The ONE Thing Book Review

The ONE Thing is a refreshing take on some conventional wisdom.

Gary Keller is the founder of Keller Williams, one of the biggest real estate firm in the US.

The entire point of this book is to show you that when trying to achieve results it often comes down to simply focusing on “The One” most important thing.

You should seek to ask big questions to big answers.

Throughout the book, Keller revisits his “One Thing” question often.

The question is “What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

From there he breaks down different ways you can apply this question to your life.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is stressed out by life and wants to break down some big tasks into smaller tasks by asking important questions.

Also, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to challenge some of their commonly held beliefs about how to be productive.

For example, the book says that multitasking is a bad habit and rarely a good idea because you don’t give 100% attention to anything. Gary provides scientific proof to back it up.

He talks about the Pareto Principle (80/20) and how you can take that a step further by focusing on the one thing that will deliver the 20%.

The book also suggests that having a to-do list is a bad idea because you fill it with tasks that have equal weight when not everything should be viewed as equal.

I enjoyed this book because the chapters were short, concise, and easy to digest. The end of each chapter has the key takeaways which is a nice recap.

Biggest Insights

I love the chapter about balance. I am guilty of saying “I just need to find the right balance”. I especially like the way Gary Keller phrases it, “Enough time for everything, and everything done on time.”

But, Gary Keller says that finding balance isn’t something that should be sought out but rather discouraged.

When you try and live in balance you give time to everything. This doesn’t allow you to devote a lot of time to something that really matters. The result is you short change everything and you end up not achieving the results you actually want.

“The reason we shouldn’t pursue balance is that the magic never happens in the middle; magic happens at the extremes.”