Zheng Shenghui's study and reflection day 2388
Core content
Generally speaking, we all think that in order for a person to succeed and achieve success, he must work hard, learn a lot of things and do a lot of things. However, the book says that if you want to succeed, if you want to achieve outstanding achievements, you must learn to give up many things, focus on the most important thing, and do one thing is enough.
Preface
"The Most Important Thing, Only One Thing" is written by an American named Gary Keller, chairman of Keller Williams International Realty, one of the world's largest real estate companies, and has written several best-selling books that have sold millions of copies worldwide. The book we're going to talk about now is one of them, which has consistently ranked first on Amazon's book sales list in the United States.
What does it mean to "only one thing is the most important thing"? Generally speaking, we all believe that in order for a person to succeed and achieve success, he must work hard, learn a lot of things and do a lot of things. The author of this book says that if you want to succeed, if you want to achieve excellence, you have to learn to give up a lot of things, focus on the most important thing, do one thing is enough. The author believes that because this truth is so simple, many people are not easy to believe.
Interestingly, the author, Gary Keller, himself didn't believe that this could be done at first, and it took him a long time to understand it.
Part I
In the first phase of his business, Gary Keller spent 10 years building a great company. During this period of time, he has done a smooth trip, so he is confident that the company will soon be able to expand its business to various countries around the world. To his surprise, it was at this point that the company suddenly fell into full trouble, and despite all his efforts and sacrifices, the business was in shambles, and nothing improved. At that time, he was like stuck in a trap, desperately asking for help from the people around him, hoping that someone would pull him out. That's when one of his teachers came to his aid.
The two of them went for a walk together, and after fully understanding the relevant details, the teacher began to think about how to solve his problem. By the time their walk was almost over, the teacher had already figured out a concrete solution. The teacher asked Gary Keller, "What do you think you need to do to turn things around?" Gary Keller shook his head in confusion. The teacher wrote 14 key positions on the wall and said, you only need to do one thing to reverse the embarrassing situation of the whole company, that is, assign the 14 key positions I marked out to people who are really competent, as long as you choose the right people in these 14 key positions, the whole company can develop in a good way. Gary Keller was shocked, he couldn't believe the solution could be so simple. He asked the teacher if the solution should be a little more complicated, and whether it would be safer to do a few more things to turn a profit. The teacher replied short and forcefully, "No." Jesus only needed 12 disciples, and you only needed 14 people in key positions. ”
This moment can be said to be a turning point in Gary Keller's life. After discussing with his teacher, he made the big decision to fire himself, stepping down from his position as CEO of the company and concentrating on finding people in 14 key positions. The result? He found 14 key people. In less than 3 years, the company has achieved sustained profitability, and profits have grown at a rate of 40% for 10 consecutive years, rapidly growing from a regional company to a national company.
That's when new problems arise. As Gary Keller discusses the work with these 14 key people, Gary Keller will start by briefly summarizing a few of the tasks they have committed to accomplish at this stage. What gave him a headache was that while these 14 people were able to do most of the work they promised him, sometimes the most important work was not done, leaving their work in a difficult situation. Gary Keller tried to communicate with them and simplify their work, from "a few tasks to do this week" to "the three most important tasks of the week" and then to "the two most important tasks of the week", but it still didn't work. Eventually, he decided to try the "just do one thing" approach. He asked them, "What's your most important job this week?" Which work, once done, makes the others easier or less important? It was a desperate idea, but it was another surprise. Since then, the performance of these 14 key people has skyrocketed.
As a result of these two troubled experiences, Gary Keller began to summarize the relationship between the state of the company and his approach, and found an interesting phenomenon: every time the company was hugely successful, it was when he focused on one thing. Gary Keller thought of the question, everyone has 24 hours a day, why do some people succeed and some people fail? Why are those who are successful able to accomplish more, achieve higher goals, make more money, and have more things? If we look at time as the original capital of a person's career, then everyone's original capital is 24 hours a day. How do successful people allocate their original capital and get far more than others? Gary Keller believes that the answer is this: all the actions and energies of successful people are closely centered around their goals, and they succeed because they give up a lot of what they can do but don't have to do and focus on what matters most.
