Gary is the founder of the largest real estate agency in the United State – Keller Williams
If you want to succeed, you need to juggle many things and take on many responsibilities.
Gary intentionally started focusing on fewer things, he says I challenge the axioms of success and I became more successful than I ever dreamed possible and felt better than I’d ever felt in my life, he realized that people achieve success in spite of doing many things, not because they do many things, as I read through the chapter, trying to understand how focusing on less can help you achieve more, I was reminded of a chart that I came across in the book quality software management by Gerald Weinberg, Gerald studied several software programmers over the course of several years and discovered that a significant percentage of programmers productivity seemingly vanished when they focused on more than one project during the day, the more projects they took on, the more time seemed to vanish, by taking on two projects, they appeared to waste 20% of their day, when they were taking on five projects, 80% of the day was completed lost to non-productive activities, Gerald described that loss in productivity as a result of context switching.
“What one thing can I do, such that by doing it, makes everything else easier or unnecessary?”
If you want to be a peak performer, there is no such thing as having priorities, there is only one priority, one most important thing in this moment in time, oftentimes, we think things equally important, because we have so many requests coming our way, a feeling of overwhelming makes everything seem urgent, and we mistake that urgency for importance when you ask a question, what one thing can i do, such that by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary causes you to pause and break the illusion that just because something feels urgent, doesn’t mean it’s equally as important as everything else when you ask this question enough, one thing will rise to the surface, allowing everything else to fade away.
The key to success isn’t doing more, it’s doing a few things really well.
Stop paying switching costs, and start asking the focusing question throughout the day to stay focused on one thing at any given moment, your goal is to ask the question enough times, so you can confidently say this is where I am meant to be right now.