Episode Highlights

• The significance of focus and it’s relationship with goal fulfillment
• Defining your priorities to understand your deeper why
• Granting your needs exclusivity so that they can contribute to greater goals AKA The Domino Effect
• Learning how to discipline your habits
• Overcoming the “death valley” stage of your new activity
• Finding your daily willpower peak and scheduling work for that time
• Identifying the tasks that contribute to your priorities
• Highlighting your “Big-impact” goals, and then ordering them by priority
• Re-evaluating how much you can get done in five years
• Feeling the pull of your “someday goals”
• Confronting and defeating the fear of chaos

Useful Links

• The 1 Thing
• 1922 Article

About Guest

Jay Papasan is a bestselling author who serves as Vice President and Executive Editor at Keller Williams Realty International, the fastest growing real estate company in North America. Jay has co-authored a series of books that have found their way to numerous bestselling lists, including those found on The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The New York Times. His most recent work with Gary Keller on The ONE Thing has sold over half a million copies worldwide and garnered more than 250 appearances on national bestseller lists, including #1 on the Wall Street Journal’s hardcover business list.

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Transcript

Zack Arnold: I am here today with Jay Papasan, who is a best-selling author and also serves as the vice president and executive editor at Keller Williams Realty International. That’s really weird because I’ve never had a realtor on my podcast. It’s all about creativity. So, Jay, it is fantastic to have you on the show. But why am I talking to a realtor? You know, I think you happen

Jay Papasan: To be talking to an author editor who happens to work at a real estate franchise company. So you’re probably more in alignment than you expected when you asked the question. I was in the book business, and then when I relocated to Austin, found a new home at Kello Williams Realty because the founder was writing books.

Zack Arnold: Got it. All right. Well, now it’s going to make a little bit more sense because I think anybody reading the bio would be thinking, well, this is a very odd guest on a show that talks about productivity and setting goals and being more creative and finding flow and managing energy and being more healthy, but once we realize that you are the co-author of the book, the one thing, now it’s going to start to make a little bit more sense, and that’s really what we’re going to be talking about today. So, along the lines of the one thing, the one thing that we’re going to focus on for this interview is learning about focus, and focus is what I believe to be the superpower of the 21st century, and for any of you that listen to the show regularly, you know that I’m paraphrasing Cal Newport, who is the author of the book Deep Work, and this is something that I’m very passionate about, because when people ask me all the time, “How have you accomplished everything that you have? How do you get so many things done? The only real answer that I have is that I am consistently focused. I consistently get things done every single day, and I have a very clear focus of what needs to get done. And that sounds great, but then when you ask yourself, “Well, how do I actually do that? that becomes a little bit more complicated. So the angle that I want to come at this today, you. Even though somebody could be listening to this interview any time of the year, we happen to be recording this at the beginning of January, and the beginning of January is all about resolutions and goals. So let’s assume that somebody has decided that they want to set a goal for their health. Let’s say I want to lose weight. I want to lose 20 pounds. Well, that’s great, but what a lot of people do is they take the all or nothing approach and they try to change everything, change their diet, change their exercise habits, change sleep. I’m going to meditate. I’m going to do yoga. All these other things, and they fail. And what they don’t really understand is the power of the domino effect and just finding that one thing. So where I want to start is talking about the power of small changes in the domino effect.

Jay Papasan: Sure, you know one of the things that you’re you’ve said several times is the word focus, and the other word that you’ve said is clear. We could have called this book focus, but I don’t think anybody would have bought it, to be honest with you. Because when I hear focus, I hear hard. I’ve heard focus before. I think that the key to the productivity method that we’re going to be talking about here is the other word you said, clear. I think when people have clarity, they’re clear on their true priority. They naturally become more productive. That’s just a hypothesis that’s borne itself out a lot in our research and experience. And I sometimes will cite if you’ve heard me talk about it before. But the the day before vacation miracle, have you ever experienced that where you’re going to the islands for a week long vacation you’ve been looking forward to for however long? It’s amazing how much you get done the two days before that, right? You you manage to get the dog put in the kennel, you clear out all of your mail, you stop the newspaper. I mean, you get all of these things done, and you pack because you’re really clear that you want to be free to go be on vacation. And I think that there are times in our life when we’re very clear about our priorities, but most people walk around with no clear sense of what not only what their priorities are, but not only but also what success really does look like for them, so hopefully we’ll touch on those. Or I’ll just, whenever we’re talking about it, I’m going to go there a lot because that, to me, is the heart of focus is clarity.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I could not agree with that more. And when I work with people on my program, the first step it’s actually a five-step framework that’s called Go Far, which stands for Goals, Obstacles, focus, act, and review. And this was actually designed originally by the first quadriplegic who became a licensed scuba diver and was the subject of a documentary film that I directed over the course of the last eight years and recently released. And it’s now on iTunes and Amazon and all the major digital platforms. But he put together this five-step framework, and unfortunately, he passed away before he completed it. So what I’ve taken upon myself is not only telling his story, but building this framework out into an actionable program. And when we talk about setting goals, the biggest thing that I talk about is not just I want to be healthier. It’s being very, very specific about what that means, but more importantly, defining your why. Why is it that you want to be healthy, which is very similar to what you talk about, which is living with purpose and priority, which then leads to productivity. So you and I are definitely going to be on the same page.

Jay Papasan: Nice, nice, and I love that you brought why into it as well. And that’s usually when I’m coaching folks and and we’re doing you know seminars, I’ll ask people you know tell me what their big goal is, and we’ll narrow it down from all of the junk they throw at the wall to you know its essence. What’s the real thing that’s at the heart of all this? And there’s two questions I like to ask around the why. So, so what will accomplishing this goal do for you, Zack? And they’ll say, Oh, if I get this, this will happen. And that’s usually the happy side. And the other one that I like to ask is, what will happen if you fail? And if there’s no consequence on the other side, you know a lot of times people say, “Oh, well, I’ll just try again, and I usually then feel like we have a lot more work to do. But then you’ll talk to someone who maybe they have to earn money because their child got accepted to Juilliard, and they really feel strongly that this is that child’s ticket, and if you ask them that question, what will happen if you fail? They’ll choke up. They’ll get really emotional, and that fundamental, like, why is this important to me? A lot of it for me is tied up in what what will happen if we fail at this. We get really clear about the downside, and that often is the biggest motivator for people. They want to avoid that bad feeling, and that’s more attractive than seeking the good.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I mean, avoiding pain is just one of the fundamental things about being human, and it’s why we make the vast majority of choices that we do. And as long as we’re talking about failure, one of the things that I always mention to people in newsletters and writing, when I do podcast interviews, is the very, very popularized statistic that 90-2% of New Year’s resolutions and goals end up failing. And this number can vary slightly from year to year, but the popularized version is 90-2% And I believe it’s because people don’t do the work that we’re going to talk about, which is defining your. Talking about why they fail, but again, kind of going back to the previous question, realizing that they’re trying to do too much and do too many things at once, and not realizing that there is that one thing that can have that domino effect.