Whether it's work or life, if you want to achieve the best results, you need to narrow down your goals as much as possible. But most people don't believe that. They think that to achieve great things, it will consume a lot of time and go through a lot of twists and turns, so they have a very full schedule and a tight schedule, but success is getting farther and farther away from them. Everyone's time and energy are limited, and if you want to do everything, you're likely to be exhausted and can't take care of everything. You're bent on multi-faceted flowering, and as a result, you're less efficient. Too much stress can keep you on time, you can't eat well, you can't sleep, you don't have time to exercise, you don't have time to spend with family and friends. In Gary Keller's view, this is a mistake. There is actually a shortcut to success, which is what we said earlier, focus your time and energy on the most important thing. And most of us don't usually do that, because we have a lot of misconceptions about success. We hear too many lies about success, which can actually mislead us and hinder us from achieving success.
Part II
Because the book is about "only one thing that matters most", Gary Keller has deliberately collected a lot of aphorisms that conflict with this sentence, such as "everything is important", "doing several things at the same time is more efficient", "self-discipline and willpower can solve everything...... He thinks it's all a lie.
First: Everything matters.
In life, we often fall into the dilemma of having to do a lot of things every day, and some of them have to be postponed to the next day if they are not finished on the same day, and then, there are more and more things, and the backlog is there that we can't finish at all. We're busy beyond our normal load, but success doesn't come close to us just because we're busy. We work more but don't get more, because a lot of our busyness is blind. It's a common mistake to think that everything is important and to get it all done. In order to do everything, we had to hope for time management. Making a "to-do list" is a useful way to help us focus, but we are often constrained by the list, as if we have to do everything on the list, and the order in which we do things can be inadvertently affected by the list.
Successful people don't approach things the same way as ordinary people, they think through it until they find the main task before making a decision, and then make the main task the core and do other things around the main task. There's a good chance they'll start with jobs that the average person would normally put off. They also have a clear understanding of what to do. Rather than a lengthy to-do list, they tend to make a short, concise "success list".
How do successful people turn ordinary lists into success lists? Let's take a look at Joseph Juran's discovery. Juran was a master codebreaker and made outstanding contributions to both science and business. His achievements caught the attention of General Electric. GE asked him to use the Italian economist Pareto's theories to test whether the company's compensation plan for management was reasonable.
In the 19th century, Pareto calculated that 20% of the world's population owned 80% of the wealth. This was supposed to be about the imbalance in the distribution of wealth. But Juran realized that this was most likely a universal rule. Later, we came to call this law the "Rule of Twenty-Eight." The rule of 28 believes that what brings a large number of results, outputs, and returns is often a small number of reasons, inputs, and contributions. That is, for success, the distribution is also unfair. It's a lot of small investment to get a lot of success. Therefore, only by paying selectively can you effectively get returns. Gary Keller himself is like that. Several decisive moments have led him to where he is today, and in the case of investments, the vast majority of his wealth comes from a handful of right investments. So, we can refer to the rule of 28 and turn the "to-do list" into a "success list". Pick the most important 20% from what you want to do. Narrow down the 20% until you find the most important thing.
The second lie about success is that "doing several things at the same time is more efficient".
If doing the most important thing is key, why should we do other things at the same time? In 2009, a professor at Stanford University did a study. He wanted to see how the so-called "all-rounders" could accomplish several tasks at the same time. He told the New York Times reporter that he himself did not have such ability, so he used to be very envious of those who could. The professor led the research team to distribute more than 200 questionnaires to investigate how well students were working on multiple tasks at the same time. They divided respondents into those who often multitasked and those who did not, and speculated that people who frequently multitasked. But the results were unexpected. "I thought the all-rounders must have some kind of magical ability, but it turned out that they couldn't get to the point," the professor said. They seem to have taken care of everything, nothing can stump them, and in reality everything is not very good.
