Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The One Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
We have a special treat for you this week. Gary Keller joins us on the podcast and we explore a number of topics, but the theme really is this idea that you find your intensity and your consistency. A lot of people can run a sprint for a week or a day, maybe even a month, but very few individuals have the power to show up and make a small contribution every day for a long period of time. That consistency is in fact your intensity. It’s the power of not quitting. And it’s one of the superpowers that Gary identifies for himself.
And this matters because I know so many people who look up and say, “Well, Gary can do that because he’s Gary.” The truth is Gary is Gary because he did that. When you look at all of his strengths, there’s this little tiny hidden one just showing up, being consistent, something that we can all do. I hope you’ll find it as empowering as I did. It gave me a lot of confidence hearing from someone who’s accomplished so much that something so small can make such a big difference.
Gary Keller:
The one thing that you and I preached, the one thing that we preached over and over was consistency. And a lot of people don’t understand that intensity is consistency.
Jay Papasan:
Right.
Gary Keller
And people get just confused. They think that success is small bursts of frenzied activity, but slow and steady wins the race.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Gary Keller:
And you have to put your faith in that. There’s a wonderful phrase when you were a kid, and it was, you bet your life. Well, here’s the truth is, you are betting your life on your thoughts and your actions. The thoughts you choose and the actions that you take on, you are betting your life on the outcomes of that.
Jay Papasan:
Most people aren’t thinking at that level. They’re just acting and doing.
Gary Keller:
I get that. I understand that, yes, that we get up and we just go. What you would hope at some moment is that you have some wants and some needs, and here you go, right? You set a goal.
Jay Papasan:
Right.
Gary Keller:
It’s an interesting thought, the idea of motivation, Jay, because when you do the research, what you discover is that life is built off of motivation. At a cellular level, your body is motivated. It functions with the motivation to keep you alive.
Jay Papasan:
Right.
Gary Keller:
When disease attacks you, your body is motivated to attack the disease. At every level, from the universe to your body, motivation is built into life itself. Motivation is life itself. So when someone says, “I’m not really motivated,” well, that’s not an accurate statement. What you should have said was, “I have low motivation.”
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Gary Keller:
Right? Because you, meaning that I have low ambition, right? If I’m breathing, that’s all I want out of life. Well, life holds the opportunity for much more than that, but you have to raise your motivation to go get that.
Jay Papasan:
You have to raise your vision to get that too. I mean, that’s going back to the old saying of the now. Like you have to start looking beyond the next moment and the next thing and look out a little farther and say like, “Where can I go?”
Gary Keller:
Well, here’s the challenge with that. And that is, is that your big goals cannot exceed your self-image. If you don’t believe that you can or deserve that big goal, you’ll undermine. Now, what you and I preached in The ONE Thing is taking baby steps, taking one step at a time, take on one thing at a time, because the challenge is that you may actually be averse to it. In other words, there should be another book or a film with the title would be In Search of Consistency.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Gary Keller:
Because where I was going is at the end of the day, you may not be motivated yet. You may not have found your power of motivation. You may be averse to doing things that you just don’t want to do or like to do. And here’s the hack, just do the action.
Jay Papasan:
And it can be a baby step if you’re doing it every day.
Gary Keller:
Well, sure, of course, it could be as small as you want it to be, but it’s that consistency that over time becomes normal to you, natural to the point where it’d feel weird if you didn’t do it. So, the trick in life is your self-image may not match your goals, and that’s going to be a problem. Your motivation may be low for whatever reasons, and yet your potential is there.
Jay Papasan:
Consistency is intensity. Intensity is consistency. That’s the theme today. I like that a lot.
Gary Keller:
It is, but it’s true. It’s 100% true. It always has been true, by the way. If you can accept that, and this is the big test for all of us, what truths will we accept that we build our life on. Have you thought about the fundamental truths that you’re going to give your life to? By the way, consistency around the thing that matters most is one of the ones that I did. And then, I looked at my life and I wasn’t the smartest, I wasn’t the fastest, I wasn’t… you know, I’m very average in so many things. What I discovered was consistency beats all that. I’ll just be doing this longer than you, and I’ll win by default.
Jay Papasan:
Persistence wins the day.
Gary Keller:
You cannot outlast me. Death will be the only time.
Jay Papasan:
What I love about this is like there’s… someone’s out there listening, they’re nodding their head right now because, like, you look at success and you think you need a superpower. Well, that guy or that gal was so successful because of these things.
Gary Keller:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
And I’ve heard people say to you, “Oh, you can do that because you’re Gary Keller. “
Gary Keller:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
And the truth is, you’re Gary Keller because you do that.