Jay Papasan: Love that. The stat I heard was 80-8% so they’re in the same ballpark, right? But then I also read that I think 100 million people every year strive to do a resolution. So you do that math, and even with your statistic, every year 90-2 million people are going to fail. So let’s talk about how we can increase the the number of successful people to from 8 million to a whole lot more if people just change the way they approach those goals.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and and that’s that’s exactly why we’re here. Is that I I generally consider myself a member of the 8% club. Maybe not in every single avenue of life, but I I tend to finish what I start and achieve the majority of the goals that I set. And sometimes I do set very large ambitious goals. And when I consider that oh I failed, I then realize no I haven’t failed. The only way I’m going to fail is if I actually give up and stop. This is just a learning experience, and I need to reassess my process and reassess what my goals might be or my one thing at this time. But I’ve only failed if I stopped. So for me, in general, I consider myself a member of the 8% Club. But I really, I think it’s so important for people to eliminate that sense of overwhelm when they think I have so many things that I need to do if I just want to lose weight. For example, going back to that that one example from the beginning, that to me I’ve been preaching for years and years and years the power of making very very small changes and how they accumulate. And at first people didn’t believe me, and then they started doing it, and they’re like, Oh my God, this is so much easier, and this is making such a difference. And then I read the study that you had in your book about the domino effect and the actual geometric progression. So, can you just explain kind of the the numbers in that study a little bit?

Jay Papasan: Sure, sure. And it was just some fun math that we worked out. I was trying to come up with a metaphor for the book, and we came up with the idea of a domino run. The first objection any successful busy person has with the book is, “What do you mean it’s one thing? It’s never just one thing. And they’re right and they’re wrong. The reality is, successful people tend to focus on the right priority at the right time, and they give it exclusivity. And there’s a sequentialness to their success. They’re not doing everything at once. They’re doing one thing. They knock down that domino, and then they go to the next. And so I’ll usually just ask the question. So everybody here is lined up dominoes, right? Yes. And what happens when you line them up perfectly and you knock over the first one? Will they all fall down? And the power of that is more amazing than most people understand. I think the world record is over 4.5 million dominoes. So theoretically, that could be as infinite as people are willing to line them up. You can line up dominoes so that by doing one thing, a whole bunch of stuff can happen. But the surprising little study that we found was by a physicist, and it was back from 1984, I believe. A guy named Lorne Whitehead published it in the American Journal of Physics that a two-inch domino can knock over a three-inch domino, and a three-inch domino can knock over a four and a half-inch domino. And my math breaks down in my head there because I’m an English-French major, but the idea fundamentally is any domino can knock over one that’s 50% larger, and the moment I read that, I was like, “Wow, okay, so this is the power of momentum, and when you start knocking things down, you can get more powerful as you go. And so I immediately pulled out a spreadsheet and started graphing. You know, if you start with a two-inch domino and they grow at the maximum rate that physics says they can grow-a 50% larger domino. What’s astounding is by the 18th domino growing at that rate, that two-inch domino will have built so much momentum that it’s knocking over a domino as tall as the Tower of Pisa. By the 23rd, it would knock over one as tall as the Eiffel Tower, which, as a point of reference, most people don’t realize that’s actually as tall as the Empire State Building. It’s just in in Paris, there’s no buildings around it to give it scale. By the 31st, it would be 3,000 feet taller than Everest, and just 57 dominoes into that run, theoretically, it would stretch all the way from the Earth to the Moon. And if you graph that out, you know it sounds like it would be just a straight line going up, but it actually looks like a hockey stick on its side. And scientists and statisticians actually call that the hockey stick graph because anything that grows at a progressive but regular rate eventually will take that shape. And what started out to be fairly small and insignificant can grow so big it’ll kind of blow your mind by the end of it, and especially with things like health goals where that can happen fairly rapidly in the grand scheme, people I think haven’t experienced in their lives, so they don’t have faith in the falling dominoes. They’re not willing. To wait for that that hockey stick to get to the curve and the results to really kick in, but let’s just take I don’t know a diet. I mean, I guess everybody here has been on a diet at some point and actually stuck with it.

Jay Papasan: And I can tell you, so many times when I’ve gone to lose that you know holiday weight, which we’re right there right now, you feel like you’re doing this thing and you’re torturing yourself by eating broccoli all day long, or whatever it is you’re doing, and I actually remember many times where I felt like I actually gained weight when I was in the process of doing this, and you get frustrated, but then about a month later, someone will say, “Hey, you’ve lost weight. What are you doing? And if you can make it through, you know, it’s kind of the death valley. There’s this period where the excitement of the new activity is worn off, but you haven’t yet felt the impact of the results. People can make it bridge that gap, then they can start to believe in it, and it starts to really grow at a rapid rate.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I think that that’s the perfect lead-in into one of the six myths that you talk about because it’s really easy to say, oh, sure, one thing, great. What does that mean? But how to get there is very different, and there are these six myths that you talk about that people think will lead to being more productive, getting more done, and being more focused. And I’m just going to go through all six really quickly, and we’re definitely not going to be able to talk about all six. But I’m going to leave a link to your book in the show notes, so anybody listening, and by anybody, I hopefully mean everybody that listens will end up getting your book because it is fantastic and life changing. But very quickly, the six myths are that everything matters equally, that multitasking is the key, discipline, willpower, a balanced life, and that big is bad. And where I want to go first is discipline because that’s just what you talked about: is getting through that kind of you know that that horrible time where it’s like oh this diet sucks and I hate this food and nothing’s making a difference and I get on the scale and I’m not seeing that change but oh wait this is starting to become easier and people are noticing like everybody thinks I it’s so boring to be disciplined forever I don’t I just don’t have the willpower to do it. There’s just no way to get there. So let’s talk a little bit about the power of discipline turning into habit.

