Jay Papasan:
Most high performers are trying to solve the wrong problem. They’re searching for a smarter productivity hack, a better time management system, or even a cool new routine that they can launch their days. But they’re missing the point. The things that lie beneath it all are where they should be looking. 90% of your success will come from the foundation where most people never look.
For almost 13 years, people have come to The ONE Thing book, The ONE Thing podcast, our training and coaching seeking productivity. And a lot of them have found it. They just didn’t find it the way they expected because what we teach is to go beneath the surface, to look for the true foundation of productivity. And that’s what we’re gonna unpack in this episode.
So, whether you’re new to The ONE Thing or a veteran ONE-Thinger, there’s gonna be something here for you. We’re gonna go tap into the foundation of what makes The ONE Thing work and the foundation, I believe, for all true success. And for our business owners out there and our leaders, it’ll help you answer the question, am I truly working on what matters?
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Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
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Jay Papasan:
The challenge for a lot of us is that we’re working harder than everyone else around us, and we still feel like we’re not making progress, or even worse, we feel like we’re stuck. And the challenge is we’re focused on the wrong things. When we focus just on productivity, what we end up getting is a lot of activity, lots and lots of work. We come home tired, right? You go from meeting to meeting, you keep checking things off of that never-ending to-do list, but it never feels like you’re truly getting ahead or you’re truly getting higher up into where you’re wanting to go in terms of your goals. It feels like a lot of activity, but you’re not quite even sure if it’s productivity.
And that’s the core challenge. The harder we work on doing more stuff, and it’s not the right stuff, I think the more tired we get and the further we get from where we want to go. It’s kind of a productivity paradox. If you only focus on being productive and not the things that make you productive, the core things that underline where we aim our talents, where we aim our resources, where we aim our time and our money, when we understand those things, productivity is a natural result. But when we try to force it from the top, things go wrong.
Some of the symptoms you hear from people is, “I don’t have enough time,” or “I don’t have enough time for all the things I want to do,” or “Even if I had the time for all the things I want to do, I still feel like I’m behind,” or “Even if I had time to do all the things I wanted to do, I still feel like I would be letting someone down.” And at the end of the day, when do I ever get to take care of myself?
And I’ve talked about it, I’ve called it the busyness trap. That’s what shows up when we get caught up in this productivity world, where it’s all about the system and the tools, and not about the foundation that the system and tools work from. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this special podcast and really focus on what The ONE Thing was always about.
The ONE Thing was never a productivity book. I know that’s where you would find it in the bookstore. I know that’s how people would describe it. We’ve probably even described it that way on this podcast and other places. The ONE Thing is actually a purpose book. It gets us into the why, so that we know the what and the how. And you can think of it that way. Purpose is why are we working at all. Our priorities become what we focus on, and then productivity is how we approach it all. When we get those things in the right order, that’s where the magic happens.
So, if this sounds like you, you never have enough time, people think you’re successful, but maybe you feel a little bit unfulfilled, that your productivity feels like it’s running you in circles or running you ragged, I think that we can go a little deeper together in this episode and maybe unpack some questions that will get you a little closer to the foundation that you’ve been looking for. And I promise, that clarity can unlock so much more for your life.
I really look up and think about The ONE Thing as kind of a clarity machine. Can we get really clear about what truly matters, about the foundation for everything that we’re doing, the why behind it all? When we do, get out of people’s way, folks. When people are really clear, the motivation is natural. It’s coming from inside, not the outside, and it is truly the productivity secret that no one talks about. It’s not about productivity. It’s about the why that lies beneath it all.
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Jay Papasan:
All right. So, let’s go through the framework. If you’ve read the book, in the American edition, the hardcover, it’s going to be on page 133. You’ll remember the iceberg metaphor that we showed. And it’s this idea that when people see a really productive person, they’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. While 80 to 90% of the actual iceberg is below the waterline. So, we’re seeing this productive person out in the workplace, out in the world, but what we’re not seeing is what is underneath it all, the foundation that’s making them productive.
Below your productivity is priority. And that’s what I say often, the difference between activity and productivity is working on our priorities. When you understand what’s truly important and you put work into it, you are being productive. You can be incredibly active. You can do lots and lots of stuff. And we’ve all had that day where we checked a million things off of our list, but we knew that we didn’t really make meaningful progress. That was just a mental health day. I just have to make all of these little things go away, but we didn’t do any of the real work that we know is waiting for us tomorrow. And it feels like that treadmill over and over again.
