Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The One Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Hey there, ONE Thing gang. It’s graduation season. Maybe you have a college-aged child about to leave high school and go off to college, maybe you have a niece, a nephew, or just someone young and special to you that’s heading off to college, or maybe you have someone that’s already in college and is headed back. I wanted to ask the question this week, how can we serve our college-aged loved ones with The ONE Thing?
You’re here, you’re listening, you’re living the book, you know what it means to find extraordinary focus and understand what your future looks like and you’re working backwards from it. You understand the principles of this book. How can we pass some of those lessons along to the young people in our world? That’s the question we’re trying to answer this week.
So I think it was around 2015-2016, we asked the question, what does a college-age student need from The ONE Thing to really thrive in that environment? And we reached out to our network and we identified 15 students from freshmen to sophomores to seniors that had read the book, who were trying to apply the book, and were willing to be interviewed. And we did a little bit of a before and after with them, after a little coaching and after a few worksheets, to develop the college kid’s guide to The ONE Thing. And this week, I’m going to share the lessons we learned from that. Let’s just dive straight in.
Well, let’s kick things off, and I’ll tell you a little bit about my college experience. It might be an object lesson in what not to do. I showed up in college. My hero at the time was a fictional character named Sherlock Holmes who knew everything about everything, which is not physically possible. But I really didn’t want to make decisions in my college career. And I wasn’t very good at managing, too, the social life.
I went to school at the University of Memphis. A lot of my friends were across town at Rhodes. And as I was trying to figure out where my social life would live, about half the weekends or more, I was driving across town to hang out with my friends at their college instead of developing relationships at the one I was at. I think the people at Blockbuster Video knew me by first name because I spent a lot of time working my way through the thriller and mystery section there in lieu of going out and doing the hard things of building my new social life.
I also couldn’t figure out academically what I wanted to do. I pretty much took every 101 or intro class you could – anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, you name it, and I was, “I wonder if I would like this.” And a one-on-one class also happens to be a little easier to get a good grade in as it’s kind of a survey. And I was just sampling the pie instead of making a decision. I didn’t really know how to make a decision.
Well, the good news is by my sophomore year, I sorted out some of the social stuff. I ended up trying out and joining the rugby team. I wasn’t good enough for the soccer team, but I could kick for the rugby team. And we traveled on some weekends and we hosted on some weekends. And even though I didn’t want the Greek life, it was a little bit of that. You know, we would buy a keg or the older kids would, and we would host and serve sandwiches when we had guests, and they would do the same for us when we traveled. But it ended up becoming a big part of my social life.
And as I figured out my academic life, I ended up really not choosing. I was a double major, French and English, and I got two minors in History and Law because I just wasn’t sure exactly where I was going. But I was pretty sure words had something to do with it. So, directionally, I might not have been too far off, but I still hadn’t decided. But I ended up starting making a lot of friends in the English department and in the French department. And so, my social life kind of came together. My academic life came together.
But when you look up at the end of the day, I was on a partial scholarship, but I still took five years to get my undergraduate degree. Not exactly a case study that we want all of our young friends to implement. Let’s wander around lost for a long time, take longer than it needs to to figure things out. So, there’s got to be a better way, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
So I was playing around with ChatGPT and also asking some friends, what are the lessons that college kids actually learn versus the ones that we want them to learn? So, I pulled out seven lessons that college kids actually learn just for fun. And then, I want to index on the ones we want them to learn, and then dive into the lessons that we actually learned from these 15 college kids that line up with the latter part.
So, the seven lessons, how to survive on caffeine, hope, and maybe a lot of ramen. The first one is clearly 12 ways to make ramen into a complete meal. And it doesn’t even count if you’re just throwing an egg and hot sauce on it, right? But we all kind of live that life, and God knows, thank goodness we were young, or that sodium would have just killed our blood pressure.