Gary Keller:
That’s right.
Jay Papasan:
I think that consistency, just like we would coach it in our kids, it’s something that we can all do. It’s all something we can do a little bit better today than we did yesterday. We just get better at it. If you can show up and be consistent, you don’t have to have the motivation to do the giant, intense things that some people do. Like, I’m so motivated, I’m going to run a marathon tomorrow. Because I’m so motivated, it doesn’t take as much motivation to just show up and do the thing every day. But very few people are consistent, which means it’s his own form of intensity. It feels like the ultimate end round. I don’t have these things that guy’s got and that gal’s got, but I can just show up and do the thing, and over time, I get to win.
Gary Keller:
Yes, the image in my head is the research that was done a long time ago with the steel i-beam and the cork.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. Yeah.
Gary Keller:
So they-
Jay Papasan:
Tell me.
Gary Keller:
Well, they… what they were trying to understand is how small of a force if applied consistently can move a big object. So, they took a steel i-beam and they hung it from… with chains from the ceiling of a warehouse. Then, they set a pendulum of motion of a cork where it was swinging consistently hitting the steel i-beam. 24 hours, nothing. 48 hours, nothing. But over time, the change started to quiver. And over a longer period of time, and it took time, the steel i-beam and cork moved in the same direction. It took a long time to get there, because it’s a little bitty cork.
Jay Papasan:
But it just shows you in a really crazy way, small inputs over a long enough time will create a big outcome.
Gary Keller:
Yeah, that’s it.
Jay Papasan:
They add up.
Gary Keller:
That’s it. Well, when we make that phrase, that intensity is consistency, think of the cork. Think of the i -beam.
Jay Papasan:
Let everybody think about that. We’re gonna take a quick break.
Gary Keller:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
And afterwards, I wanna come back and find out, why do people think that these ideas aren’t relevant today?
Gary Keller:
I love that.
Jay Papsan:
All right, Gary, I’m still thinking about the cork and the I-beam.
Gary Keller:
Yeah, yeah.
Jay Papasan:
I love that idea. Just the small inputs create a big output. Now, people have come up to me and asked, like, this book’s been out for 11 years.
Gary Keller:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
And it’s been very successful, but-
Gary Keller:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
… why do we think it’s still relevant today?
Gary Keller:
Well, did productivity ever go out of vogue? It’s a book about getting the most out of your life. The ideas that we put in that book were not whims. I mean, you and I went to our research team and we said, “Prove us wrong.” And this was before artificial intelligence. So, we had some researchers and it took months. And you and I were given volumes that were probably at least three feet high, if not higher, Jay. It took us almost, I think around six months to absorb all of that and then pull out what we believed to be the 20% that mattered and then wrote a book about it. But all of this was researched. It was timeless information-
Jay Papasan:
That’s the word.
Gary Keller:
… that went in the book.
Jay Papasan:
That’s the word. And you’ve… I remember even in the very beginning of our relationship, so many of the bestsellers I got to see when I worked at HarperCollins were timely books. This thing happened, we’ve got the first book on the scene. And I remember, like it was a proven formula if you wanna sell a lot of books and you just dismissed it out of hand. You’re like, “I would rather write a timeless book than a timely one.”
Gary Keller:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
And so, I think that’s the key. Like there are timeless principles. And to go back earlier in our conversation, I think we did manage to say them differently. And I think we have to have the discipline. And this goes for all leaders. How do you take the things that are timelessly true and say them different enough for people to hear them again and again?
Gary Keller:
Well, I would ask you this question. I mean, if we’re going to pick on productivity and ask, is it still relevant? Is love still relevant? Is friendship still relevant? Is happiness still relevant? You understand these ideas are timeless, universal, foundational concepts that are the essence of life itself. So, the idea of having a productive life is not out of vogue. So, writing a timeless book around the truths and the science around that idea, how could it ever go out of being relevant?
Jay Papasan:
I’m with you on this one. I think it speaks, though, to our need to hear things differently. Like we could have called the book Focus-
Gary Keller:
Sure, sure.
Jay Papasan:
… Focus Dummy, and nobody would have read it. They were tired of hearing people telling, “the focus.”
Gary Keller:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So, we had to approach it differently. So I had a friend, Justin. He was teaching us, and he said, “You’ve got your message, you’ve got your purpose. You don’t need a thousand things to say, you need a thousand ways to say the same thing.”
Gary Keller:
Amen.
Jay Papasan:
I’ve just been – that’s been reverberating in my head.