So, productivity is founded on priority. That’s below the waterline, right? Every now and then, great leaders will make sure that everyone on their team hears the priority, right? They’ll always say, “Hey, what our focus is this week, this month, this quarter is X. I want to give everybody full focus on what our true priority is.” The reality is, and if you’re a business owner listening, take it easy on yourself, give yourself grace, we’re idea machines. We show up every day with a new idea and we layer it on top of what our people were already doing, what we were already doing because man, that’s fun, that’s shiny, that’s new, that’s interesting, that’s creative, it’s a lot sexier than actually doing my one thing, if we’re honest with ourselves. And we keep piling it on without any subtraction.
The whole idea of priority, it’s about first. That’s actually the meaning of the word. The idea of having a plural for the word priority, because prior is first in the old Latin origins. So, the idea that you have many firsts, right? I’ve got lots of first. No, you don’t. You have one first at any given time. So, the whole idea of how we use the word priority is kind of reckless. So, what is the clear priority that we need to be focused on? And when we do, guess what? Productivity happens.
So, we have to go a little deeper still, folks. If you remember the graphic of the iceberg, what lies below productivity is priority, and what lies below priority is purpose. And purpose, it’s one of those big heavy words. That’s one of the reasons we talk so much about core values, right? What is it that we’re truly working for? What direction is it that we need to be headed for fulfillment to naturally be a byproduct of what we do when we’re operating in alignment with our core values.
For me, family, impact, abundance, said it a million times on this show. When I know that the work I’m doing lines up with all three of those, it may be really hard work. It may be the hardest work day of the year, but I won’t feel depleted afterwards. I might be tired, but I will be fulfilled. When we work in our purpose, we are bringing meaning to our work because it’s delivering something to us greater than the output of the work itself.
A lot of people got hung up on the word purpose, which is why we started talking about core values first. But at the end of the day, your purpose is kind of your mission. And it’s one of those things that most of the world does not just show up in the workplace having any clarity around because we don’t talk about it. We spend all of our time talking about productivity hacks and not enough about why we’re working at all.
So, one of the big dichotomies that I saw early in this book, and sorry for the fancy word, people would ask me, what is The ONE Thing? And I’d be like, “Well, it depends on which angle we’re looking at it from.” When you look at the focus in question, “What’s The ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or necessary?” we put that in two frames in the book, folks. There’s this idea of based on my goals and my priorities, what’s my one thing to make that happen? There’s this activity base that’s in the now. It’s what we put on our calendars day after day, so that we can actually make progress on our goals.
But you have to zoom up a little bit to think about it on the higher level. What’s my one thing? This is the grand question of life, right? Why am I here? And so, I’m gonna take it down a notch from there because research has shown, I’ve read several papers that said only about two out of 10 adults has a clear sense of mission or purpose. And a lot of them are highly religious, meaning it is drawn from their religious beliefs, what they believe they’re here for. And that makes sense. Like how many people do you actually know that said, “My whole life, I wanted to be an astronaut,” and that’s what they became? Not very many. We read about them and it makes it feel more common. We see them on TV. I’ve always wanted to be a skier and I just won my Olympic medal. Great, I love that. Those are amazing journeys where people figure it out very early on, but they’re also rare.
So, it’s totally normal if you’re listening to this and going, “Dude, I don’t have a clue,” because that was me too. We wrote this book and I realized I had a gap in my game. I was working hard for something, but I wasn’t clear why I was working hard. Where that drive was coming. Was it coming from a healthy place or was I trying to fill up a hole with the wrong stuff? And we all need to ask that question every now and then.
So, what is my one thing is the big question, and I’m gonna bring it down a notch. Instead of having to think about your whole life, let’s go to the season. I’ve worked with a couple of clients that were in different seasons of their life in my executive coaching. You’ve got one that’s got four kids. They’re still in the house. They have ambitions for their craft. They have ambitions for their professional life. But the truth is, if you asked, what’s the last thing that you’re gonna fail at in this season, right at that moment, it’s gonna be the parental role.
And so, in a season, we tend to wear one hat and it’s the priority over the others. I found this to be helpful. When I look up every single day, I have to ask, what’s my number one role in life right now? I am a father of two great kids. I am a spouse to an amazing wife. I am also a son to my remaining mother. I, also, am a brother to my sister. I am an uncle to my nieces. You can go through the list. I’m also a business owner. I’m also a teammate, right? We have all these different roles, and we have to figure out what matters most.