Jay Papasan: Sure. It was funny. We were saying you know you pick one thing, and the like the superpower that Gary kind of discovered by accident, and that I think anybody can discover with some intentionality in their life, is that if you know what your most important work is, the thing that will matter most in any endeavor, why not just make it a habit, right? If you know that part of the journey to being a great human being is going to be to read more books, instead of just making it a resolution to read 12 books for one year, why not just say that I’m going to start reading a book every month, right? Why not build that habit? And so that led us to this idea of discipline, and that’s tied to habit formation. What’s funny is most people don’t even understand the word. If you ask a child what discipline means, they’re going to tell you it’s punishment, right? Because that’s the way they get interpreted at school and at home, you ask adults, and they’re going to tell you it’s kind of that resolve that powerful people have to do what they need to do. I’m just going to be disciplined about it. But the truth is, discipline is training yourself to do something until it becomes habitual. And the story I love to tell because it made a big impact on me. I was teaching the book in Nashville, and because you know it was going to start at 830 in the morning, and of course I’m there like 715 because I’m going to be on stage and I want to check out everything and do all the stuff that you have to do before an event. And there’s a guy sitting in the front row, and I thought he was part of the crew, and I introduced myself, and he goes, “Oh no, no, I don’t. I’m not working here. I’m just early. I said it’s a habit. You know, I’m just always early wherever I go. I was like, he said that habit word. You know, I’m like, you know, I’m going to tune in to this guy. Said, tell me more about that. He goes, well, for nine years I was a green beret, and I was trained to show up early and observe before I act, and even though I’ve been out of the service for over 10 years, I just can’t shake the habit. And I was like, “Wow, here is habit. He was trained so thoroughly, like a soldier, right, so that the right activities just happened automatically. That even 10 years later, he was driving his wife crazy, showing up to restaurants and movies early, you know, every time, and we had a good laugh about the fact that that was better than the habit of being late. But yes, you can train yourself to be habitual, and so we went on a search. Like, well, how long do you have to train yourself to form a habit? And this is where the lies really abound. Zack, I found, I want to say close to 1819, books, maybe 20, that all cited a number 20-one or 30 days to form a habit.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, 20-one is definitely the big one.

Jay Papasan: The big one, yeah. But 30 shows up a surprising amount when you go searching, right? And they all, if you, if they had references, they were referring. Other books, and you go to that book, and that book would refer to this book, and at some points they were even self-referential, but nobody actually referenced a real study. It was all anecdotal; none of it was based in science, and so we tasked our researchers to go ask what science had to say. And so there was a group that had asked this question, and they had asked a little over 200 graduate students to take on any health habit that they they wanted to could be drinking you know 10 glasses of water a day, doing yoga daily, running a diet. Some people were like on the really tough end of this, like I’m going to quit smoking, and all they did was track them for a year, and they asked two questions every day: Did you do it the thing that they said they were going to do, and how hard was it? And they found, on average, that it got as easy as it was going to functionally get after 60-six days. And we decided that that’s a good number right there. Let’s just start with, on average, it’s going to take us 66 days of effort to form a habit. Now, you look at most people’s resolutions; most people have petered out long before March. But the reality is, if they’re even average and they’re doing an average habit, they’re going to have to stick with that new activity for two months or more, three times what the the lore would tell us to actually get that investment. So I think one of the big mistakes people make with these resolutions and goals in the new year is one, they take on too many, and we’ll talk about that maybe if we get into willpower and how that dividing up your willpower is really bad recipe. But for sure, they’re probably thinking they form the habit way too early and moving on to the next thing. And when you leave that habit early, it falls apart, which is what the experience is for most people. I’m in the book business. I have been for 20 years. Look at the bestseller list of this month, Zack. Every single year, you’re going to find diet books on there, and often they’re new diet books because the publishing world knows everybody goes on a diet this time of year and everybody fails, so they’re going to buy a new diet book next year, and that’s just the way it works. So we can stop that first and foremost by realizing, on average, it can take 66 days to form a habit, and I’m just going to put one more qualification as I’m you know, monopolizing this. This is a big passion thing for me. When we talked to the researchers, there were all kinds of numbers in there. Some people formed habits as early as 18 days, but some people took more than 250. So we have to be cognizant of the activity. Does it feel automatic? Right? Did making that healthy choice in the in the in the grocery store? Did they have to prepare their list in advance, or they just walk straight to the vegetable aisle? The moment these things start to become automatic, we can start considering moving on to the next thing. But before that, because we might be in a habit, the nature of the habit and the nature of our lives might dictate that it might take even longer than 60-six days.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s something that I found in my own experience, kind of going through this one thing progression. And again, going back to when people will ask me, “How do you get so much done? The consistency is based on habits, not willpower or discipline. It’s that I have stacked so many tiny daily habits on top of each other that those have become effortless. Once I get to the effortless point, I just add another one, and I think that where that kind of leads us next is kind of a combination of the two myths together. Because I love talking about willpower, especially the marshmallow test, which I talked extensively about with Joe Desenna on my podcast. And for those that don’t know, Joe Desenna is the founder of the Spartan race, but I kind of want to talk about the combination of willpower and the myth that everything matters equally, because that’s the trap that a lot of people fall into. Is I want to lose weight, therefore I must go on a diet, which means I have to clean out my pantry, which means I have to get a gym membership, which means I have to go to the gym five days a week. But in order to go to the gym, that means I don’t have to start sleeping more. But if I want to sleep more, I better manage my stress. So I should also start meditating and do yoga. So that’s what my life looks like for the next 90 days.

Jay Papasan: There you go. Well, I want to I want to come at that a little bit sideways before we leave discipline, because if you’re not aware of you, have you read BJ Fogg at all?

Zack Arnold: I haven’t read him much. I’m aware of him, and he’s on my list of people that I want to jump into, but I haven’t dove in deep into his stuff yet.