I also think a lot of us learned how to write a 10-page term paper in four hours. I didn’t have Wikipedia, but we had other resources. But today, I’m sure they use Wikipedia and a little bit of ChatGPT. Style guides, what’s that? Who knows? But we figured out how to cram at the last minute. Probably figured out some strategic laundry management. If we couldn’t get home and ask mom or dad to help us out with our laundry, or do it on the big machines there, you can probably wear that hoodie 17 times if you figure out when to turn it inside out. Yeah, coffee stain, no problem. Flip it inside out, you get another day’s worth.
I remember one moment I saw one of my friends in college and every day she wore sweats. That just was her uniform. And one day she was wearing a dress and I was like, “What’s going on? Do you have something big going on?” She goes, “Nope, all my sweats were dirty.” There you go. I know this from my son who’s in college. We learned how to function on caffeine. For him specifically, it’s about six Arizona teas a day and maybe a little bit of existential dread that goes with college midterms and everything else. It’s probably not the optimal way to perform caffeine and little sleep, but a lot of us learned how to do it in college.
I think we also learned how to pretend like we read the assignment, right? We didn’t quite get to it, but we get called on in class and we can make some ginormous statements. It’s really broad. Well, I thought the author was actually making a social commentary on such and such. We kind of learned to fake it a little bit. Yeah, that’s probably on there.
And then, one of my favorite ones that a friend shared with me, I think every college kid finally figures out there is one really clean bathroom with almost no traffic if you find it. And that can become a sanctuary of kinds when you’re lost on campus and you just need to go find that spot. There’s always one bathroom that’s off the track. Nobody else knows where it is, and it’s always clean and empty. So, those are the lessons that college kids tend to earn.
So, what are the lessons that parents actually hope their kids will learn in college, besides learning how to do stuff without calling home for the password and instructions? So I kind of came up with a quick list of seven. I’ve got two kids in college now. Really strange to say out loud, I got a freshman and a sophomore, but what do I hope they’ll actually learn?
Well, first and foremost, I hope they can figure out their ONE Thing. I know a lot of us didn’t figure that out exactly in college, but it is something you hope. Can they find their calling while they’re there? Can they figure this thing out early instead of late? It’s what we wish for them, it’s never guaranteed, but if we give them the right tools, maybe it’s more likely to happen.
Maybe how to manage your time instead of just letting your calendar bully you. I know so many people struggle with the strange, you know, you have Monday, Wednesday, Friday, your Tuesday, Thursday. You also have all the things you have to layer on. How do we actually manage that and build routines that will last a lifetime? How to build habits that are better than your roommate’s cleaning habits, which are basically non-existent? That pile of dishes that I can still picture in my college apartment dorm sink with my two roommates, just always there.
But how do we build better habits in our life that serve us in college and then beyond? The routine, managing your time, those are all tied together. But like, how do we build a routine in college that doesn’t start at midnight? I’ll talk specifically about that in some of the lessons we learned with the college kids, but you know this, I know this, but we didn’t know it then. Doing a cram session after midnight is so much less effective, even if it’s fun to do it with your friends in the middle of the night, instead of doing it sometime during the day when we actually have our brains fully working.
I want my kids to make great decisions. I’d like for them, in the moment, when they’re faced with a tough decision, to make a great decision and make great decisions about maybe what courses and extracurricular activities they’re doing, the internships they do that are in alignment with their future. And you ONE-Thingers, you know this, you know how to work backwards from a goal. Our college kids haven’t learned that skill yet. How can we give it to them a little bit earlier, and then make it a little bit easier for them? How do we say yes to the right things and no to everything else? How do we pick the right opportunities?
Not every party is like a networking opportunity. Yes, those frat brothers and those sorority sisters, at some point in your life, they can come in really handy if that’s the Greek life that you lived, but not every party is actually a networking event. We need to teach them the difference between having fun, and social, and actually building your network for the future. And finally, I hope that our kids learn to love learning. Do you learn how you learn? Do you learn how you can actually learn things versus just memorizing them to get through the test?
