Use the One Thing Strategy To Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals

If you want to achieve your most ambitious goals, you need to approach goal setting the right way.

I’ve been a personal development author for 9 years. In my research, I’ve read more than 100 self-help books. Most were mediocre. Some were good. And a handful had a direct impact on my life and helped me stay motivated to build the seven-figure empire I have today.

One of those books is called “The One Thing” by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

In this post, I’ll explain the one thing strategy and give you insights on how to turn your dreams into reality as quickly as possible.

The power of focus and prioritization

Before we dive into how to use the one thing strategy to achieve your most ambitious goals, it’s key to understand why approaching goal setting this way is effective.

In life, you have to deal with the concept of opportunity costs and trade-offs: You can’t do two things at the same time.

If you choose to spend your time on one aspect of your life, you sacrifice another. The time you spend on one task or strategy means you eliminate other options.

There’s a saying:

He who chases two wolves catches neither.

I’ve worked with 1,000+ writers and entrepreneurs over the span of a decade.

The biggest issue I see is their unwillingness to pick a strategy and stick with it. They try to write about 9 different topics under one umbrella. They try to run multiple businesses at once. They’re all over the place when it comes to where to post instead of choosing one primary platform.

Here’s the advice I give them…

Accept that you won’t be able to do everything you want to do

It’s impossible. Warren Buffet has an interesting strategy for this called the 5/25 rule:

Most ambitious goals happen in these three- to five-year seasons of your life. So you can knock off a handful of your major goals, but you have to prioritize to get some of them instead of none of them.

I’ve experienced this in my life.

My first big season in life was becoming a full-time writer which took roughly four years.

Now I’m in my entrepreneur season where my one thing for the long term is “build a multi-seven-figure business that I don’t have to operate myself.”

You can use this set of questions to help you figure out what your long-term goals (your big 5) might look like:

Writing and building a business had been at the back of my mind for quite some time.

It wasn’t until I made a decision to start writing that things really started to change for me.

I can’t force you to pick a path for your life and focus. But I can stress how important it is so you get the gumption to just figure it out.

How the one thing strategy will help you reach ambitious goals

The one thing strategy is centered around this question:

“What’s the one thing you can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

You can use this question to reverse engineer your long-term goals and break down the steps you need to take every single day to accomplish them.

Start by answering the one thing question when it comes to your:

• Long-range plans (3 plus years)
• One year goal
• Quarterly goal
• Monthly goal
• Weekly goal
• Daily goal

The point isn’t to be perfect with your answers, but to have a north star you can use to make sure you’re doing purposeful work instead of working aimlessly.

Most people don’t have a time management problem. Most people have a prioritization problem. 

Since they don’t know what to work on and in what order, they get lost, confused, and stuck—which kills their momentum and keeps them from making progress.

Taking the time to articulate your “one thing” goes a long way.

I’ll use myself as an example.

Years back, my long-range one thing was to make enough money to quit my job so I could pursue a full-time business as a writer.

Each year of the process I had to cross a specific milestone.

So in my first year of writing, my one thing was to become as skilled as possible as a writer and marketer, so I could use those skills to build a business.

Each quarter, I worked on a specific skill:

• Q1: Practice writing blog posts
• Q2: Master writing platforms to build an audience
• Q3: Understand email marketing which is key for sales
• Q4: Research different ways to monetize my writing and pick one

Each month I’d focus on a specific skill or outcome. For example, one of the skills you need to know to write good posts is coming up with clever headlines, so my monthly one thing was mastering the art of coming up with titles.

Each week, I’d choose a specific format I was trying to tackle, like writing a how-to headline.

Next, each day my one thing was following my writing process from start to finish. This involved:

• Writing 10 headline ideas every day
• Drafting an article
• Posting and publishing it online

I kept that routine as a constant for the first 90 days and then changed my daily strategy moving forward.

Practical tips for implementing the one thing strategy

Step one is going through these questions and coming up with an audit of how you’re currently spending your time. I wrote an article on how to do a time audit for productivity that you can read if you want an in-depth look at the concept.

Once you have an idea of how you’re currently spending your time, you can create a new strategy to help you implement your one thing strategy (based on the big goal you’ve decided for your future).

Break down the steps of your one thing all the way to your daily tasks and then create a ritual around it.

