you can live The ONE Thing from their life lessons. And of course, just like when we researched the book, we’re going to look for the best of the best. What we wanted to do is ask what they had in common, and we’re just going to continue that journey right here on the show.
So you’ll hear me maybe interrupting our guest and saying, you know what, you may not realize it, but that was your first domino. You don’t know it, but that was you building the habit of success that you needed to go where you needed to go. I’ve done this long enough that I can see the patterns after hundreds and hundreds of interviews where I can maybe help pull some of The ONE Thing lessons out of other people’s stories.
So that’s our commitment, actionable, conversational. And if we’re going to talk to someone else, it’s always going to be brought back to The ONE Thing, which is why you’re here anyway.
So when I think about the mistakes that people make on this journey, because we’ve trained tens of thousands of people now, I’ve gotten to mentor and coach people through this process, there are a lot of people who’ve been dreaming about that big switch, but they haven’t started it yet. Might be leaders in corporate America, looking to take the next step. Might be someone in their business trying to level up or someone just trying to launch it to begin with. They’re waiting for the right time or the right circumstances to start.
If I’m honest about it, I spent the first 20 years dreaming before I really started doing. To give you context, I tend to look back on my life like there’s two chapters, kind of like a before and after photograph. There’s the me before and the me after, and in between was a little bit of dose of the wisdom of The ONE Thing.
Today, when my coach and I are looking at who we serve, we like to think about two groups of people. There are dreamers who need to spend more time doing, and there are doers who need to spend more time dreaming. Chances are right now you’re nodding your head at one or the other. If you’re a doer, maybe you have no space to dream anymore. If you’re a dreamer, your future is still in the future because you haven’t found time or the will or the ability to do. That was my first chapter of the story. I was a dreamer who didn’t do enough.
Now, books are the through line of my life. I started dreaming about being an author when I was in seventh grade. Back then, books were kind of my escape. I was kind of a small kid, a little nerdy, and I borrowed my mom’s typewriter, and I tried to write my own version of The Hobbit. One of those books, but I remember it was a fantasy story because when I was in seventh grade, that’s what I read. That was my escape.
I excelled at English, even though I didn’t spell well. That’s my dirty secret. I always got an A in content, but a C for grammar and spelling. But I would write short stories, and I would share them with my friends at the lunch table. I even had a teacher, Mrs. Bond, who circulated one of my essays about chasing my grandmother’s cat around her house because she thought it was so funny, she circulated it to all the teachers in my high school, but it made me think that maybe I had a gif there.
But what did I do with that? Well, I got an English major. I was always around books. I even went on to get a master’s in NYU in writing with a creative dissertation. Went on to be an editor at HarperCollins. I got to work on bestselling books. Do you see the pattern? Books are everywhere around me, but I’m not really at the keyboard since I tried to write The Hobbit in seventh grade. I tried some freelance writing, but I wasn’t writing books. I was writing articles. I got published in Memphis Magazine. It got published in Texas Monthly.
And eventually, my wife fired me when she came home after I’d done all of my calls to the few editors I knew, and I was playing video games with the cat on my shoulder. She’s like, it’s time for you to get a job. And I did. I got a gig at Keller Williams, little real estate company with 27 employees at the time, and I was a newsletter writer. Again, I’ll get paid to write. I’ll get to be a writer, but I was writing a tech newsletter.
Two years after I joined the company, I found out that Gary Keller was going to write a book. A few days later, I ran into Gary, founder of Keller Williams and my future co-author, in the bathroom. He was actually working on the building, plunging a toilet. He owned it. And he made some crack about how no job was too dirty for him to do. And we’re washing our hands, and I turned to him, and I said, I hear you’re writing a book. And he said, yeah, me and Dave are writing a book. And I said, do you remember that I used to work at HarperCollins? And I could tell from his expression that he didn’t. And he invited me into his office.
And there in that moment is kind of a pivot point in my life, is a new relationship that maybe I was missing with someone who would ask me to think bigger than I was currently thinking. Gary laid out a vision at that time, 2002, June for writing 13 books. The first of which would be a book called The Millionaire Real Estate Agent. He gave me 30 days to write a business plan. And then we wrote a book in a hundred days.
And I will tell you, that was the hardest I’ve ever been tested at that point in my life. I’d gone from this person who did a lot of dreaming with a lot of doing to working someone who was a major world class doer. He wanted to write a complete book over 300 pages in less than a hundred days. Today, that book is sold over one and a half million copies in an industry of just a little bit over a million. It ran away because we had the right message at the right time. And I definitely will credit Gary and Dave on that. I just was a part of the process.