So, those are just a handful of the lessons that I hope my kids learn when they’re in school and maybe you hope the young person in your life learns. So, let’s turn the page a little bit, have a little fun thinking about what kids actually learn. The ramen lesson, as I’m seeing every single day from my college freshmen, that is his go-to meal. Sorry. Like that’s when I look up, there’s always a pan in the sink that’s got noodle residue in it. That’s just his go-to meal. And face it, that may not change, but we can give them better lessons.
So when I look back at our college guide, and I also look back at my notes from the time, I was able to pull out five discoveries that they gave us around how to manage your college life based on the principles of The ONE Thing.
So the very first one that I’ll throw out there is that it’s really important to lay a future foundation. And by future foundation, what I mean is that these college students that we worked with years ago, we asked them to actually explore their purpose statement. As tough as that can be when you’re a young person, ask the question, why am I here? I know in our classes at Keller Williams here in Quantum Leap, that’s a big part of the culmination of that class is to write a personal mission statement, same thing.
So they had to explore that part of their world, like ultimately, why do they believe based on what they know today, they’re here and what they’re destined to do and what they want to do. We then invited them to set someday goals, kind of like we do with our adult students and corporate students, but we tweak the areas. You might recognize some of this from the only page I have memorized, page 114 in the book with the seven circles that you can apply The ONE Thing, we asked them to set some someday goals around their job or career. We asked them to set some someday goals around their personal life, around their health and wellness, around their finances, like how much money do you want to make someday? That’s a big part of the future.
And most kids don’t have any concept of what that looks like. But if they have to ask and answer the question, they might sit down and do a little research and get clear what they want their friends, family, and relationships to look like. We even asked them about their spiritual life. And for some of them, that was a really, really big area, even young in their life. And then, we gave them two just kind of wildcards. What’s important to you now that you would want to set someday goals for?
And what we learned from that is that even the clarity you get when you’re 18, 19 years old, a couple of them were in their early 20s when they did this, who knows what they want to do at that age? My research suggests less than 20% of people go into their 20s or out of their 20s with true clarity about their purpose. It’s just a rare thing to get clarity that young, but even a vague notion that they had thought about it, they had written about it, they had journaled about it, even that vague notion of where they might want to go gave them direction. It gave them things that they could at least exclude, “Well, you know, that doesn’t sound like that fits in the future that I’m designing for my life.”
So, working backwards works. We know this. We talk about this. If you’re a fan of The ONE Thing, Goal Setting to the Now, we dedicated a whole chapter to it in the book. How we work backwards from our someday goals, so we can be appropriate in the moment, it absolutely works. And we found that with these young people as well. And even allowing for the fact that who knows, truly knows and is confident ultimately where they want to end up, but asking the question really matters. That was our first discovery.
I’m going to pause there. I got four more to go, but we’re diving into this episode. It’s a short one, but I want to still give you a break. Let’s take a quick break and we’ll walk through the other four discoveries from these college students after the break.
Welcome back. Let’s get to discovery number two. Discovery number two is about the idea that setting targets between now and the end of college matters too. This is again going back to that Goal Setting to the Now. If they’ve set someday goals, the next thing we ask them to do, what goals in those same areas, we started with job and career and personal life, finances, spiritual, all of the same categories, but like where do you want to be at the end of your college career? And that forces them to analyze not only where they want to be in the next four to five years, but they also have to ask the question, where am I today?
When you’re in college today, making 20 bucks an hour feels like a fortune, but where do I want to be five years from now? Maybe I need to do more than cover a third of the rent, I might want to have a place to myself. So, they get to ask that question and guess what? Clarity matters. When you have a near-term priority, you get even clearer. And that’s what we heard back from these kids, that when you have clarity, it allows you to prioritize so, so much better about what you give time to and what you don’t give time to.
One of the stories is actually from someone who joined our team many years later, was a student in North Dakota. And she was having to work her way through college like many of us did. I did. I waited tables and worked in bookstores. But some of us had to also earn income while pursuing our academic careers and everything else that goes with it. And she was starting a real estate career. And she was juggling that. And she realized in launching a real estate career and trying to stay on top of academics that she wasn’t doing great at any of them, maybe best at the real estate because you know this, like if you need to support yourself in college, you will prioritize getting paid, so that you can get food on the table and have a place to stay. That’s just how life works.