So, when we think about our purpose, don’t get too hung up on having to get the ultimate mission statement. Just think about in this season. When I think about this period of my life, what’s the area that I truly want to be making progress on? What am I leaning into most? What’s the thing that I would want to fail at least? That will give you more clarity than most people believe.
So, we’re going to flip this. When you’ve asked that question, the foundation, you go beneath the waterline, maybe you have to put on your scuba gear, go there for the weekend, get your cup of tea, get your coffee, get your journal out, talk to the people who love you and know you, what is the thing that’s truly driving you? Go down there deep and start connecting it to where you are in your true priorities. Because when you say, “In this season, my number one priority, truly my purpose for this season is…” great. Now, it becomes clear what your priorities should be. And when you’re acting in your priorities, folks, when you’re making progress towards them, that is when we’re most productive. That’s the right order. We go down deep, we figure out the big, what’s my one thing. And based on that, we identify the priorities to make it happen, and we start taking action.
That’s the basic foundation, shows up on page 133 of the original book. And I believe it’s, kind of, the deep, dark secret. I remember our head coach, Jordan Fried, he’s one of the first people that called attention to it. Someone had called The ONE Thing the best productivity book that he’d ever read. And Jordan kind of corrected them. It’s like, it’s not really a productivity book. It’s a purpose book. And I knew exactly what he meant because we help people through our coaching, through our training, through this book and this podcast – hopefully you’re getting some clues right now – to go beneath the surface and found the foundation of their future productivity.
And when they start in the right place, guess what? All of those descriptors, “I’ve got too much on my plate,” “I feel like I’m always behind,” a lot of those start to fall away because we don’t have a million priorities, folks. Those are usually gonna be two to three in any given week, maybe five if you have a really big business, and you can dedicate real time to making progress on them.
And even if you had an otherwise busy day, you’ve gotta drop the kids off, you’ve got to pick the kids off, you’ve got to maybe go to the dentist or whatever it is, all the errands, pick up the dog from the kennel, you can still be busy, but those few hours that you spent acting on your real priorities based on your purpose, you will go to the end of the day and say, “Today was a good day. It was hectic, but it was a good day.”
So, I’m going to dive into maybe a couple of case studies and examples and some frameworks for helping you get through this. But before that, let’s take a quick break and I will see you on the other side.
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Jay Papasan:
So, when I think about someone who truly figured this out in the right order, one of the first people I think of is my friend, Stu. And we did a whole episode with Stu McLaren. He’s actually been on the show a couple of times. But I remember hearing about Stu that he had sold his business because he read this book. And I cannot do justice to his story. But Stu’s realization was, based on this book, and I think he had a really good coaching session with our mutual friend, Michael Hyatt, he realized that his business was not aligned with his true identity, his purpose in life, and that was creating stress for him over time.
Everyone saw him as the most successful person in the space he was operating in. He was building community online. It was a new industry and he was the guy. I mean, he was the guy. I remember hearing about him from very far away going, “If you’re trying to build an online community, you’ve got to take Stu’s course.” And he’s still kind of the guy for that. But he realized the way he’d built the business, no matter all the markers of success, the valuation for the company, the prestige of the stages and the podcast that he was invited on, the actual net income and the growth rate of that company were spectacular, he sat there through a sleepless night and then told his wife, he’s like, “I think I need to sell my company. I think I need to sell my company.” And he went through a pivot.
And here’s the beautiful part. Even though a lot of us who realize maybe we’ve been walking down the wrong path and we have to start over, the more I’ve gotten to know Stu, even though he was hitting the restart button, you’re not starting from zero. You’re actually starting from a much better place. You’ve built something, maybe it’s an amazing something, but it’s not the thing that actually fills you up. It’s not the thing that makes you happy and fulfilled at the end of the day. It doesn’t bring meaning to your work. It doesn’t bring meaning to your life. It doesn’t make you feel great about what you do. You might be good at it, but it wasn’t actually leading to your ultimate productivity.
Now, you flip the switch, you move to something that is aligned with it, you’re not starting at zero folks. You’re actually starting from a much better foundation, you’ve been down the path before, you get through the stages much faster. Any entrepreneur will tell you, sometimes, you don’t even figure it out to your third business or the third iteration of the business that you started. That is through those iterations that you start to get things right.