Gary Keller:
Yes.
Jay Papasan:
So, how is… how do we make timeless ideas fresh as leaders? I see you doing this all the time. You’re like, “I need a new brand. I need a new name.” Like, I know I’m just popping this question, but I think this is one of your skillsets as a teacher. How do we make the familiar feel new?
Gary Keller:
Okay, well-
Jay Papasan:
Big question.
Gary Keller:
Yeah, here’s the biggest answer I can give you, and that is you’ll have different outcomes. So, it’s not that the activity itself will be new. What will make the whole thing feel new to you is the result you experience if you keep doing it.
Jay Papasan:
Because the results will get better and better over time.
Gary Keller:
Consistency wins. Time on the task wins every time, Jay. So, it’s not that the idea or the practice has to be new. It’s the outcome that presents you with a different experience, or a better experience, or gets you closer to the experience that you want. That, by the way, will be new every time. And that’s where the newness is. You’ve placed the emphasis on the wrong thing. If you’re looking for newness, don’t look at it in a changed activity necessarily, not if it consistently is gonna give you the results.
Jay Papasan:
I think there’s two things that change. And I remember this from our research. There’s the outcomes that change and you change too.
Gary Keller:
Well, that’s exactly right.
Jay Papasan:
As you grow, I remember we were reading these, I mean, you talk about mind-numbing studies, but these people that were professional swimmers and athletes. because they stayed at it long enough, like the activity of just practicing their stroke, which is like, “Ugh, I have to do the backstroke again for the thousandth time,” but they were picking up on subtleties that a novice or even an expert couldn’t do because they’d moved so far, like how their pinky went through the water. So, like, I think as you grow, your interaction with the activity is going to change and your outcomes are gonna change in a huge way.
Gary Keller:
And you change.
Jay Papasan:
Yes.
Gary Keller:
That’s where all the newness is.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Gary Keller:
But that’s gonna come from consistent behavior, right? Let me ask you this, if you’re raising a child, what’s one of the foundational principles of child rearing?
Jay Papasan:
Like schedule. Like when they’re really little, you want a schedule.
Gary Keller:
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Predictable schedules solves so many problems.
Gary Keller:
Listen, my… I have three grandkids and I’ve gotten into the habit recently. I finally realized that what we do in our other life applies to the grandkids, right? So, I asked my granddaughters, they spent the weekend, I said, “So, okay, let’s get paper and pen. Let’s write down our schedule. What are we going to do together?” So, we sat there and created a whole list, right? And then the weekend, we just spent living the list.
Jay Papasan:
That’s so cool.
Gary Keller:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
And you got them to participate in it. I’m sure you’re guiding things a little bit too.
Gary Keller:
Yeah. Yeah. The one that I regret was we were going to go buy bubble gum at the drugstore, and then we were going to practice blowing bubbles.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Gary Keller:
Yeah. That started out brilliant until I forgot to take the gum away when I wasn’t there.
Jay Papasan:
So we had some freezing gum and hair stories coming up?
Gary Keller:
Yeah, well, we ended up with gum smeared all over the window, gum smeared all over a pencil, gum smeared all over her blanket that she likes to take with her.
Jay Papasan:
All solvable. It’s better than having to return them to the parents with gum in their hair, which I like at that moment.
Gary Keller:
Yeah, I told my son, I said, “Well, okay, this is what we did. Here’s the list. Here’s what we did.” And he laughed. He said, “Yeah, we learned bubble gum is not in the house and bubble gum is under supervision.” And I went, “Well, okay. I didn’t know that. I know that now.”
Jay Papasan:
There you go. Grandpa still gets to learn some lessons.
Gary Keller:
Yeah, but the schedule works. This idea that I want my life to move forward as best as it can. And understand that… and we wrote about this, it’s not just… we’re not talking about just an achievement, we’re talking about actual physically. We’re talking about spiritually. We’re talking about, you know, in knowledge itself. We’re talking about all the areas that make up in essence you. Consistency is going to be it, right?
Jay Papasan:
Consistency is intensity. Intensity is consistency.
Gary Keller:
You don’t have to be consistent in everything, Jay.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Gary Keller:
And in fact, show me someone who would be. They would be weird. That would be weird.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Gary Keller:
But the people that lead the lives that you look up at and you go, “Wow, that looks like a really cool life,” or whatever is because they have figured out what mattered most and they applied consistency to it over time. And they were relentless in that consistency. And at the end of the day, that brings more heat than anything. We use the word intensity, but it just brings more heat than anything. It brings more results over time than anything else.
