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’re down to the final hours of 2024. If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time thinking about the future. Lots of achievers are always asking, “What’s next? What’s next? What do I need to do next? What do I need to do next to get my goal?” We don’t live. In the past very often. We don’t look back very often. And while this constant forward focus is a great recipe for achievement, it’s a really poor path to wisdom. And what it can lead to is repeating the same mistakes.
So if you’re one of those people – and I’m raising my hand, I’m one of them – that tends to be very future focused, this is a great episode for you. I’m going to walk you through two powerful practices that you can use to wrap up your 2024 and kick off your 2025. For all of you forward-focused, high achievers, always running, always moving, can we just hit pause for the duration of this podcast and maybe a little extra time for you to do the work? I promise, you will move forward with more clarity.
So let’s start with reflecting on your past with a purpose. Let’s look back at 2024 and really get clear about what our highs and our lows are. Every year, when my wife, Wendy, and I do our annual goal setting retreat, the very first thing we do is our highs and lows for the year. And I find it helpful to flip through my photographs and look through my calendar and just ask the question, what are the highs or lows?
Now, I didn’t always do this. It’s actually something I learned from Peter Drucker. He wrote a really amazing essay back in 1999 for Harvard Business Review called Managing Oneself, and you can actually buy it in book form on Amazon. That’s where I ended up finding it. It’s like a 30 or a 40-page read, but it’s really magnificent. If you don’t know who Peter Drucker was, he is one of the true management leadership gurus of all time. If you could only learn about management from one person, learn it from Peter Drucker. And this was his treatise on managing yourself.
And when you read the book, your big takeaway, mine was the highest achievers tend to do a couple of things. They start their day with a very clear intention. What are my goals for the day? And at the end of the day, they ask, how did I do? And Drucker was trying to tell young people, if you don’t yet know what your strengths are, if you don’t yet know what your values are, if you don’t yet know how you learn or how you best perform, this practice of setting a clear intention for your day and then reflecting on how you did over time will add up to a lot of wisdom.
And it’s not necessarily wisdom of everything that you will run into in the world. What you’re really trying to focus on is, “What are my superpowers? What are the gaps I have in my game? Where do I need to focus my attention and my energies to get the most out of my life?” So this idea of a daily reflection, which is something I had never considered doing, I read about first from Peter Drucker.
This is a quote, direct quote, from the book that I wrote down and I carry with me, “Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves, their strengths, their values and how they best perform,” Peter Drucker. That kind of encapsulates to me the big idea of the book, which is why I wrote it down. And the pattern that you follow to get that wisdom about yourself, set the intention and then reflect back at the end of the day.
Now, I didn’t really start doing this until I thought I’d lost several million dollars. I was revisiting an old decision and thought that me and my partners had lost many millions of dollars. So let me go back in time and kind of tell you that story because, sometimes, it’s the story about how we learned the lesson that tells us why we learned it.
So for about five years, I was fortunate to work with Gary Keller, my writing partner on The ONE Thing, and another fellow named Mitch Johnson in a private equity firm. And we were going out and we were trying very clearly to invest in businesses and a little bit of real estate as well. And I remember I brought a deal to the table and it was for a very specific kind of startup. It had a very seasoned founder that had already done some big couple of unicorns actually that they had worked on. And we had an opportunity to be an early investor.
And we ended up looking at it hard, meeting with them, considering it. And our CEO at the time, Mitch, rejected it. And I remember thinking, “Darn!” You know, like, I felt like I was really proud to have brought such a good deal to the table and it didn’t turn out. Well, fast forward about four or five years, not that long, it wasn’t like 10 years, it’s like four or five years, and that company that we had an opportunity to invest in, I’m reading in the paper that IBM bought them for reportedly over $2 billion. So our little stake in that company, round A or round B, it was very early in their inception, would have been worth a lot of money. And I’m just like, “Ugh!” Just in agony. Like we missed it. We missed the boat. This is the thing.
So I ran downstairs. I go straight up to Mitch’s office and I’m like, “Look, did you hear the news?” He’s like, “No, I didn’t. Tell me about it”. Now tell him and I expect him to be a little disappointed. And there’s a part of me, I’m almost certain I didn’t say it but, like, I wanted to say, “I told you so. I told you this was a great investment.” But I asked him, I was like, “Man, did we miss it? Did we mess up?” And he goes, “I don’t know. Let’s look.”