So, don’t resist the change even if you’re incredibly successful, like Stu was when he made the pivot, because if you talk to him today, he is living his life mission, he’s doing what he is best in the world at. And I think, gosh, I think I was with him raising money. We raised like $800,000 in December for his charity. They built schools in Africa. I think he’s already built 21 of them. Something incredible. So, they are making a difference in the world, something that’s passionate. He and his wife are passionate about education for children in these countries where they don’t have these privileges like we do. He is making that happen through his work. And now, he’s living in alignment with his family, with his work, and with his one thing. That’s an example of what I’m talking about.
You’ve also heard me interview a fellow named Pat Flynn. We talked about his great book, Lean Learning. Well, there’s another book he wrote a long time ago, and if you found it in the bookstore, you’d see that I actually wrote the foreword for it. And it’s the only time I’ve ever done that for a friend. But I love the idea of the book. Pat realized through his podcast, he had helped thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs launch profitable businesses. And he realized knowing how to do it was only half the story. You needed to know where to aim it.
And he had talked to people, his students, who had built these amazing businesses for themselves online. They had liberated themselves from the day-to-day work that they had done before to do the thing, their very own thing, yay, but they’d built the wrong thing. They were climbing the wrong ladder and they were ultimately unfulfilled.
So, he wrote a whole book called, “‘Will It Fly?’ And it was about the idea, not just of, can you build a better business? Can you also build the right business for you? He got it in retrospect, and then he started teaching it. It’s advice we should all take. And no matter where you are on this journey, it’s not too late for you to get on the right path.
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Jay Papasan:
So, when we think about the pivot, I shared with you earlier in this podcast that we had written this book. It was going out in the world and I realized I wasn’t clear about my purpose. And I felt a little bit like a fraud. You know, the imposter syndrome, like punched me in the gut and said, “Not you, buddy. You can’t go out on stage and talk about this book.” I had to do some work.
And then, I read a great story, and I’ve talked about it many times here. It was from Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Happiness Hypothesis. And he told the story of the rider and the elephant. And it’s the idea, if you can imagine, a small child riding on the elephant’s back through the jungle. You’ve got a three or four-ton elephant and a 40-pound kid. The author asked the person imagining this, can you really imagine that there’s anything that child can do to make the elephant go where it doesn’t want to go? And we all kind of get the basic laws of physics. A 40-pound child riding on a three or four-ton elephant cannot force the elephant to do anything it doesn’t want to.
And his point was, the rider is your brain. It’s your logical mind. When you plan your life, that is the writer saying, this is what we’re going to do. The truth is though, your elephant, your heart, your purpose, that thing that feeds on meaning is always in charge. And I remember thinking, wow. So, if everything that I’ve done, even if my writer was kind of clueless about where we were going, the elephant was leading the way, that means that I’ve been going down this path for a reason. Now, my job, my one thing is to figure out what is my purpose on this path? Am I on the path or close to it? How did my elephant get me here?
So, no matter where you are, if you’re feeling some of the pain of trying to be productive, but not clear on your purpose, the good news is your elephant, your heart has probably been leading you in the right direction. You just need to figure out where you’re going.
So, let’s look at a few ways we can apply this principle right now, wherever you are. So, on the purpose level, do you know why you’re doing what you currently do? When you think about your profession, I looked up for me, I am a coach, I am an author, I’m a CEO, what is it about those things that makes me fulfilled? So, on the days, no matter how hard I work, I feel really amazing about my day. What are the commonalities there? What’s the thread that I can pull through there? And I ended up asking my coach, I asked my wife, I asked some of my friends, and I ended up getting clearer and clearer, and that’s articulated in the family impact abundance, kind of the short version of what I want to be and how I want to live in alignment with my purpose, that’s kind of my compass for getting there.
But I, then, will call back what I said before, if you don’t wanna go too big of a frame, you can also say in this season, right? If you’re a parent with young kids, is ultimately not just providing for those kids through your work, but also being an amazing parent to them, what is the real meaning that you need to draw from this season? What is the ultimate priority that you need to be focused on above all else? That becomes your North Star. And then, we ask based on that, what would my priorities be? So, we start with the foundational, why? Why are we doing this? And what is truly, truly important in this season of my life? And that will help us get clarity about the foundation of your iceberg, right?