Jay Papasan: Well, I love you. Keep talking about the smallest possible step. You know, I usually will say the smallest domino. Start with the smallest domino. We all are ambitious. We want to skip ahead, but start with the smallest domino because momentum matters a lot. It matters a lot that you get to be successful every single day. I got to see B.J. Swog speak at South by Southwest a few years back, and he was talking about habit formation. He runs the the behavioral science lab at Stanford University. If I may have that slightly off his title, but that’s what he does. And he’s gotten 10,000 people to start flossing their teeth, and the goal was simply by stacking habits the way you talked. And his formula was: after I do established habit, I will do new habit. And he was a massive proponent of this smallest step. So for the the flossing experiment, he said, after I brush my teeth, and please, Lord, let everybody listening to this as an adult have already established that habit. I know from having two small children, it can take a decade to form that habit, but it should be well established for all of us, right? But it was after I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth, and people are like, “Why one tooth? He goes, “Because you can have success just by flossing one. You can say, ‘Boom, one tooth, woohoo, I’m done. But the reality is, if you take the time to grab the floss, pick it up, and start flossing. You’re probably going to floss all your teeth, but the habit is to think about doing it and starting it. It’s like putting your running shoes by your bed, right? The smallest possible action can actually lead you to much more. You just have to start the momentum in that direction. So I love that you preach that, and that’s a theme in all that we teach as well. So, do you want me to do the everything does it matter equally, or the willpower first? I can go either, come at it from either angle.

Zack Arnold: Well, I think that the the willpower, you know, will will dovetail nicely off of discipline, just because that the the two really kind of go together. But then again, really jumping into this idea that everything matters equally, I think is so important to hammer, to be able to transition to this idea of actually finding one thing. So yeah, let’s we’ll we’ll do willpower first, and then jump into the the everything matters equally.

Jay Papasan: Well, the willpower is on will call is the way we put it as a lie in the book. Willpower on will call is a lie, and I think a lot of people get the power of where there’s a will, there’s a way. The reality is our willpower is actually very fragile. It’s a limited resource. It does renew, but it’s something that we’re not usually aware of, and it has a massive impact on whether we’re successful in doing what we need to do. So I like to tell people if you’ve ever had a really old cell phone, you know you’re you’re holding on to it for another four months so you can get the renewal and get the latest greatest model. But usually, towards the end of their life, their batteries tend to be very weak. So we plug them in at night, we plug them in in the car, we plug them in at our desks throughout the day, and we’re constantly monitoring that charge. Well, that’s a lot of what our willpower is, and our willpower is essentially our mental ability to focus on what we need to do and avoid distractions. It’s saying yes to the thing that matters most and no to everything else. Both activities, yes and no, drain our willpower. And there’s different ways of looking at this, but the fundamental one we chose to to address in the book was you can literally measure your blood sugar drop when you use willpower. If you ask people to focus on an activity like taking an exam or doing something that was not natural, right, like forming a habit, you can measure their blood sugar before and after, and it will visibly drop. And so you look up, and without going into the like, there’s a great study in the book we talk about with parole judges in Israel, but the reality is, we all start the day with a lot of willpower. Whether you slept a lot or not, it’s just a process that overnight in those sleeping hours we tend to store glycogen in our muscles, and so we start this day with this reservoir, and it immediately starts bleeding down, and it bleeds down rapidly. In one study, they had people, you know, taking an exam, and one group got eliminated with sugar, right, to replace the glycogen really quickly, and one group got eliminated with artificial sweetener. The people who had the real sweetener that were replenishing their willpower, which is sugar, is probably the least healthy way to do it, right? But they were doing it. They scored 50% higher than the other group, so it’s super fragile. It fades really quickly. And our big takeaway was: if it really matters to you, start with your most important task and do it in the morning, because throughout the day you’re bleeding it down. If you’re not replenishing it purposely, you may be deciding to do your most important work at a time where you actually have no willpower, and then you’re straying to Facebook or Twitter or whatever it is that distracts you, but start your day with that most important activity. That’s the best time to form a habit.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and what I found as well, because my energy will wane throughout the day. I do very intense creative work both early in the morning, which is writing and working on the the website and the podcast. But then I have a full time job where I work 50 to 60 hours a week editing television shows. So I go from you know doing my writing session at 630 or seven in the morning, and I still have to be editing at eight or 9p.m at night if I’m working on a busy day. So what I found is that because my energy wanes throughout the day, I will pre schedule my most focused creative times when I know that I’m going to be the most focused and energetic, which means that if I have a bunch of tasks like I need to call this company to figure out why my subscription was canceled, or I have to email this one person, or whatever it is, just like the menial day-to-day life management tasks that don’t require a lot of creativity, I schedule those when I know. My energy is the lowest, so it’s not so much just managing my time and saying I have so many things to get done during the day. I’m just going to knock them all off. It’s more when is my energy at its greatest, and what are the highest value tasks I can do then, and what are the lowest value tasks that I can do when I know that my energy is just I’m just going to feel like crap.

Jay Papasan: Yep, you’ve got it. I mean, we’ve all felt the lulls during the day when we know we don’t focus very well. There’s a really particularly sharp one that tends to happen about an hour after lunch, right? Is that you know like that two to 330 window, and a lot of people would love the ability to crawl into their desk and just take a nap. You know that’s a great time to be triaging email, to be doing a lot of those mundane tasks that don’t require a lot of willpower. On the other hand, one of the strategies that you know we developed as a family, we have small kids, and when you have small kids, what do you get them to do every day around 3o’clock when they come home from school?

Zack Arnold: Nap time. I’ve got two kids as well.

Jay Papasan: Okay. Well, there’s nap time and snack time.