So, she was doing pretty good on the real estate side, but her social life had fallen apart, and she was seriously considering dropping out of school. And after going through our process and working through the worksheets, she was able to recalibrate her priorities, allocate her time differently. And you look up, I think it was three years later, Kim was not only graduating from college, she had successfully launched her career, and she’d also reclaimed her social life.
So, these near-term targets, understanding where we want to go in the next few years, based on where we want to go someday, that clarity helps us make so much better decisions in the moment. And it also unlocks a lot of other things that might surprise us. I’m sure, I don’t know what was going through Kim’s head at the time, but I remember reading through our notes, I was looking at it, I was like, I can see her stepping back and going, “Well, I’m gonna keep the career, because that’s how I’m paying the bills, but gosh darn it, I’m gonna finish college too. I’m gonna graduate, I’m gonna get my degree.” When I was looking through the notes, I was like, “Well, what’s gonna happen with the social life?”
Here’s what we know. We help people all over the world with The ONE Thing. When people understand how to master their time in one area, it carries over. We call it the halo effect. And a lot of times, we get the unexpected secondary and third benefits from our primary focus. So even though she was really core focused on, “How do I manage my career with my academics?”, the surprise was that she also got her social life back. Don’t underestimate the halo effect.
And ultimately, the main lesson here, number two, is that near-term clarity, those targets that are just four to five years down the road. Those are the five-year goals we set for our adults. But for these college kids, they don’t know exactly when they’re going to emerge on the other side. It took me five years, took my wife four years, and I know lots of people who’ve done it in four, sometimes faster. It doesn’t matter, but when do we expect to get out, and are we going to be prepared for the next step then.
So, lesson number three. Success lists, as we call them, absolutely dominate to-do lists. Almost all of our young people, like almost all of us, have a to-do list somewhere. But if you don’t know better, your to-do list becomes your boss. And in The ONE Thing, very early on, right, it’s in the very first lie, we teach people how to turn their to-do list into a success list. And if nothing else you get from this lesson, if you’re listening half-heartedly while you’re out walking the dog and wondering, “Would my niece like this? Or would my nephew benefit from this? Would my son, my daughter,” whatever that is, you’re not sure you can at least learn this. When you have a to-do list, all you have to do is prioritize it, extreme Pareto it, as we call it, by figuring out the 20% of the 20%.
It’s just a couple of steps. You look at your to-do list, and you ask the question of all of this stuff that I know that I could do, what are the few things that absolutely matter, the things that I should do. And I usually ask people when we’re doing a workshop in a corporation or whatever, put a star by them and then start a completely new list. Get rid of all of the other stuff. And what we find is immediately people go from 20 to 30 things to four to five things. When we look at the long list of stuff that we need to do, usually just written down in the order we remember it, it’s just some sort of chronological record of the things we know we need to do. There’s no priority living there at all. Immediately, we identify the handful of big rocks that actually matter and then we take it one extra step.
Based on your timeframe, let’s just say a week of these things, if I could only do one this week, which one would I choose that would get me the closest to my goals? What’s the one thing I can do? Not the five things. So, you pick your number one. And unsurprisingly – I say that now. In the beginning, it did surprise me – most people know what their number one is than when they looked at the list originally. But when it’s buried under 25 other items, it’s not screaming the loudest. It’s not the thing that gets our attention. And frankly, we can cheat and just do all the little stuff and feel like we’ve been productive.
But now, we’ve got our clear number one. It’s that big rock that we know we should do. We also know it’s our number one. And then, we ask the next question. If we still have time to do more things, we have more energy, more resources, whatever that looks like for you as a college kid, what would be my number two? And then, we tack that on as number two. And then we say, if we do number one and number two and we still have bandwidth, what would be my number three? And you continue that way and you go from this jumble of potential priorities of stuff, really, to a handful, in order of priority, where you know, if I’ve got some free time this week, I really need to attack number one.