Jay Papasan:
So subconscious to conscious, what is that thing I need to do? Consciousness to calendar, and then we got to live our schedule.
Gary Keller:
That’s it. It’s really that simple. What do you want? What matters most to you? And what’s the hack to making sure that you will get that, right? Being appropriate in the moments, right?
Jay Papasan:
Right, that matter.
Gary Keller:
Yeah, that matter. And I use a simple example of my wife. And that is no one in my life is more precious than my wonderful wife. So when I get home, what I discovered is if I just focus on her and try to make sure that she’s having the best time that she can have, I get everything that I want out of the relationship by helping her get everything that she wants out of the relationship. If I approach it by, “I’m going to get everything I want first, and then we’ll focus on you second,” I don’t get everything I want out of the relationship. Life doesn’t work that way. So, when I hit the house, what’s the one thing I need to do such that by doing it, everything will be easier and unnecessary? Go find her, go track her down and hug her and kiss her and hang out with her.
Jay Papasan:
“How was your day, honey?” And listen.
Gary Keller:
Yeah, and “What do you want to eat tonight? What do you want to do?” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever that is, let it be that. Because what I discovered was at some point, she’s going to get bored with me and she’s going to say, “I got to do something.” And then I go, “Okay, well then I’m going to go do the things I was going to do without you.” But hitting the house and saying, “No, don’t have time to talk to you right now. I got things to do. I’ve got these things. I’ll talk to you at seven.” I’ll talk to you at six. I’ll talk to you at eight. I mean, whatever. I just got to go in there and I got to get these things done. That’s a huge mistake. That’s a bad move. You’re being inappropriate in the moment.
Jay Papasan:
What Gary’s talking about here is something I’ve encountered a number of times in teaching and coaching individuals on The ONE Thing. If we’re going to be appropriate in the moments that matter, those moments don’t always line up between work and life. Sometimes, we have to bounce between the two again and again frequently. And how do we transition? That’s a big question. How do we transition? I know that I’ve struggled with it just like Gary. I have some rituals that I go through. I’ve got this big job, the businesses that we run, all of their responsibilities. How do I shed those things on the way home or when I get home quickly so I can be present and appropriate in those moments?
I have a similar ritual to what he describes. I go by and check the coffee machine for the next day. I wanna do some of my chores so that I can fully relax. My wife has gotten so tuned into this that Wendy will sometimes do those things before I get home and she’ll kind of be smirking as I go to the coffee machine and I’m following my ritual pattern of leaving work behind and becoming present at home.
Now, I have a friend, his name’s [Reid], and he was in the Air Force and he worked in a missile station. He described the intensity of what he had to do every day, staring at radar, looking for threats against our country. In that intensity, it would be very hard for him to just leave behind. And he developed a ritual. He would come home. He would take off his uniform. He would put on a different set of clothes. It took him less than five minutes, but then he could be fully present for his wife and kids. These rituals of transitions are things that we can focus on. And I would just tell you from experience, I chose long ones. How do we pick fast ones like [Reid]?
Now, let’s look at the bigger picture. How do we know where we are? Now, in today’s modern workplace, we have a phone where we can be at work literally any time we choose to drop into our email, our Slack, our WhatsApp. Whatever it is that represents work for us is with us in our pocket all day long. If you work from home, if you have a virtual office or a hybrid situation, when are you at work and when are you at home?
We worked with an individual whose name is Rick Villani. We co-authored a book called Flip. And he worked from home. He was a contractor. He did hundreds and hundreds of homes. It was a very busy life, and he was a bit of a workaholic. He admitted it. He did not know how to transition. And after some coaching from Gary, he decided he would establish a home office. And only when he was in that room would he be at work. He would literally close the door at 6pm every day and then be at home.
And one of the gifts he said was because he put this constraint, “I can only work from home in this space between this hour and this hour.” I think it was like 9 to 6 o’clock at night. He tended to be so much more focused when he was in that room. He looked at all he had to do, and he was now counting down a clock versus having this unlimited swath of time to do the work.
So place some constraints around your work. When I’m at work, does it mean I’m in my office at home? Can it be on my couch? Is it when I’m in bed with my laptop? What are the rules that you can follow and build rituals around so that you know when you’re at work, when you’re at home and you can start being more appropriate in the moments that matter.
Jay Papasan:
So, that’s the theme. You’re figuring out, for the things that matter to you, how do I be appropriate in the moments that matter? What are the moments that matter? And how do I be appropriate in them?
Gary Keller:
That’s it.