And at this point I’m like, “Let’s look.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” And he reaches behind himself, and he’s got some journals on the shelf, and he goes, “Whenever I make an investment, I write down all the reasons why I did or I did not make it. So all of my yeses and nos are written down in his journals.” And he goes, “I know I’m not going to be a perfect investor. I know that I won’t always invest our funds perfectly, but my goal is to be better and better and better. And the only way to do that is to write down what I believe to be true at the time. And a lot of these investments play out over, sometimes, decades. I can then see how they played out. And go back and ask if my reasoning was correct.”
And I’m kind of stunned because Mitch, super smart guy, he can be funny, he can clown around a lot. Like he really is self deprecating. And I’m genuinely, like, super impressed. I was already impressed, but now I’m super impressed. It’s like, “Really? You have the discipline to write down notes on every single investment you’ve either said yes to or no to?” He looks it up, he finds his notes, and he starts reading them to me. And at the end of the day, he goes, “Jay, based on what we knew then, I kind of still stand by the decision. It was not a good investment, but it was something that turned out unlucky for us.”
And that’s a really big idea right there. One, he was writing down so he could learn over time. That’s the theme here. He’s reflecting back. He’s recording, so we can make better decisions in the future. But what’s about this idea that he made a good decision that had a bad outcome? There are decisions that you will make that will either have a good or a bad outcome. The worst kind you can make is a bad decision that has a lucky outcome because, then, you might think that the bad decision is actually a good thing.
Think about a gambler who goes into a casino, throws $100 on the table and walks away with $2000. That was probably a really bad decision, right? That is not a great investment of your money. That’s at best entertainment, but they might take the lesson that I’m really good at this thing and I can win. Not the right lesson to take. You could also make a great decision and get unlucky. And that was the case with us in this investment. But because we had notes, we knew it was a good decision that was unlucky.
So I walk out of his office and I’m like, “okay, I’ve now got to commit to what Peter Drucker told me. I’ve got to start asking and examining, how am I doing? Why am I doing it that way and is it the best way?” So, I started really asking those questions much more sincerely. How did I do this week? If I could have it do over, what would I do differently? What were the things that I walked away from absolutely buzzing and happy?” Because you don’t just learn your strengths and your weaknesses when you ask these questions, you also can learn what actually fills you up and what are the things that actually kinda drain you as you go?
So, this became my weekly practice. And then, over the years, I’ve also had coaches. I think I’m on my sixth coach now. And we have a process where, for me, it’s biweekly, we sit down, we review what my goals were, how I did. And if I’m not asking the questions, my coaches are asking them of me to make sure that on a regular pattern, we’re getting those insights.
Now, all of this leads up to the routine, the ritual I wanna share with you, for reflecting on your year, specifically 2024 since you’re probably listening to this at the end of 2024. It’s something I do. It’s something that Gary does. And so, after the break, I’m gonna share with you nine questions that we use for our reflection, and so that we can learn how to be better business people, how to be better dads, how to be better spouses. Whatever it is our goals are, when we reflect back, we have an opportunity to see patterns and learn. So, after the break, I’ll share my nine reflecting questions.
All right, folks, welcome back from the break. I’m going to walk through the nine reflecting questions. Some of these are ones that I’ve crafted on a few occasions in our masterminds, Gary has shared his reflection questions. And so, I do believe a few of these are actually Gary Keller originals, especially the last one, which really feels like it has all the hallmarks of a Gary Keller question.
Now, I know that you’re probably driving in a car, you’re on your way to work, you’re on your way home. You might be doing some holiday errands, right? Maybe it’s your break right now. You’re out walking the dog. Maybe you’re working out. Who knows? Chances are you’re listening to this and you don’t have a way to quickly write these down. Don’t worry about it, we will put all of these questions in the show notes. So, whenever you’re done, just circle back to your favorite podcast platform, look at the notes and you’ll find these questions, okay?
So right now your job. Listen to the questions and just try to get clear about the first thing that comes to your mind. These are not questions in my experience that require you to reflect for hours on end. I find that the answers tend to rise to the surface rather quickly, for most of them. And you kind of get those instinctive answers rather rapidly. So I think you can enjoy and then do some of this exercise just listening to this podcast. And if one of them really hits you in the gut, hit the pause button for a second. Sit with a question and then hit play again.