So, we call that a success list, and we taught it to these kids. What an essential life tool. How to break down the long list of stuff we all carry around with us every single day. If you’re a parent, you’ve got the list of chores you’ve got to do as an adult in the family. Maybe you make breakfast, you get the kids out of bed, you get them to school, you pick them up from school, you take them to sports. You have a long list of to-dos. What is your approach, if you don’t follow The ONE Thing, to highlighting the things that matter and the jumble of things we have to do every day? The success list is how we do it.
So, we looked up, there was a kid named Hogan, and one of the things he immediately figured out is that he could not give the same energy and time, even if he wanted to, to his beginners golf class that he needed to give to his biology class that was a part of his major. He started separating the classes that were his electives, that were for fun, and realizing as much as he might wanna come in first in his class or get better on the golf course for the weekend, he really needed to give more time to that biology class because I can tell you I tried to escape it, but I didn’t. That’s a hard one. That’s one that requires a lot of study, so that you can actually pass those exams or maybe even ace those exams. It’s a simple matter of, yes, I do have two classes. Which one matters more and does my calendar reflect it? So that was lesson number three, success list, dominate to-do list.
Discovery number four, thinking big matters. And this is a story that we found after we wrote The ONE Thing. There’s a guy named George Dantzig, and he’s kind of a famous mathematician, if that’s your world. And he was attending school in Northern California, I believe it was Berkeley. And if you can imagine a giant lecture hall for math majors, they have this 15-foot chalkboard that’s as wide as the stages for the professor. And the professor will get on a ladder, sometimes, and do these giant equations on there.
And so, he showed up for class late. And there were two very complex equations on the board that was usually reserved for homework. And he had missed what they were because he showed up late, but he copied them down in his notebook. And then, much later, he came back to his professor and he said, “I know these are a couple of weeks late, but the homework you gave on such and such date was really, really hard.”
Well, it turns out how we think about things matters. The two “homework assignments,” and I put those in air quotes, if you’re not watching this on YouTube, those two homework assignments were actually famous unsolved math problems. And he ended up completing both of them. His professor actually tapped on his shoulder and said, “Hey, I’ve drafted our papers, and I need you to sign on,” as I believe it’s like a co-author in academia.
And so many, many years later, I think it was a preacher that got this story out of George Dantzig on an airplane. But he said, “In all honesty, if I had known they were famous unsolved math problems instead of homework, I would not have tried as hard to complete them, I would not have tried as long to complete them, and I probably would not have been successful.” And it’s all about your mental mindset.
The lesson here, and a couple of our kids articulated it, is that yes, we can all make a mountain out of a molehill but, sometimes, by the way we look at things, the way we face our challenges, we can turn mountains into molehills. We can do it in reverse. So, those big unsolved problems were clearly mountains, but because he mistook them for homework, he was able to approach them as molehills. So, don’t forget the lesson. When we think big, we have the power to turn mountains into molehills. What seems really too big might actually seem more approachable if our perspective is much larger.
So, number five, we want a time block for willpower. And what’s really cool about this one is this is the one that was highlighted by my friend Clark who went on to become a very successful entrepreneur. He’s met like Charles Branson, like he’s done all kinds of really crazy stuff in his career. But here he is a college student, I believe in Baylor, and he’s realizing that he is not managing his time well. As he understands willpower, he realizes willpower is not on will call. He can’t just show up any old time and study. He’s got to actually plot out his days. At the same time in his college career, he got diagnosed with ADHD.
So, he realizes, based on The ONE thing, he’s got a willpower deficit. He may not be able to just grit down and do the work at the last minute like he thinks he can, and he also has an attention problem. So, he needed to get serious about designing his days. And in our college kids guide, we actually have blank pages for people to plan out their calendars. And so, what he did is he started designing his semester-by-semester calendar for willpower and attention.
Now, remember, if it’s been a long time since you’ve been in college, there’s two rhythms to your week. You have classes that happen on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and you have classes that are often longer that happen on Tuesday and Thursdays. So, depending on the ones that you have to take that semester and when you can fit them into the schedule, you have some limited ability to design your schedule.
