The ONE Thing

In “The ONE Thing,” Gary Keller and Jay Papasan write about the three commitments you must make if you want to live a life of extraordinary results: following the path of mastery, moving from being entrepreneurial to purposeful, and living the accountability cycle.  Are you making those commitments? Brandon Turner, who you may know from the Bigger Pockets podcast, shows us what it looks like...

What does it look like when times get hard and you’re not sure if you’re going to be able to achieve your goal anymore? How do you stay committed and achieve the goal? This episode is a case study about goals. Not about setting goals but having a relationship with them. Because we don’t need new or better ways to set goals — we just need a way to create a relationship with the goals that we do hav...

 The purpose of a goal is to be appropriate in the moment. Every year we set goals around the areas of our life that matter to us, and when we get to the end of the year we look back and say we’ll do better next year—especially around finances. The problem is that, until you learn to have a relationship with your goals, your future won’t change. When we look at some of the biggest causes of stres...

What do you do when life throws you a curveball and forces you to reinvent the way that you work? Every one of us experienced that in 2020, and just about every one of us has struggled with this transition. But for everyone who was able to attend The ONE Thing Virtual Goal Setting Retreat, and especially for everyone on The ONE Thing team, we had the much-needed opportunity to get back in touch wi...

When we originally launched The ONE Thing podcast, we understood the importance of having weekly conversations with people who were living The ONE Thing—the areas they were succeeding in, and the areas they were struggling with. While the principles are simple, it isn’t always easy. The purpose of a goal is not the result, it’s to be appropriate in the moment. It’s to inform how you behave right n...

We’ve been talking about goal-setting for a while now, but we wanted to talk about it from a different perspective. You’re going to hear a conversation between four powerful women about how this annual ritual has brought value to them and how their husbands have been brought in to support them. These are the hosts of Empire Building — Seychelle Van Poole, Vija Williams, Sarah Reynolds, and Wendy P...

As leaders, It’s easy to get stuck in the idea that we always have to have the answers—that we always have to be prepared with the perfect response to deliver wisdom to our teams. But the thing about true leadership is that what you don’t say is just as important as what you do.  How you listen to your people is critical to keeping them engaged; valuing their ideas and their contributions and...

Imagine what becomes possible when you and your most important relationships get on the same page about your future. Spoiler alert: Everything. Jay and Wendy Papasan have been setting goals together for the last 14 years. As a result, they have a stronger relationship and a bigger life than they could ever imagine. So much of their success is a credit to the framework they’ve established for how t...

We are entering the time of year where we start to set our goals for the upcoming year. The mistake people often make is that they commit to things that look attractive in the short run without understanding if it’s a distraction from where you want to go in the long run. How do we put a plan in place that honors both our short term commitments and long term goals? In this conversation, you’ll hea...

Every year people set their goals and, without realizing it, they struggle to have a relationship with them. Gary Keller says that the purpose of a goal is not to achieve a result but to appropriate being in the moment; it’s a compass to help you identify how you have to behave today so that you’re in alignment with where you want to go. But before we can find alignment, we have to have clarity on...

If we want to look at the quality of our relationships, we have to look no further than the quality of the conversations that we have. Here’s the problem: The everyday conversations with the people we care about are either strengthening our relationships or undermining them—and we’re not always aware of which because we’re failing so slowly we think we’re succeeding. When it comes to marriages, it...

How do you succeed in health, your relationships, and with your money when there is so much uncertainty in the world? With all that’s going on, a lot of us have been facing challenges. Our health routines have been disrupted, our relationships have been strained, and a lot of our financial worlds have been rocked. Today, you’re going to hear stories from two groups of The ONE Thing members. One is...

Wouldn’t it be great if you could fire up a time machine and travel to the end of this pandemic? Better yet, what if you could transform to an extraordinary future where you not only accomplish all your big goals, but you achieve them without stress or overwhelm? This may sound like a fantasy, but it’s more achievable than you think. When you practice mental time travel and get clarity on where yo...

Is your relationship moving forward or are you caught in a predictable loop of business as usual? There’s nothing wrong with your day-to-day routine when everything is fine. But ask yourself: Is fine where extraordinary happens? Sometimes you’re at a point in your life where you don’t have a specific challenge to overcome—and that can be a good thing—and yet, sometimes, it can feel like you’re mea...

Socrates said, “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” The truth is that change is hard—especially uninvited change. It is often that change that pushes you in directions you would have otherwise never explored, and that’s where growth happens. What becomes possible if, when ushered into new territory, you quickly reset your vision on...

What do you think the future of your work could look like? With everything that’s going on, we have the opportunity to pause, to ask different questions, and to reevaluate what our vision for the future looks like. All around the world, people’s opinions of what the future of work looks like have changed. We’re going to walk you through the questions we’ve been asking over the last few months, the...

What if we told you that you are only one habit away from making your goal a reality? It’s the truth. The problem is that, while habit formation is simple, it can be challenging. For anyone who’s tried to make a habit stick you know what it feels like to struggle with consistency and doubt. BJ Fogg, the author of the best-selling book “Tiny Habits” , is going to help you understand that the key to...

How do we unpack the lies that keep us from experiencing extraordinary success? One lie in particular that holds most people back is that “big is bad.” It’s tricky to debunk because, when you put “big” and “results” in the same sentence, many people jump straight to thinking that big is complex, time-consuming, or intimidating. But the four ambitious leaders of the Empire Building podcast live in...

How is your health right now? For many of us, The ONE Thing is our health – or it should be. We get so busy and stuck in the day-to-day that we often neglect healthy choices and, instead, opt for convenience. Or we just feel so busy that making a healthy meal or going to the gym just feels impossible. Today, we want to introduce you to someone who has spent the last few years making health He...

If you want to change your life, you have to get honest with yourself. What’s working? What isn’t working? Who’s bringing you forward and who’s bringing you back? Candid self-reflection can reveal things you wish weren’t there, but knowing what you’re dealing with makes big change possible. Our guest, Grace Vroom, knew something had to give; there were countless areas of her life that she wanted t...

Have you taken any time to be grateful today? When we think about forming power habits, we often think about doing something that will improve our productivity or health. We rarely consider the transformative power of mindset habits, and one of the most powerful habits is gratitude. That may seem like an easy or trivial thing, but in practice, embodying a state of gratitude every day is both surpr...

A brief summary of this episode

Did you come into this year imaging what was possible for yourself? Many of us had big plans for all the things we were going to accomplish this year—whether personally, professionally, or both—and then COVID-19 hit and we were derailed by our new reality. None of us had the existing habits we needed to support our new environments. Tom Bilyeu took a look at his life and realized he was capable of...

Think back to your childhood: What did you want to be when you grew up? What dreams did you have for yourself? What did you envision your life looking like? Along your journey, you may have come up across ceilings of achievement—or on the other end, you may have been thinking too small. Any time you are hitting up against a ceiling of achievement in your life, you are missing either a person or a...

How do we lead people through fear? The answer, as simple as it may seem, is goals—but the right goals. If the purpose of a goal is to be appropriate in the moment, many of us have lost sight of the fact that our actions may not be leading us to where we want to go. We don’t want to sacrifice our long-term visions and our long-term goals based on short-term circumstances. As an individual, you can...