So question number one, what did I accomplish? What did I accomplish in 2024? I sometimes phrase this as what were my highest highs in 2024? Take a second. Hopefully, you got a good vibe right there, right? “What did I accomplish?” usually pulls together some of your biggest highs, whether professional or personal. And that usually kind of starts this whole process with a little positive buzz. Awesome. Congratulations on whatever that was for you.
Question number two, what challenges did I face? Well, there’s a reason we started with the good vibes, isn’t there? But we also need to look at what are the challenges that we had this year. Now, the last time I did this, I listed out 23 things that I always felt very proud about having happened or happened to me that year and six, kind of, lows, but they’re both there for us to learn for.
Number three, where did I fail? And most importantly, what did I learn? Now, you’re thinking, “Okay. Oh, man, I was just going through the challenges and probably one of those was a failure that your DNA is written all over.” The important part here is not to use this to club yourself, right, with guilt and regret. It’s to learn. What did I learn? Did I learn that maybe there are certain people I need to spend less time with? That I need to learn how to lead myself a little better in very specific situations? When you look at the things that you failed at, especially the things that come really quickly, the ones that come quickly are usually either really recent, are really important. If you don’t know what you learned from them, that’s one to go back to. All right, we’ve gone through three.
Number four, who supports me and helps me grow? I think it was Jim Rohn that says you’re the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. And I really do believe that. I recently went through some challenges and my coach told me, “Jay, you need to re-engineer your village,” because when I was trying to come up with the answers to who supports me and helps me grow, the list was not as long as it should have been in that moment in time. And that gave me an opportunity, an insight to be a little bit more proactive about spending time with the kinds of people who both support me and fill me up.
All right, next question? What relationships are missing from my life. Now, a lot of times when I’ve seen Gary in action, someone will say that this isn’t happening or that’s not happening for them, my business isn’t growing, I’m missing something from my life, I will tell you with an incredible frequency, he will simply respond, “It sounds like you’re missing someone, not something,” because a lot of times, the thing that’s missing isn’t necessarily something that we know how to do, it isn’t something, maybe, that we can do at that moment in time, but chances are we know someone or we know someone who knows someone. We’re missing a relationship that will help us either unlock that opportunity or move past that challenge.
So, really quickly, I’m going to hit what were the first five? What did I accomplish? What challenges did I face? Where did I fail? And what did I learn? Who supports me and helps me grow and what relationships are missing from my life?
Now, let’s get on the downhill slope. Question number six, when is enough enough? We had a great conversation with Kim Zuroff, talking about individuals like her, like me and on a bad day, who are constantly moving the goalposts on ourselves. When is enough enough? Can we ask this question at least once a year, so we can get clear on where the goalposts are for us and not move them on ourselves?
What do I fear? Do I fear losing a relationship? Do I fear entering into a relationship? It’s crazy, all the incarnations, when you ask that question and listen to your heart for the answer, you realize that a lot of times, it’s our fears that are between us and what we want. And just identifying that fear is a part of that puzzle. Maybe giving it a name, whatever that is, it will help you unlock it.
We got two questions left, folks. Number eight, what brings meaning to my life? What are all the things that you do for yourself that fill you up? What are the things that you do, even if they’re really, really hard, that you find incredibly fulfilling? There’s some of the hardest work that I’ve ever done that was also the most fulfilling. I can think back on some of those projects. Sometimes, it was writing a book that felt like torture when you’re going through it for the ninth or tenth draft. “I never want to see these words again.” You’re frustrated. Maybe it’s some other labor of love that actually is incredibly fulfilling. What is it that brings meaning to my life? Ask and answer that question.
Now, the final one is a bit of a doozy, but I love it. Number nine, who am I becoming and who will I be in the end? I love that question because it invites us to look now, instead of at the snapshots that might show up when we think about our challenges and we think about what’s missing. A lot of those tend to be flashes. They’re tiny pictures from a movie scene. When we ask, “Who am I becoming and what will I be in the end?” we have to look at a larger picture, maybe even beyond the whole year. And we’re looking out at what direction, what trajectory are we on? Are we becoming the kind of person that we want to become?