Jay Papasan:
So you found this window with your primary relationship with your spouse and said like, “When I come home, this is the moment that matters and I’m gonna show up right.”
Gary Keller:
And that’s tough for me because I-
Jay Papasan:
It’s tough for a lot of people.
Gary Keller
Yeah, but I’m just-
Jay Papasan:
Because they’re wound up from work. They haven’t shed that. Like they have to get into a different zone when they get home.
Gary Keller:
Yes, I’m just confessing this stuff for me because my most recognized trait, if you will, is that I’m aggressive. I’m just aggressive. I have ants in my pants, let’s go. I mean, I’m aggressive and I need to be active. And you add goal orientation to that. And if I’m not careful, I’ll walk right into the office, right into my office, shut the door and go to work and forget to say hello to everybody. It’s not that I’m rude. I have a maniacal drive to go do the things that I need to get done. And I enjoy doing them anyway. So this idea of hitting the house and slowing down.
Jay Papasan:
On your drive home, is there a ritual or anything? How do you get in that mindset or is it just a habit now?
Gary Keller:
Well-
Jay Papasan:
Because you had to learn this at some point. If it’s not in your nature.
Gary Keller:
Yeah, you’re right. When the office was 20 minutes away, the drive time home was a real asset.
Jay Papasan:
Right.
Gary Keller:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
You get to, kind of, wind down and enter the new mode.
Gary Keller:
By pure happenstance, I happen to live three minutes or less from the office, right? I can put on a song on the radio and-
Jay Papasan:
Not finish it.
Gary Keller:
I won’t finish it. I’ll pull in my driveway and they’re still singing.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Gary Keller:
You know. So I lost that, right? But I… you know… so you say, where did I learn that? Probably my biggest teacher of that was having a child. And I’ve told that story to you before where, you know, all of a sudden on my drive home, I had built the habit of coming home and taking care of my stuff and all of that before I got into relationship with my wife. And, you know, that worked out for us. I see now that it wasn’t working out the best that it could, but I learned a lesson because we had a child. And I’d pull into that garage, and I say this jokingly, the door would fly open and a baby would come flying through the air. You’d go and he’s your child, right?
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Gary Keller:
As she ran off.
Jay Papasan:
Your turn
Gary Keller:
Yeah. So essentially she’d had him all day or had him half a day or whatever. And I get home and it’s your turn.
Jay Papasan:
Right.
Gary Keller:
It is not your– and I’m going, “Well, can’t I at least, you know, change clothes?” “No.” “Can I have, you know, a cup of tea?” “No.” “Can I just sit down and read the sports, you know, for a second?” “No, he’s your child. Take him.” So I had to rewire my brain totally that when I came home, my one thing was take the child. So, I just rewired my brain so that when I got home, my habit now was take the child. So I just took him, right? And we started planning stuff and doing stuff and it created the relationship, I think the basis of the relationship I have the day with him.
Jay Papasan:
I love that you had a big enough reason to make a big change and that change really worked out on more than one level. Gary, I think we could go on forever.
Gary Keller:
Let’s do it. Let’s go on forever, Jay.
Jay Papasan:
Yes, but we’ll have to just come back and do it again.
Gary Keller:
Well, let’s do it again and again.
Jay Papasan:
So, we’ve talked a lot about consistency.
Gary Keller:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
One of the things we try to end these new format episodes with is with a challenge to the listeners. Based on their conversation today, if you would want to give them one, think of the first Domino challenge that they might take this week, what would you ask them to do?
Gary Keller:
My go-to answer is always sit down with your favorite beverage and pick a category. in an area that matters to you, whether it’s a relationship or it’s an activity, whatever it is, and ask yourself, what’s the one thing that I could do to move this forward such that by doing it, any other thing that I need to do would be easier or unnecessary. If you can identify that, and then, once you’ve identified it, look at your schedule, look at your calendar, and ask the question, at what time in the morning should I do that? And then make sure you protect that time. That’s the challenge.
Jay Papasan:
It could be a very small thing, but by putting it on their calendar, they take that first step and you might be surprised that first step might be all the momentum they need to keep doing it. Gary, thanks so much.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to tune in next week. I’m going to do a solo episode and I’m going to talk about the power of reflection and the power of setting intentions. How can we reflect on the wins, on the highs and the lows of 2024 and therefore set an intention for 2025 so that we have an even better year than we had this year? I’ve been doing this for close to 19 years with my wife Wendy and our goal setting retreats and there is a real process to setting intentions based on your reflections. I can’t wait to share it with you.
