My One Thing

Introduction

I’ve been reading The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan . And like a few other books I have read, I am deciding to publicly put its message in action.

Rather fitting, the book discusses a single main theme:

To be successful, focus on ONE thing and one thing only.

It’s full of great quotes, useful analogies and anecdotes to apply the principles behind achieving success. About half way through the book I started to think, “What’s my ONE thing?” - which led me to writing this post.

My Challenge

I’ve been blogging on/off for the last couple of years, and have recently tried to improve the frequency and consistency of my content output. I’ve been proud of the work thus far, but always wish I could do more.

Many successful daily bloggers talk about only publishing high-quality content that they are truly proud of. For me, since writing is more of a hobby than an income stream, my challenge has been balancing prioritizing between my day job, family, and the time needed curate and edit quality posts.

I’ve been struggling to find that time needed to write the quality content that I would be proud of.

Quality vs. Quantity

I am conflicted with the advice of these bloggers: to “…only publish extremely high quality content”.

Quality

Naturally , quality would be measured by the reader, right?

For example, I might be overly critical about grammar, while a reader has mostly ignored my perfect placement of punctuation and is more interested in the story.

Whether I am proud of that writing or not, probably doesn’t matter as much as how valuable the message is.

Quantity

I generally believe that doing is better than thinking.

For example, rather than spending more time planning a single post, I should be spending that time writing and crafting the message. And along those similar lines, instead of seeking perfection on a single post, having two or three 85% complete posts would be better.

My Reality

The entrepreneur in me says, more/regular posts are better than writing the “perfect” post. But the reality in me say, you are a high attention to detail and overly analytical type person - so, good luck with that!

Figure It Out

While the major premise of the book is discussing the idea of focusing on ONE thing, there is an undertone of “getting started immediately” as well.

The best quote of the book is found early and is taken from the movie City Slickers. It’s the part of the movie where Mitch and Curly, who haven’t seen eye-to-eye up to this point, leave the group to herd stray cattle. As they ride together alone, they seem to bond over a conversation about life.

Curly: “Do you know what the secret to life is?” Mitch: “No. What?” Curly: “This.” (holds up one finger) Mitch: “Your finger?” Curly: “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*t” Mitch: “That’s great, but what’s the ‘one thing’?” Curly: (smiles) “That’s what you’ve got to figure out”

My ONE Thing

This introduces my newest reflection: figure out what my ONE thing is and I plan to do that by writing. Sort of in a way: writing is THE thing. But sort of in an open ended: “my ONE thing will always be evolving and writing can be a way to share that journey”.

I think the types of content will fluctuate over time, but my focus will be on writing shorter and more regular pieces of content about life, technology, productivity…and maybe more about things going on in life in general!