Now, here’s the thing. A lot of folks, we work with a lot of founders, business people, leaders, individuals, and they have been moving so fast in their life, chasing goals and accomplishment that they haven’t really sat down and asked the question, who am I choosing to become? They’re becoming something. We’re all becoming something. That is by default. You are evolving. And you are evolving in a very specific direction. Do you know which direction you’re evolving in? Do you know what your trajectory is? Take a second. Think about it.
Now, just a quick reminder. I rolled through those nine questions. I’ve repeated them because I’m assuming you’re out on the run. You’re listening to this because you’re one of those people that tends to be in motion. You’re a tasker or you’re doing, right? It’s not that you don’t have time to do. It’s that you don’t take time to dream. And this is one of those episodes where I’m inviting you to reflect and to dream.
So, here’s what we do with all the information. The show notes will have the questions if you want to go take more time with them. I want you to take a minute, instead of beating yourself up, make sure that you’re seeing the patterns. Just write your answers down. Maybe talk about them with your spouse or a loved one. Maybe your business partner. “Hey, I did this exercise and this is what I learned.” If you can learn even one lesson from 2024 that you can actually write down and remember, it’ll make you perform better in 2025.
I believe if you actually sincerely ask those nine questions, you’re going to learn more than one lesson. The point of this is not that you’re just celebrating what you accomplished this year or just bemoaning your failures from the year, right? We have a little bit of both. All of us do. The point is to be wiser in 2025.
Now, one of my favorite authors, Ed Millett, he’s also got a great podcast, if we’re admitting, he came and spoke at one of our conventions. And I remember him describing reflection as bullet time. And bullet time, if you’ve never seen the Matrix, is when the hero, Neo, he has got this superpower right in the movie where it’s almost like he can slow down time. And in the movie, there’s this great scene where people are spraying bullets at him from machine guns, and he’s leaning back, and he can literally focus on the individual bullets that are flying by his head. And Millett kind of refers to these moments where we journal and reflect as bullet time because when we look back, we get to hit the slow motion button on our life. We get to break things down a little bit more clearly. We get to see things starkly with the benefit of some hindsight as what they actually were.
So taking that moment is invaluable. I love how he refers to it as bullet time. I hope that after hearing those questions and the benefits, for me, like, I’m pretty sure that thinking I lost millions of dollars may have been the impetus, but I’m darn sure that by doing this over the years, it’s helped me make them and keep them as well.
Now, let’s talk about the second half. I’m going to turn the page a little bit. This is the shorter one, but I also want you to set a clear intention for 2025. Here’s a question for you. Without cheating, without looking at your calendar, without scrolling through your photos, without anything, today is one of the last days of 2024 or the first days of 2025 when you’re listening to this most likely, I want you to tell me your favorite memory, not from 2024, go back another year, what is it that you actually remember vividly as one of your favorite memories of 2023?
Are you frowning right now? Are you shaking your head? In my experience, when I ask people to go back more than 12 months, they really have to think. If they didn’t have a kid graduate from high school, if they didn’t have a baby be born, if they didn’t have, maybe, a death in the family, get married, get divorced, if they didn’t have a huge life milestone, it’s unclear what actually happened that day. “Oh, that was the year I transitioned jobs.”
So here’s the point of this. Before we really look forward, realize that when we look back on our lives, most years might have one or two big memories attached to them. And most of the big things that happen to us don’t come with a timestamp. Wasn’t that the year that so and so did so and so? Like you might remember that that was the year the Summer Olympics were or something like that, but what actually happened in your life?
The point of this is 2025 is unlikely to have more than one, two, or three big things that happened in your life that you’re going to remember a year from 2025, much less three or 30 years. So not all things are going to matter equally. So when you think about the things that you most want to have to remember about your life, about this coming year, this is your opportunity to get focused on making that thing happen.
I think about teenagers, I’ve had a couple, and I’ve had friends who’ve had a few.
They tend to think that everything is a much bigger deal than it is, because frankly, they’ve had about 12 years on this earth. So for them, a huge blowout fight with their best friends at the locker in 8th grade is a big deal, because in the scope of their life, it’s the biggest blowout they’ve ever had. And they’ll say things like, “My whole life is ruined.” But as the adult, we’re like, “That’s not true.” But that doesn’t help to say that. You have to say things like, “I know it feels that way.”