So it's just a beautiful lie to say that people can juggle several things at the same time. The problem is that this practice is very popular nowadays, and many people think that several things should be juggled at the same time, and they leave no stone unturned in it. We often think of this way of doing things as a sign of efficiency, and we often discuss how to master this skill. Companies also see it as a clear advantage when hiring, but in fact it is just a "blind lie", dealing with several things at the same time, which is neither efficient nor successful. If you try to do two things at the same time, the result is either not at all or you can't do both at all. There's a good saying: "Dealing with several things at the same time is tantamount to messing up several things at the same time." ”
Sometimes it's true that we can do two things at the same time, like talking while walking, and looking at a map while eating, but we can't do two things at the same time that require our focus. Oddly enough, modern people are particularly fond of giving the impression of being a "generalist". For example, listening to music while doing things, talking on the phone while driving, and playing on the machine while eating. Sometimes instead of having too little time and too much to do, we keep hinting that we want to do more at the same time. What used to be the time to do one thing, now we want to be able to do two or even three things.
Let's talk about our work scene. Our office is a place where everyone is required to have "three heads and six arms". You're concentrating on an item in front of you, and suddenly someone coughs and asks if you have a cough lozenge. The phone in the office is so loud that no one is immune. The email in your mailbox never seems to be finished, and your phone keeps vibrating to indicate that you have received a new message. A bunch of couriers haven't been dismantled yet, a bunch of things haven't been done yet, but there are always people who keep asking you about the progress of things. Distractions, distractions, interruptions happen all the time. Research shows that, on average, employees are interrupted every 11 minutes in the office, and they spend 1/3 of their day recovering from distractions. But even so, we still had to meet the deadline.
Multitasking? Switching between tasks? Such a statement is nothing but self-deception. The researchers found that switching tasks is not cost-free. If it is a simple task, the cost of additional time is less than or equal to 25%; If it is a complex task, there is a good chance that the extra time will be consumed by more than 100%. As a result, we waste an average of 28% of our time on task switching in a workday. We simply don't realize what a price we have paid for the image of a "generalist".
The third lie about success is that "self-discipline and willpower can solve everything."
Many times, we tie success and willpower together, as if with willpower, we will definitely succeed. But the problem is that for most of us, willpower is not something you can have at your fingertips, and it is not an inexhaustible supply.
You can think of willpower as an indicator of how much battery your phone has left, every morning, it may be fully charged, but as time goes by, you keep using the power you stored, it gets consumed, and you need to find the right time to recharge it, not all the time. We all know that we need to use limited resources in a planned way, but we don't plan for such an important willpower as a limited resource for individuals, so that by the time we really need willpower to accomplish important tasks, it may have already been exhausted.
Modern research has shown that willpower is indeed fleeting, the energy is huge but not long-lasting, and the amount of glucose in our blood decreases dramatically after willpower is used. We can think of willpower as a resilient "mental muscle" that takes a long time to recover. If we put too much willpower into one thing and don't wait for it to recover before we put it into the next thing, we will not be satisfied. At this time, you need to supplement the brain, such as eating some foods that can slowly raise blood sugar, such as carbohydrates, proteins, etc. Therefore, if we want to make good use of willpower, we need to consciously grasp the timing and do the most important thing every day when our willpower is at its strongest, and finish it before willpower fails.
Self-discipline is also not something that comes easily. From a human point of view, you can't ask yourself to be self-disciplined all the time, but you should develop a habit through a fixed training method and a long enough training time. The trick to success is to pick the right habit and train yourself to develop it, and when it becomes a part of your life, you will look like a self-disciplined person to others. It may be particularly difficult to develop a habit at first, but once the habit is formed, it is much easier to keep it than to form it.
