Strategic Discipline Blog

I'm taking a short detour to start the year.

My intention for this blog was to provide insights from Outthink the Competition: How a New Generation of Strategists Sees Options Others Ignore by Kaihan Krippendorff.

The past two weeks I’ve been doing research for one of my customers, pursuing the question of what the optimum work week looks like. It’s an idea suggested in The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan.  In reviewing my highlights, the significance of The One Thing kept slamming me in the face. 

It’s an idea all of us need to keep in front of us as we begin 2017.

YOUR DOMINO

1983, Lorne Whitehead shares in the American Journal of Physics, a single domino is capable of bringing down another domino 50 percent bigger than itself.  If you can realize the implication of this, you suddenly realize that, it’s not just the next domino that you impact, it’s how the next, the next and the next successively knock over still larger dominos.

The critical question: “What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”

Here are a few of my highlights from the book to share with you to recognize that no matter how busy you are today, tomorrow, or the next week or month, the most important thing you can do is simply figure out what your One Thing is for 2017.  In doing so you will be able to accomplish dramatic, even impossible results due to the impact of this One Thing Domino Effect.

Realize extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.

Highly successful people know this – find the lead domino, and whack away at it until it falls.

The key is over time.  Success is built sequentially.  It’s One Thing at a time.

No one succeeds alone.  NO ONE!

The One Thing shows up time and again in the lives of successful people.  Why?  It’s a fundamental truth!

SIX LIES BETWEEN YOU AND SUCCESS

Please check out these blogs with a quick list to their keys:

• Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.
• The Pareto Principle: The majority of what you want will come from the minority of what you do. Find the vital few of the vital few!
• Doing the most important thing is always the most important thing.

2. Multitasking

• It’s not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it’s that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.
• Tasks switching exacts a cost few realize they’re even paying.
• Why would you even tolerate multi-tasking when you’re doing your most important work?

• Success is actually a short race – a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.
• You can become successful with less discipline than you think, for one simple reason: success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right.
• When you do the right thing, it can liberate you from having to monitor everything.
• It takes an average of 66 days to acquire a habit. Those with the right habits seem to do better than others. They’re doing the most important thing regularly, as a result everything else is easier.

4. Willpower is Always on Will-Call

• Willpower has a limited battery life.
• The more we use our mind, the less minding power we have.
• Make doing what matters most a priority when your willpower is highest. Do your most important work – Your ONE THING – early.

5. A Balance Life

• Magic happens at the extremes.
• When you gamble with your time, you may be placing a bet you can’t cover.
• To achieve an extraordinary result, you must choose what matters most and give it all the time it demands. This requires getting extremely out of balance in relation to all other work issues, without only infrequent counterbalance to address them.
• When you act on your priority (One Thing), you’ll automatically go out of balance, giving more time to one thing over another

6. Big is Bad

• No one knows their ultimate ceiling for achievement. Worrying about it is a waste of time.
• The only actions that become springboards to succeeding big are those informed by big thinking to begin with.
• What you build today will either empower or restrict your tomorrow.
• Only living big will let you experience your true life and work potential.

NEXT BLOG: THE PATH TO PRODUCTIVITY

Are you interested in making 2017 more productive?  Join me next blog to examine the One Thing principles to achieve greater productivity this coming year. Success comes down to this: being appropriate in the moments of your life.