But remember, we’re adults listening to this, most likely, right? I’d love it if there were more young people listening. But chances are we’re not going to have something that truly changes the trajectory of our life happen every single year. Just not probable. Something could happen this year. You could, by intention, make it happen. This could be the year that you write the book. This could be the year that you start the business. This could be the year that you make the big transition in your life and your personal life that you get healthy. Man, 2025 was the year I finally got fit. 2025 was the year I kicked alcohol. 2025 was the year I fill in the blank. What will 2025 be for you?
So here’s the question I want you to answer. When you look back on 2025, years from now, what is it that you want 2025 to be about? Focus on that answer. What came to mind? I threw out a bunch of stuff. What are the big goals? You’re going to run an Ironman? Are you going to be able to walk 10, 000 steps a day? Are you going to do something really small but is really important to you, right? Everything is relative. What’s most important to you is most important to you. It doesn’t matter that anybody else would care about that accomplishment. It only matters that you care.
And are you clear? So set that intention. And as you look at your 2025, you’ve learned some lessons. You see some gaps. Those are opportunities for you to shape 2025. But with this clear intention, I would propose that you make this intention, if one jumped to your head, this is the year that I finally – let’s put the word finally there before the blank – this is the year that I finally blank.
What is that thing that you intend to make happen this year? Put that as your number one goal. Set that as your clear intention for 2025. You might be surprised if you don’t just have a goal, but you have a relationship with it. You revisit it. It sits like an Olympic athlete that tapes a picture of a gold medal to their mirror, so they have to see it every single day. Make it your home screen on your phone. What is the thing that you’re going to constantly be confronted with, so you never lose sight that this was your intention?
I’ve seen people do this with words and put them on bracelets. Whatever the trick is for you, do it, but you have to find a way to keep this intention front and center. But if you do, the likelihood that you will make it happen or make significant progress goes way, way up. When we talk about decisions that were lucky or unlucky, by setting a clear intention, it’s kind of increasing the surface area of your luck, right?
There is luck that feels extreme, and there’s luck that just feels like persistence. If you’re very clear about this intention and you keep it front and center, you have a much greater chance of also getting lucky this year because you’ll be talking about it, you’ll be acting on it. And I find that when people are acting on their dreams and talking about their dreams, the world will often come to support you or it will present you with options to get there or get there faster.
All right, that’s it. I want to recap it. I want you to use the non-reflecting questions. I want you to look back on last year. I know you’re a doer. I know that you’re an achiever. You’re out there, and you move fast. It isn’t perfectly appropriate. It is not losing the day or losing the morning for you to take a moment, take a beat, look back and learn from 2024. That will make you wiser.
If you can do it more frequently, great for you. I try to do it every quarter, every month, every week, not all nine questions, but I’m asking how did I do? How could I do better? How do I feel about that? What do I need to do next as a result of that? Those are the four basic questions I ask almost every single week or my coach asks me if I forget.
Reflect. And then, I want you to set that intention. In fact, that intention, this will be the year. I finally, you fill in the blank, I want that to be our challenge for the week. Every week we challenge our listeners with something small enough that you could set down your phone that you could turn off this podcast, spend just a few minutes and set it in motion, that’s the nature of our weekly challenges.
My challenge to you this week is I want you to set a clear intention for 2025. This will be the year that I, finally, you fill in the blank. And then, I want you to put that somewhere where you cannot avoid it. You cannot ignore it. You cannot forget it. Set your intention for 2025 and I promise you, you might be surprised at the end of the year, how much progress you’ve made towards that goal.
Now, before I forget, let’s talk about next week. Next week, I’m gonna do another solo episode. I’m gonna share in the eight plus years that we’ve been doing this organization, we’ve helped thousands and thousands of people form habits in their life. I’m going to walk you through the science of that. And I’m going to share the most impactful habit we’ve ever done as an organization with our training and with our coaching clients. The most impactful habit. It’s super small. It is doable by every single person listening. You don’t want to miss this episode. It’s the most impactful habit we’ve ever documented in all the years we’ve been teaching The ONE Thing. I can’t wait to see you next week.