**Zack Arnold: Yes.

Jay Papasan: And and and teachers even know this, right? They get snacks during the day, and what they’re actually doing is they’re refueling their brain power. And so I thought about that. I was like, “Wow, okay, moms and teachers have known about this for centuries. We’re just discovering why this actually works. But I now have, and I surround my workplace with healthy snacks. You know, I’ve got low-calorie, high-protein bars, like things that you can snack on, that will break down into the energy you need to focus over long periods of time. Sugar is a very bad way to get this right. That spikes insulin. We don’t need anybody going and getting diabetes for focus sakes, right? But you can get healthy snacks, nuts, and things like that. And I usually, instead of getting a cup of coffee at 10 in the morning and two in the afternoon, I’ll have like half of a protein bar, or something like that-a complex carbohydrate or protein that can fuel my focus during those lag times.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s exactly the way that I do it. And I will actually pre-plan during the weekend where am I going to want to eat the crap the most because that’s one of the the biggest habits that I’ve been working to break is the afternoon snacking habit. Because from the moment that I wake up until about 330 my diet is immaculate, and then around 330 or four, it’s not so immaculate, and it gets worse and worse and worse the harder my day is. So it’s that’s become one of my one things is if I’m going to focus on maintaining my focus and having energy and mental stamina throughout an entire day. The one thing I have to do is focus on sugary snacks, which means that every weekend I will prepare healthy snacks that will get me through the afternoon. Which I think kind of brings us back to this idea of the one thing and trying to do too many things at once, so I want to talk briefly about this. Going back to this analogy of I want to lose weight, therefore there are 25 things that I need to do in the next 90 days because the program on the DVD tells me to, and instead figure out how to break all of those down, create a clear sense of priority, and then ask ourselves what you’ve deemed the focus question.

Jay Papasan: Sure. So you know the the very first of the lies that we talk about is everything matters equally, and the reality is I don’t think people walk around and they they understand intuitively that most of their activities are not equal in terms of results, but because we list our to do list in the order of chronology, right, and we often are overwhelmed, we tend to be quite reactive. I’ll be honest. When I’m on my worst days, I look at my list of things that has to be done, and I will just simply do the things that I can knock out the fastest because I want to make the list shorter. Right? It’s it’s human nature. You’re not doing the one thing that actually is the most important. You’re saying, “Wow, I crossed off 10 things off the list. None of them may add up too much, but you feel that satisfaction. So the heart of kind of countering this, right, of making better decisions, is just to take a moment and identify the real priority. And we just employed the 8020 rule. Most people understand it. You know, it comes from Vilfredo Pareto. It was popularized by a guy named Joseph Juran, and it’s largely been in the business world, kind of a fact as real as gravity. 20% of what we do gets us 80% of our results, and the numbers to me don’t matter as much as the minority of what we do will get us the majority of what we want. So how do we identify those things? So a simple exercise anybody could do is just grab their to-do list, right? Most people have some form of a to-do list. What they don’t have is a success list. And here’s how you convert them: of all the things that you could do, just take a minute and identify, highlight the ones that you really need to do, the should-dos on that list, right? And those are tend to be the ones that will have the biggest impact towards getting your goals. If the thing that you need to do is lose weight, and you’ve got a list of 25, there’s probably five on that list-the true 20% that matter most. So let’s start with those, and then the next thing is we’re going to put them in order of priority. If you could only do one of those things. What would that be? And you put a number one by it. Great. If you managed to knock that one out and had time to do a second, what would be your second priority? Then that becomes number two. And I’ve literally seen people take a list from like 20 to 20-five and narrow it down, usually to three to five things that actually matter. And I find this incredibly liberating because we all are weighed down by all of the obligations and opportunities that we’re pursuing. It’s just a lot of stuff on our plate. But if we can just take two or three minutes in the morning, sometimes at the beginning of the week, even for the whole week, you can really identify the stuff that matters. And if you knock that out in the morning first thing, then you can get to walk around righteous the rest of the day while you’re knocking out the other stuff. And this is kind of the heart of the book, and you alluded to it. The focusing question at the at the middle of the book is the the really simple, but not simplistic tool. It’s the question: What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary. It’s a very specific phrasing for a reason. We want people to ask a powerful question because it’ll help them get the answer they need, and it’s got a few important elements. It’s not three things. It’s what’s the one thing I can do, not could do or should do or would do. It’s what you can do already. A lot of people talk about the things that they could do, and there’s about five things they have to do in order to do it. So you ask the question differently, and such that by doing it just means that anything that you’re looking for has to be a line of dominoes.

Jay Papasan: There’s going to be a consequence that’s a favorable one afterwards, and that means it’s going to be easy or unnecessary. And when people ask that question, in my experience, like 90-9% of the time, they already know the answer and they feel a little guilty for not having done it. Sometimes they’re just looking for validation that they’ve chosen the right thing. Most people have a great sense of what the core thing is, they just need to identify it so that they’re clear about it and can do it.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and this is something that when I discovered it was a huge life changer for me. Literally, I think that the first time I had read your book was maybe I don’t know a year and a half or two years ago when I was still kind of on my own personal development quest, which I still on to this day, but I hadn’t really been formulating curriculum curriculums yet, and I’d gone through a period of massive burnout and suicidal depression, which I’ve been very, very, I’ve been very open with my audience about that, and I help other people deal with depression and attention issues. I’ve, I’ve just, I’ve got a whole smorgasbord, a whole cocktail of things that I deal with on a regular basis that I’ve learned how to overcome through these various steps, but I was at the point where basically my life was lived in the fetal position in fear and paranoia, and I couldn’t get anything done at all. And I asked myself this question: I said, “All right, well, I obviously want to get out of the state, but I want to lose weight. I want to get back to a place where I can run obstacle course races because I’ve run 10 Spartan races and tough mudders and like I’m I’m really into high intensity activity and I always push myself and I could barely get up in the morning and take a walk around the block like that was the most that I could do so I was really in a bad place and my mindset three or four years ago would have been well I need to start P90X again, or I need to go back on a strict paleo diet, and that was my mindset: was this all-or-nothing approach because I’m very, very intense about everything that I do. And I said, well, clearly that’s not working because I’m back here again. So let’s think about this differently. Oh, there was that one book and that one question. All right, so what is the one thing that I could do, that’s going to get me out of the situation and get me back to doing high-intensity activities, such that everything else will become easier or unnecessary. And it’s easy to think, well, P90X is going to have the most impact and the most results, or going on a diet will. But those were not things that I could do. I needed to find something that I could do. And for me, the one thing was improving the quality of my sleep, and that’s where I started. I said, and then I said, what’s the one thing I can do to improve the quality of my sleep? I need to establish a better sleep routine. So that’s where I started, being in the fetal position, barely able to function or get any work done at all. The only thing I’m going to do right now is I’m going to establish a better sleep routine that will then help me get higher quality sleep. Because getting higher quality sleep means it’s going to be easier to do more activity during the day because I have more energy. Once I start doing more activity during the day, it’s going to be easier to eat a better diet because science has proven that the more you exercise, the easier it is to stick with a diet, and the less you want to eat crap because it makes you feel bad. And then from there, the larger dominoes just start started going one after another after another. And I went from a place where I could barely function, walk around the block, to now after knocking all those dominoes over, I’ve run three or four Spartan races since then, and I now actually train. For American Ninja Warrior,