And what he started doing was trying to attend classes earlier in the day. And instead of going home and taking a nap, actually using his afternoons or like on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I think he had like two and three o’clock classes, or I might be confusing him with my own son Gus, and he would use those mornings to do a lot of his homework and his reading assignments. And instead of trying to do them at home in the apartment or the dorm room, a lot of times you go to the library, you go to a common area where you might have a little bit more focus and can bear down and do the work.
Guess what? On a college campus at 11 a.m., the library is not nearly as crowded as sometimes it will be in the evening when everybody’s trying to cram late at night. So, surprisingly, he was able to find that time when he did tend to have more mental willpower to stay focused on his work, and he was able to go through there with fine colors. And it was all through scheduled design. And so, all through schedule design.
And so, that’s one of the things I remember sitting down and talking to Gus about. That’s my oldest son who’s in his sophomore year. I just said, “When you look at your schedule, if you end up with a really free day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or maybe it’s on Wednesdays and Fridays, don’t just use that time to go blow off steam and go play golf or go hang out with your friends or worse, play video games. That daylight hours, if you choose to, you can do your reading assignments, you can work on your papers, that will help you be the person,” right?
Everybody’s in the dining hall or they’re out at the restaurant. Some of them are going to go out, and then they’re going to try to study at midnight. Some of them are going to leave the dinner table and say, “I’ve got to go back to my dorm room and study.” You’ll be the guy that can say, “I finished my studies. You want to go see a movie? You want to go see a band?” But if you can learn the discipline of doing the work in advance when we tend to have the willpower and the attention to do it, mostly, that’s gonna happen earlier in the day, then we don’t build those horrible habits that a lot of us kept where we’re up at midnight to 3 a.m. trying to write that term paper.
Now, this didn’t come easily to me. I used to think I was more productive after midnight because there were fewer distractions, but the truth is I was just using deadlines to achieve focus and that can be very effective but it also is very stressful, and it also sometimes can just absolutely backfire on you. You get there, you’re close to the finish line, you know you’ve got to bear down and do it, but you realize you’re missing pieces. You don’t have the right research, you didn’t read the right books, you don’t have something, and now there’s no time left. And that can create real anxiety, and I felt it. I remember it as a college kid, and I’m sure that you’ve got young ones who’ve done that too.
So, how do we take that lesson to time block, to schedule our classes for willpower and attention, just like Clark did, who went on to be very successful. But he conquered his ADHD. He conquered his bad habits over the course of four years. And those emerged and allowed him to, I believe he did an internship with Gary Keller, he launched a music non-profit, and then started his own business. That’s the reward if we can learn that a little earlier instead of having to learn that while we’re doing our first job.
And a lot of us didn’t learn that lesson. We showed up for work every day with our hair still wet because we tried to get every minute in we could in the bed because we stayed up till 2 a.m. streaming some show or binging on something or playing video games. If we can learn some of those disciplines early, they don’t just serve us in college, they serve us in life.
So, a really quick recap, and I’m going to give you one bonus. First and foremost, they learned the power of setting a foundation in the future. Then, they learned that if they have clear goals, even if they’re not 100% sure that that’s exactly what they want, but they’ve set clear goals for the end of college, those two things give them real clarity around making great decisions. So, even though we might go, “Well, nobody knows what they wanna do yet,” we can still put something down. It’s easier to adjust those future goals than it is to live without them. And we make better decisions in the meantime. And it’s actually how we sometimes discover them. By deciding what does and doesn’t work, we sometimes navigate to the real thing along the way.
Third, discovery. Success lists dominate to-do lists. Basically, achievers live by priority. How quickly can we get a cheat in our lives, like the extreme Pareto exercise, taking our to-do list down to a prioritized short list that we can actually attack and make progress on, and actually, therefore, be appropriate towards the goals that we’ve set. How can we help our kids think big? We would never tell our kids to think small. “Hey, kid, I want you to think small and safe. That’s the way you get ahead in life.” No way. But sometimes we say that to ourselves and maybe we’re role modeling that for our kids. How can we take the George Dantzig story and make sure that our kids get it? By the way, I didn’t tell you this. If you’ve ever seen the movie Good Will Hunting, supposedly George Dantzig’s story is what inspired that screenplay. Anyway, a little bit of trivia for you as we go.