But there I am, the dreamer who started doing 20 years later. Man, some people would say, Jay, all of those things you did, you were writing stories in high school, you worked in booksellers, you worked in publishing, you were a freelancer. That was all preparing you for that moment where you got to meet Gary, put that question in front of him. Do you remember I used to be in publishing? All of that was preparing you for that moment. And I love that. That’s kind of a noble sentiment.
Today, as someone who spent the last 22 years working side by side with a world class doer who does find time to dream, but sometimes it feels like we’re moving pretty fast. I’m on the other side of that, and I know that maybe a lot of what I was doing was just delaying. What I was doing was maybe hiding from what I truly wanted for fear that I might fail. What would it say about me if I tried to work on books back then when I was an editor at Harper and I failed? Would that mean the dream is dead?
I knew a young lady who worked the exact same job I did as an editorial assistant, and I would be leaving at 5 o’clock and I would see her going into a conference room. And she was writing her first novel after work. She had started doing so many years before I did. And she went on to publish multiple books.
I would ask you, the listener, right now, what is your dream that you’ve been delaying? What is your dream that you’ve been rationalizing all of this preparation? Are you afraid? Are you trying to be perfect before you start? Because what I would go back and tell that kid in high school is start sooner. No, I would actually say start today. And that’s maybe the key because failure is going to happen. I failed a ton since I started with Gary. There were many chapters where I would work my heart out, and I can still remember, maybe the worst, I was 37 drafts into a chapter for The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, Gary read it, he looked at me with a little bit of sadness and passion, and he just turned it upside down on the table, and he goes, maybe we should just start over.
And it was hard. You are going to fail on the journey, but that’s part of the journey. That’s how we learn. We have to learn from our mistakes and persist. If it’s really your dream, you won’t quit. You’ll keep going. So stop delaying and start doing, I would tell you that it takes a little bit of courage, maybe some circumstances like I walked into, I walked into a room where someone was ready to help me live my dream, but you might be walking into that room every single day. And because you’re not looking for it, you’re missing it. But you don’t have to wait for the circumstances, you can create them. You don’t have to wait for the time, you can make the time.
Today, we’ve written books that have sold over 6.5 million copies. The ONE Thing alone has sold over 3.5 million in 40 plus languages. That all started with one moment where I decided to stop dreaming and start doing. And by doing that thing, it’s created all the other opportunities that I enjoy today. So here’s some mistakes that I’ve seen along the way from other people who were a little bit like me, maybe a little bit like you listening. They look up and they say, I need to start doing, but the problem is maybe because they don’t have the confidence. They’re not sure about it. They’re not dreaming big enough.
I never imagined I would work on a million-copy bestseller. So go ahead and give yourself permission to dream as big as you can possibly dream. When we ask a big question of our life, that’s how we find the big answers. If you ask small questions, you will get small answers. The other thing that I see, and I might have had to correct myself is, once I’ve got the big dream, I feel like I have to go big. That’s so intuitive. Like, I’m going big, right? Go big or go home. But we wrote about this in The ONE Thing. It’s one of the earliest chapters, Think Big, Go Small.
The true secret in life is actually focusing your attention on that single domino that you need to knock over every single day. When we were writing that first book, I had a chapter outline, some flip charts, and on average, I had to turn around 14 pages every single workday. I had that domino to knock over. And if I did it enough days in a row, with the rewrites and the restarts, we got a finished book. I just had to focus on my one thing that day, and it would add up to something bigger.
Most of us have to start small and go small, but keep pounding away, knocking over that domino day after day, and the little wins will add up to a giant win. Most people underestimate the power of consistency and time on the task. And that’s something that everyone can do. And finally, maybe you’re willing to dream big, maybe you understand that you need to go small once you take action, but you’re still waiting for that moment in the bathroom. You’re waiting for that right time or right circumstances. I can tell you, you’re probably delaying just like me 20 years. What would have happened if I’d started sooner?
Here’s my challenge to you. You have a dream. You want to start doing. It isn’t that you need to start sooner. It’s that you need to start right now. Go ahead and make the first commitment. Open up your calendar, block just 30 minutes and take the first step. I promise you won’t regret it. And even if you stumble, you can get back up and keep going.
Be sure to tune in next week when I interview Captain Daryle Cardone. This is a journey from a music major to a mariner. He became captain of the USS Ronald Raegan, one of our largest aircraft carriers with 4000 soldiers, 2 nuclear powerplants and airplanes taking off day and night. It’s an incredible story about how he led that in a surprisingly simple way using the principles of The ONE Thing. Please don’t miss it. It’s a great story on leadership.