Jay Papasan: Love it. No, I actually had the the privilege of interviewing Charles Poliquin. He’s a strength training coach, like Olympic level. He’s known as the strength sance, and I had him on a webinar, and we were talking about health. And he absolutely confirmed when we started talking about what would be the first domino for health, right? And the way I’m going to simplistically, because it was an hour-long conversation, sleep is number one. Not just for the energy that you find that frees your mind, it clears your stress levels and the stress hormones, all which makes it easier to exercise. But it also literally will turn off the enzymes in our bodies that make us want to nibble, and it will turn on the ones that allow us to feel sated after we eat. So it has a direct impact on all of those things if we’re getting a healthy amount of sleep. And most Americans today are chronically, you know, sleep deprived. It’s just a fact. We spend too much time in front of our our screens and all of the other things that we do. Can I recommend a book? You may have already read it, “Sleep Smarter” by Sean Stevenson.

Zack Arnold: I actually had him on my podcast, and I will put a link to the episode in the show notes because it’s a game changer for anybody that hasn’t listened or read it. You must stop, listen, and read.

Jay Papasan: Love it, and it’s it’s full of really I think out of the 20-something methods in there, my wife and I have implemented probably 15 of them. You know, we got blackout curtains. I mean, we did all of the little things that you can do to improve the quality of your sleep. And frankly, that’s not something I was challenged with. But my wife and I are on the journey together, and she is. And so, improving the quality of our sleep-not even my sleep-was the first domino for us as well, and the second domino. If you want to, you know, the typical phrasing is, “I want to lose weight, and when you ask them why, because I want to look good by the time I have to wear a bathing suit, and looking good in a bathing suit is a combination of many things, but the big things are going to be sleep, followed by diet, and the last thing that most people should be focused on is exercise in terms of direct impact on that particular goal. So you line them up and you tackle them sequentially. You build a habit of great sleep, then you can focus on your diet. And I would just say I think dieting itself is a bundle of habits, right? You have to shop differently, you have to prepare food differently, you have to prepare food in different quantities, and then you have to actually eat that food. And that last one may just be a given, but I can tell you times that I have pre-made my food for the week and then left it all in the fridge. So for me, it was a necessary thing to think about on the journey to eating better.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I think that the other thing to think about as well, when you’re looking at all these habits, is how you frame the question of what your goal should be. Because if you’re saying I want to lose 20 pounds in 90 days, depending on your weight, like if you’re vastly, vastly overweight, all you have to do is cut your calories a little bit and drink a lot more water. You might lose 20 pounds, but if you’re in fairly decent shape, but you’ve just gained an extra 20, which is a situation that I’ve been in several times, losing 20 pounds is not going to happen in a healthy, long-term way in 90 days. So it’s not just about asking the focus question; it’s about also knowing how to ask the right question that fits realistically within a plan, and what I always tell people over and over and over is that you have to learn how to play chess and stop playing checkers because the 90-day plans are playing a game of checkers. But thinking this is where I want to be in one year, three years, or five years-that’s playing a game of chess, which means that if it takes me two months just to get my sleep under control, and I haven’t even started on diet or exercise, that’s fine because I’m not trying to change my life in 90 days. I’m trying to change my life for the next 50 years.

Jay Papasan: To emphasize what you’re saying, the long game, right? Chess versus checkers. Everything in our book is about a bigger time frame. And I asked Gary once, like he uses a month at a glance calendar, and it’s like, why don’t you use other tools? He goes, if you’re going to do big things, you need to have a bigger framework of time. Extraordinary rarely happens in a single day, and it certainly doesn’t happen in a single month in almost anything. You’re usually looking at a period of years, and the thing that most of us do is we chronically overestimate what we can get done in a single year, and we chronically underestimate how much we can accomplish in five. And if people would just change their, flip that around a little bit by focusing sequentially on the right steps, they can build those exponential domino runs in their lives. And I’m telling you, five years. I mean, if you’re a parent, you know how quickly five years goes by. When you’re a five-year-old, it’s your entire life. It feels like forever. I get it. But the older we get, the smaller that time frame feels to me, and the more acceptable it is to set big goals around that. But you can set huge, outrageous goals, and I can tell you again. And again and again, my wife has been doing this, and I’ve been doing this for I don’t know, like 13 years now, doing goal setting retreats where we’re setting long term goals, and then what do we have to do this year to accomplish it? We almost always underestimate, even knowing this, what we can accomplish in five years by focusing on the things that matter this year.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, one of my favorite quotes, and I’m to paraphrase. I can’t remember it verbatim, but it’s from James Cameron, who obviously is in my my field of work, famous film director. For anybody listening that might not know who James Cameron is, by the way, you need to get an internet connection and come into the world. But anyway, yeah, yeah, get out of your Cave, right? Get out of your Cave. But he says that if you set goals that are so outlandish and you fail, your failures are better than everybody else’ successes. Yeah, yeah, totally.

Jay Papasan: Aim high, always aim high.

Zack Arnold: So that having been said, what I want to talk about next then is how to really use the focus question in various contexts. Because it’s one thing to say, well, what’s the one thing that I need to do right now, or what’s the one thing that I need to do tomorrow. But I love how you talk about this idea of the one thing functioning kind of like a Russian doll does, or like an onion where you’re peeling all these layers to get to the center. So let’s talk about the power of this question in both small and very very large contexts. Because at the end of the day, the only action I can take is the next one. I can’t take an action tomorrow. I can’t take an action next week. And I think it’s funny that you said, “Well, you can’t really do anything extraordinary in a day, but what you’re doing today is going to lead to that extraordinary thing. So, how can we use this kind of all-encompassing question in various contexts?