And number five, how do we time block? How do we design our schedules for success? In Clark’s example and a lot of our young people, how do we manage our willpower, the time when we have maximal focus, usually earlier in the day, those hours after we wake up, not after midnight? How do we design for success? Because that serves us in life.
I’m gonna give you one bonus. This would be the sixth. If we were doing this study today, if we were coaching young kids today, the other tool I would give them is the Core Values Deck. I remember I gave it to my son, Gus. He did his core values. He’s actually done them a few times over the years, but I wanted him using them like a compass.
And if you go back in episode 483, I think it fell in December of this year, 483, my wife and I really went deep on core values. And that’s come up a lot over the last few months, for sure. But when you’ve identified your top three core values, they kind of serve as a compass. For me, it’s impact, family, and abundance. What is it for that young person in your life? It takes about 30 minutes, and that is a great stepping stone towards purpose and mission. And it also gives you a compass. It’s doing this thing on a Saturday night in alignment with the values I’m trying to live. We can give them a tool to make better decisions when we’re not there to help them make decisions.
So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick episode on how to employ The ONE Thing for college-age kids. Maybe you’re refreshing your memory on your college days. Maybe you’re that kid right now listening to this episode. How can we take some of these things and put them into effect, whether we’re in college or not? How can we get these ideas in front of the young people in our life?
So, that brings me to my challenge of the week. And this is one of the most specific ones I’ve ever given. I’ve never asked people to just take action like this before. But I want you to take a minute and ask the question, is there a young person in your life that’s going off to college, that maybe already is in college, that for graduation day this year, instead of giving them, “Oh, the places you’ll go,” maybe you need to give them a copy of The ONE Thing.
I just want you to identify that person. And then if you go to the1thing.com/college, you can find our free college guide and we’re going to offer some graduation month discounts on The ONE Thing and the Core Values Deck. So, if you really want to be the uncle with the mostest or the auntie with the mostest, you can go the whole shebang, get them all of that at a discount. At the very least, if you don’t have the budget for it, you could give them the college guide.
And I hope that you won’t just give it to them, I hope you’ll follow up with them. You know kids when it’s around graduation time, they get all of these gifts. If they were raised like me, it takes them a month to even write thank-you notes and say thank you to everybody who gave them gifts. And then, do they actually read the books that you give them? You’re probably gonna have to follow up with them. Did you look at the college guide? Would you like to sit down and do it together?
Maybe you’re the parent. My wife role models this so well. Our son is thinking about moving from the dorm into an apartment and I heard them upstairs and she said, “Let’s talk through what it looks like to have a budget because now you’re gonna have a cable bill. Now you just can’t go to the rec center and get dinner. You’ll have to plan for groceries.” And I was like, “Yes, preparing for real life out there.” How do we, for the young people in our lives, get this in front of them and then help them actually engage with it.
Before we leave, I do want to tell you about next week. It’s one of my all-time favorite interviews. We had Dr. Robyne Hanley-Defoe on the podcast. We recorded it live when we were out in Vegas at our big event where she spoke. She absolutely stole the show. So many people said they had more ahas from her 30 minutes on stage than anything else over those four days. And I can tell you, in this interview, you’re probably going to want to pull over the car, stop jogging, and take notes. It’s that good.
She talks about her 90-second rule that absolutely changed the way I think about dealing with really tough emotions. She’s got the wind-then trap, which is really great, and this really plays into The ONE Thing. And she also really articulates how so much of what we do in our work life is replaceable, but what we do in our home life is actually irreplaceable. She’s talking about priorities, folks. I hope you’ll tune in next week when I get to talk to Dr. Robyne Hanley-Defoe. It’s a fantastic episode. I’ll see you next week.
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