Then, we ask the question, what are the priorities based on that clarity that I need to pursue? When we get clear on the foundation, the direction starts to show up. It might be that we only know we need to travel north. I don’t know exactly where I’m going destination-wise, but I do know that it’s north of here. Guess what? That eliminates east, west, and south. We’ve eliminated a lot of wrong turns and the priorities will be in a much narrower band. So, even if we’re not perfectly clear, I promise you, directionally, you know that you’re making progress and the fulfillment will show up along the way.
And then, finally, we build productivity into that. What am I doing each week to take action on my priorities? What are the things that I can concretely say I’m doing, so that I am moving forward, not backwards in those areas? So, when you look at your week, write down your answer. You know, how can I make my work matter this week? Can I do that for the month? Can I do that for the quarter? And ultimately, then, you come back down, we say Goal Setting to the Now, like each day, can I make one small deposit in the direction that I know I need to go?
So, the big idea here is, forget all of the productivity hacks, forget the tools and the systems. If you haven’t started with the right foundation, all you’re gonna do is go through a lot of stress and behavior change while you try to change everything to do the new system. And that can be kind of attractive, which is why people do it all the time, right? We see people kind of, I call it fad surfing. They jump into our bandwagon for a while, and then they’re off to do the next thing. And they don’t really go deep enough, they’re surfing on the surface to kind of get the bigger message beneath.
But the people who do, those that we work with and our coaching clients that we work with at a corporate level, when they get down to the core meeting, that’s where you see the massive unlocks. You hear people talking about, it’s crazy. When I’m clear about what it is I need to be doing, it’s so easy to say no to all the distractions. That is the amazing thing. The clarity we get from our purpose helps us identify our priorities, and it makes us compelled to want to work on them. Because now, we know it’s connected to something far more important than titles and raises and income and all of the things, right?
Yes, money is important, but there’s a lot of things out there that we’re chasing that are way beyond our basic needs. And they’re not maybe the important things. So, if we can identify what’s truly important, what truly matters for us and our business, everything becomes easier.
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Jay Papasan:
All right, so to wrap things up, we’ve got to get our work in the right order. We don’t start with productivity, we start with purpose. Purpose identifies our priorities. And when we operate in our priorities, guess what? We’re productive folks. We just have to work from the right order. We spent too much of our lives focused on the top level, above the surface stuff, the performative work that makes us look good, but doesn’t fill us up. When we do a little bit of a deeper dive, we unlock a whole other way of living, both in our personal and our professional life.
I wanna make a special invitation. We spent a lot of the last year building, in secret, in the background, a brand new foundational course called The ONE Thing OS, The ONE Thing Operating System. And what we’ve done is we’ve taken all of our exercises, right? How to identify your purpose, how do we write a someday letter, and we work backwards from our core values and our purpose statement to identify where we want to go and how we need to get there. I personally am teaching all these classes.
They’re available online. Check it out at the1thing.com/OS. It is your personal course to getting clarity around what truly matters. It will help you do all the foundational work and then and only then, will we teach you the systems and the tools, like the 411 and the GPS, so that you can build habits and routines around living your purpose in life.
The ONE Thing was never a productivity book, folks. It was actually a purpose book. And we’ve built great tools over the last 13 years to help people get clearer about where they ultimately need to go. And more importantly, why? Why is that truly important for them to get there? We’ve put all of that into The ONE Thing operating system. I hope you’ll check it out at the1thing.com/OS.
Now, to close out every episode, I want to give you a challenge. I’ve challenged you, are you overly focused on productivity and maybe need to spend some time thinking about your foundations? My challenge to you is to take 30 minutes and just ask the question, why am I working so hard? What is it that I’m truly working for? Spend a little time with yourself thinking about your big why, your purpose.
I promise if you do that, that clarity will help you make better decisions. It will eliminate so much of the noise. It will definitely lighten the load going forward.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode. I hope you’ve taken something away from it. I hope you maybe even got a little bit of a glimmer of why you’ve truly been working so hard in what you’re ultimately what you’re striving for.
Disclaimer:
This podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts and opinions of the guest represent those of the guest and not ProduKtive or Keller Williams Realty LLC and their affiliates and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, tax, or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty or guarantee of its accuracy, tax, or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or results from using the information.