Jay Papasan: So, part of the book is one of my favorite sections. I mean, I wish someone had taught me this when I was in high school. It’s it’s goal setting to the now, and it came. Gary’s been teaching this since probably the mid ’90s, and I’ve watched him do it a million times, and wasn’t really realizing what I was witnessing. But when people talk about begin with the end in mind, I think it’s an easy thing to say, and it’s a really hard thing to do unless you have some sort of structure for doing it. And the premise here is that you look way out, and where do you want to be someday, right? What does your someday look like? And then you work backwards from that goal. And there’s a lot of reasons for doing this. And one of them we talk briefly about in the book. There’s a concept called hyperbolic discounting. And one of the the classic studies you’ll see is people will go up and they’ll say, Hey, I’ll give you you know $1 today or $100 tomorrow, and of course everybody says I’ll take 100 tomorrow, and then you do one thing, you change the time frame, and the results change dramatically. Hey, Zack, I’ll give you $1 today, or I’ll give you 100 in a year. Same proposition. The only thing that’s changed is the time frame. Well, guess what? Almost everyone will take the smaller amount when the time frame grows that large. Probolic discounting basically says is that the farther away a goal is in the future, the less pull it has over us today. And so maybe a lot of people are pursuing these short-term goals because those are the ones who have the most pull over them. But a construct for getting around that is to go way out and say, “What’s the one thing I can be? You know, I need to accomplish in five years to feel like I’m absolutely on track for my someday goal. And whatever your someday goal is, let’s just say you’re going to be a American digital warrior, right? Let’s just assume that that is a greater than five year journey for most of us. I know it would be for me. You’re probably a lot closer than I am, Zack. But for me, I’d be like, okay. So, what would be the one thing I would need to accomplish in five years to say I would be able to do that? And we just fill in that blank. And guess what? There’s probably not any real research around it. It’s probably an educated, because who has a crystal ball that’s that accurate five years out? The next step you would do is go well based on my five-year goal, which is to be able to accomplish this thing. What would I have to achieve this year to feel like I was absolutely on track for that? And then we put that answer in, and then we say, well, based on my one-year goal, what would I have to accomplish this month? And then based on my monthly goal, what do I have to accomplish this week? And we’re steadily backing down from that larger goal. Most people work for what do I have to do this month to this year forward, and the problem is when we look forward, as we see all of the million options that are available to possibly tackle that goal. But if we look backwards in time, and someone says, “Zack, how did you get come to have this podcast? You could probably rattle off three or four milestone moments that led you to where you are today, because looking backwards, we tend to see a straight line. And so the whole trick is to project forward and look back. Not going to tell you that that five-year goal is completely accurate, but I can tell you that it’s usually in the ballpark. And by the end of that year, you know enough to reset that five-year goal in a much more accurate way and continue the process. So much of big success is course correction, but you have to be going in the right general direction to begin with.

Jay Papasan: We almost wrote a completely different lie that never made it into the book, and it was called “The Low-Hanging Fruit Is a Lie, because I can tell you, people who don’t follow this process are very susceptible to quick hits along the way. And when someone says, “Oh, Zack, if you just started the second podcast, you could make X amount of dollars, and that might really fit your short-term goals, but if you put it in this framework, you might realize you that short-term win might move you even farther away from where you ultimately truly want to go. Does that all make sense when I explain it that way?

Zack Arnold: It absolutely makes sense, and it actually brings up something that I wanted to mention, which is the very, very popular quote: “The journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. And as a side note, this is outright eerie. But I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Google Chrome extension Momentum. It’s basically a it’s a screensaver in a way that comes with the Google Chrome web browser. So when you open up a new tab, rather than having all these other tabs you visited, or having a Google search bar, rather than having something that draws your attention to it, you get this gorgeous photo, and it just says “Good morning, Zack, and it gives you the time and a quote. And the quote, “I swear to God, five minutes before I got on Skype with you was the journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. And I was like, “All right, the universe wants us on the podcast today because that was eerie. But one of the things that you mentioned that I think is so important in the book is that the journey of 1000 miles can become over 2000 miles if you don’t have some sense of the destination.

Jay Papasan: Right, you can double the length. You can go in the opposite direction. So it’s very important for people to pause a little bit, look out into the future, and just I’m just going to acknowledge, very very few people have a lot of clarity out there, but the only way to get clarity is to start walking down that path. But just the virtue of having said thinking of a bigger time frame someday, like way out beyond five years, I would love to be blah blah blah blah blah. What’s the one thing I can do right in the next five years that would make that easier and necessary? And you write that in. You just work backwards. And I got to tell you, I start started reading interviews with Bill Gates and you know these different people very very differently. When you hear them really analytically break down how they got to where they are. They almost always were doing some form of this process.

Zack Arnold: Well, we have a very limited amount of time left, and whenever I’m talking to guests that specialize in productivity, I know that I have to be super, super, super careful about being very conscious of their time because they’re like, it is 1120-nine and 30 seconds, and I’m going to have to get off in 30 seconds, so that I’m aware of. So we’ve got about five minutes left.

Jay Papasan: Four minutes by my clock, right? We’ve

Zack Arnold: Got four minutes left, so I’m watching the clock. Don’t worry. I think it’s really, really important to just talk very briefly about the four thieves because it’s one thing to have all this clarity, but if you haven’t stepped outside yourself for a minute and tried to identify some of the obstacles that are going to stand in your way, which is again one of the five steps of the GoFar framework, you have to identify these obstacles, and you have what are called the four thieves. And I want you to just pick the one that comes to you first. You’re the most passionate about, and just talk about it for like two minutes.

Jay Papasan: I’m going to say that the the first two they’re in order of priority, right? In terms of what trips people up the most, the inability to say no is by far number one, and number two is fear of chaos. And I will say, if you are a people-oriented person, you don’t like saying no to people, especially people you care about a lot. And so, even though you’re on a mission, people can say, “Hey, Zack, I need your help today. And if you aren’t really clear about that mission, you’re liable to start yesing yourself to death. And all of those yeses can absolutely bog you down and move you away from where you ultimately need to go. And so, learning how to say no strategically, I can tell you, the most successful people in the world say no all day long, and they do it in ways they don’t even always sound like no. I once taught a whole seminar on seven ways to say no without actually saying it. But my favorite technique for people is just to change the time frame. Most people want your attention now. You say, “Great, Zack, I would be happy to help you. Can we can we talk about this next Tuesday? And next Tuesday is a script. I literally will say that because that buys me Monday to get things off of my plate if I have to. You know what happens when people have to circle back in a week?