You should have one hour, at minimum, blocked out on your calendar every single day so you can work toward your ambitious goal (like starting a business or finding your dream job).

Your ritual will work best if you do it at the exact same time and place every day.

You want to focus on eliminating distractions like social media, TV, and checking your email.

It might help to do a dopamine detox to help cure your reliance on cheap dopamine and replace it with the healthy pursuit of accomplishing your one thing.

In this new phase of your life, it’s important to keep this quote from Keller in your mind:

Nothing ever achieves absolute balance. Nothing. No matter how imperceptible it might be, what appears to be a state of balance is something entirely different— an act of balancing. Viewed wistfully as a noun, balance is lived practically as a verb. Seen as something we ultimately attain, balance is actually something we constantly do. A ‘balanced life’ is a myth—a misleading concept most accept as a worthy and attainable goal without ever stopping to truly consider it. I want you to consider it. I want you to challenge it. I want you to reject it. A balanced life is a lie.

I agree with Keller here.

A lot of people have this idea in their mind that they’re supposed to be well-rounded and devote an equal amount of time to everything. This probably comes from a culture and upbringing that has you go to equal periods of classes every day, even though applying equal effort to learning different things makes no sense in the real world.

If you want to achieve ambitious goals you need to focus on the mastery of a certain set of skills instead of trying to be a jack of all trades. And when it comes to your life, you need to make sacrifices instead of trying to “have your cake and eat it too.”

When I was working on becoming a writer while juggling my 9 to 5 job, I only had time to go to work, spend time with my family, and work on my writing.

This meant I spent little to no time:

• Watching TV
• Going out to parties and drinking
• Enjoying “leisure” activities

From the outside looking in, it may have seemed like I had an “unhealthy” lifestyle because I wasn’t “balanced” enough. But thanks to that effort I was willing and able to leave my day job and get my entire life back to spend more time doing things I love (thanks to the time and freedom of reaching my specific goal).

The one thing will get you where you need to be if you embrace it.

Here is the sobering reality of ambitious goals

I have zero patience for the usual rah-rah “you can do anything if you believe” pep talk BS. That’s a denial of reality, and we’re dealing with the harsh truth here. So let me lay it out straight.

Achieving ambitious goals through uncompromising prioritization, as gratifying as it is, comes with real and unavoidable tradeoffs. Heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that jazz.

Be prepared to stick out like a sore thumb from the masses. They’ll question your intensity, tell you to “chill out” and quit being so “obsessive.” They will try to drag you down to their level. Don’t let them. Stay far away from dream-killing naysayers and energy vampires. Be “selfish” and keep your inner circle to people who inspire you.

On a personal level, be ready to feel a bit of FOMO in service of your ambitious goals. You might encounter turbulence in relationships with people who don’t share your enthusiasm for prioritizing one thing over all else. Life gets rocky, feelings get hurt, tough decisions may need to be made about who stays and who goes.

It won’t be like this forever.

Along the way, take time for self-care, pace yourself, and avoid burnout. Trade seasons of intensity for seasons of healthy recovery.

But never let small breaks for recovery turn into inertia. Keep the momentum going always.

Will you achieve your goals? The choice is yours

We’ve reached the end of our little manifesto for obsessive goal-doers who demand more from life than the status quo. You now know what’s required.

Will you back away from the challenge of achieving one thing mastery?

Will you return to your comfort zone, forever haunted by lingering regrets?

Will you lie to yourself with more excuses about “balance” and the timing never being right?

Or will you finally, once and for all, accept the harsh truth?

That if you crave the extraordinary, sacrifices are mandatory.

That ambitious goals require an abnormal level of discipline in prioritizing your deepest desires above all else.

That you’ll never feel “ready” by conventional standards and that the only preparation required is mustering the courage to begin your focused sprint into an uncertain path that may entail some risk but might have a life-changing upside.

I made the choice 9 years ago and I never looked back. This book helped me get started. Read it and follow the advice. It will help you too.

It’s easy to choose weakness. Most people do. It doesn’t require genius-level talent or resources to make a decision to win, though. It just takes the choice.

So ask yourself this one final question:

“Are you a coward or a conqueror?”

If you read all the way to the end of this piece I think we know the answer.

Then pull the trigger on choosing your one thing, whatever it takes. I’ll see you at the top my friend.