Zack Arnold: Probably nothing. Almost no nothing. Right. The front of it.

Jay Papasan: Yeah. Right. And so yeah, that almost always it’s not a me that oh great I’m sorry you can’t help me now I’ll go ask somebody else. So you haven’t said no, you’re not my one thing, which is a horrible thing to say to someone you care about, but you’ve actually said yes, but on my terms. Say I often a lot of people ask me for coaching, and I’m not a coach. I’m just going to put that out there right now. I’m part of a coaching company. And there are people who do that, but they want my advice, and I almost always will put some sort of condition on that. If you’d like me to coach you on this, well, would you mind going and reading this book and circling back when you’re done? Because that’ll give us a framework to have that conversation productively. Well, almost no one will go read a book, right? They just won’t do it. And I’m trying to be nice, but I’m also trying to place a high value on my time because people will waste it, even if people who care about you. So learn the art of saying no, and that doesn’t mean you’re selfish. What it means is you’re not wasteful with the most valuable resource that you have, which is your time. We all nobody knows how much we ultimately get, but we get the same amount every day. And some people get a lot more done with it because they invest it smartly. So treat it like a real thing to invest, and be careful about investing it willy-nilly with others. So learn to say no. And the other one is fear of chaos. Now I’m not terribly people-oriented. I love people, but I get my energy from being alone, so I tend to like to organize things to death, and people who are trusting in the message of the one thing will give disproportionate time to the core activities that will give them the most success, and that necessarily means that there’s going to be some sloppy piles on your desk, there will be some fires burning in your business, they might even be embarrassing, but because they’re not fatal and they’re not actually in that 20% of activities that matter, you’re just not going to address them, and that is the right thing to do. So I find that that ability to trust the process and ignore the chaos, right? Stop organizing, you know, the the the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, right? You need to go save the ship. Do the right things first, and then buy yourself that downtime, like we talked about earlier. That really unproductive time. Use that to start filing stuff, because that’s the last thing that probably needs to happen, unless that’s your true profession. But those are the two big thieves that I find trip people up more than anything else, depending on who they are.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and for me, the the inability to say no is by far number one. And just very very briefly, we may end up being like a whole 90 seconds late. And I apologize. But for anybody that thinks that the the whole problem of saying no is because we’re in the 21st century and there’s so much technology and there’s so much social media and all these demands on our time. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to one of the most powerful articles I’ve ever read, and it was actually in the American magazine in 1922, and it was written by a man that realized that he had been so accommodating his whole life and had done nothing for himself. It is an amazing read. It’s called “Why I Quit Being So Accommodating. So I’m going to put a link to that in the show notes, just so you don’t have to use the excuse of oh, that’s just the way things are today. This is an epidemic in human nature, and it has been for you know decades upon decades. And I know that for me personally, one of the things that I don’t want to regret at the end of my life is thinking, wow, I spent so much time doing so many things that I probably should have said no to.

Jay Papasan: No, that’s that’s you know I didn’t mean to say no right when you said that. I meant to say like in my mind I’m saying yes I agree with you and no we don’t want that. I look up and I think that for me the things I’m going to value most is time spent and experiences I’ve had with the very few people on this earth, and so my ultimate priorities are very clear. I mean, I’ve got it at the top of my goal sheet that’s in front of me all the time. You know, for me, it’s I’m going to be the best father and the best husband I can be, and actually, husband comes first for me because I want to have that role model for my kids, and everything works backwards from those true north priorities, and that allows you when you’re really clear about what you’re saying yes to. It does make it easier to say no.

Zack Arnold: Well, and as long as we’re along the lines of sharing purpose and intention statements, I this is going to be the first time I shared it publicly, but I think this would be a great time to do it. So I’m just going to read mine verbatim so people get a sense of what that true North Star can be. So mine is that the purpose of my life is to be energetic, authentic, and inspiring. To learn every day, to love and support my family, and to live an exemplary life, so I can inspire others to see past their obstacles and disabilities, achieve their goals, and be the best version of themselves that they can be. And I read that twice a day.

Jay Papasan: Well, my challenge to you will be: How can you fit that on a bumper sticker?

Zack Arnold: That’s going to be a little bit tougher. That’s a that’s going to take the whole bumper. That I realize. So I might have to might have to narrow it down a bit. But you

Jay Papasan: Might one thing that a little bit because I bet that there’s a heart. I mean, I love everything that’s in it. There’s, I mean, there’s everything about what you said is wonderful. But I bet that there is a clear beating heart that makes everything else in that statement happen, and identifying it may take some time, but I think it would be a worthwhile journey.

Zack Arnold: Well, I promise you that I’m going to take that challenge on because I’m always looking for areas to improve and get better, and then share those things with others. But along those lines, you and I could talk for at least another hour or two. I feel like I’m just getting going. But I did promise to be very respectful of your time. So before we’ll just have to do it again. We’ll just have to do it again. It’ll be a lot of fun. So I just want to make sure that people know where to find you, where to find your book, where to find the coaching programs that your company offers. So where can I send people? If

Jay Papasan: They could go to the onething.com with the number one, that’s where all of our resources are. There’s tons of resources around the book. You don’t even need to buy the book to do some of the activities that we’ve talked about on this podcast. I don’t want that to be a condition for people to get what they want at all. But there’s information about all of our programs there, and you know my name. If you Google it, you’re going to find me on the major social media channels, and I do those things myself. If you’re a patient, I will eventually circle back. I block time to review those sites, and if you had a question, I can reach out to you.

Zack Arnold: Well, it means a lot to me that you took the time today to chat with me and share all of your knowledge with my audience. So I really, really appreciate it, and I hope you have a wonderful and fantastic day, week, month, year, and five years.

Jay Papasan: Thank you, Zack. The same to you, and thank you so much for investing so much in our book-it’s very clear to me that you’re you’re striving and you are trying to be your best human that you can be, and that you’ve put our book to good use. And I really, really appreciate that on behalf of Gary as well.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Jakin Rintelman. Special thanks to Krystle Penhall and Sarah Furie for helping to spread the love!

The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).