So, how long does it take for self-discipline to become a habit? The results of the University of London survey give us a clear answer: it takes an average of 66 days to form a habit. We are sometimes encouraged to say that it takes 21 days to form a habit, but that's unrealistic, so don't give up too soon. Australian researchers have also found that there is a halo effect in the habit formation process. In the course of the experiment, students who developed good habits generally reported less stress, less impulsive shopping, better eating habits, less frequent TV watching, and even improved the situation of saving dirty dishes without washing. This shows that not only is it getting easier to maintain good habits, but it can also bring benefits to other areas of life.
We all know champion swimmer Michael Phelps, who was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder as a child, and his kindergarten teacher told his mother, "Phelps is always fidgeting and can't be quiet, sorry, your son can't concentrate at all." However, this young man, who seems to have nothing to do with focus and success, has set one world record after another. His mother proudly says, "I was amazed at how focused Michael was. His swimming coach also praised his concentration as "the most powerful weapon." Why did Phelps make such a turnaround? The secret lies in his training habits over the years. From the age of 14 until he competed at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Phelps trained seven days a week, six hours a day, and devoted all his energy to the most important thing. This self-discipline and habit allowed him to find his place in the pool and it was a huge success.
Part III
With these few lies about success out of our minds, we can return to the main topic of the book: there is only one thing that matters, but which one is it? You need to ask yourself a key question: What's the most important thing I can do? Why does doing this make other things easier or unnecessary? This problem can be broken down into three parts.
1. What is the most important thing I can do?
This question inspires you to act. "The most important thing" means that the answer is one thing, one specific thing, not many things. Although you may have a lot of options, you have to make judgments, otherwise you can't move on to the second thing, the third thing. You have to choose the one most important thing to do. "What I can do" prompts you to take possible actions. "Can do" is not "must do", "may do" or "will do", there are many things we must do, may do, will do, but never do. The power to do it because it can be done is much greater than that of wanting to do it.
Second, what will happen if you do it, this is saying that your answer must meet a standard.
This criterion allows you to move from "just find something to do" to "do something for a clear goal". "Do this and you will ......" means that you have to dig deeper, because after doing this thing, another thing will happen.
3. Make other things easier or less necessary.
Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum, and I will move the earth." "You have to find a pivot point where other things are easier or no longer necessary. Once you've done the most important thing, you'll find that the other things you need to do to achieve your goals can be done with less effort or at all. You can "turn a blind eye" to trivial things, like putting a blindfold on yourself. Then you will have the possibility to change the course of your life and do the most important thing without distractions.
Key questions will lead you to the most important thing at different stages of your life. At different times, you just need to divert your attention and rethink what the key questions are.
For a person to have happiness, the most important thing is to devote himself to his career and make his life more meaningful. When what we do every day gradually reaches a goal, happiness will follow. The way to succeed is to understand what is really important to you and achieve it by accumulating bit by bit.
The author of this book, Gary Keller, gives a very practical piece of advice, which is to work backwards. Start by thinking about your long-term goals, then work backwards to the most important thing you should do now. Think about it:
What is the most important thing I should do in the next 5 years for my long-term goals?
What is the most important thing I should do this year to achieve my 5-year goal?
What is the most important thing I should do this month for this year's goals?
What's the most important thing I should do this week for the sake of this month's goals?
What's the most important thing I should do today for this week's goals?
What's the most important thing I should do right now to get to where I want to be today?
Connect all the goals one by one until you find the most important thing at the moment. Let's take an example. Someone once asked the famous American comedian Jerry Seinfeld, how can he become a better comedian? Seinfeld said it was to write a joke every day. His method is to hang a huge calendar on the wall, and when a joke is written, he puts a big red cross on the calendar for that day. He said that the red cross would get longer and longer, and that he would love to see it continue, and that the only thing he had to do was not let it break. The so-called persistence is not a long-distance run, but a series of many sprints.
summary
In the past, we had a lot of misconceptions about success, thinking that in order to succeed in our careers, "everything is important", "it is more efficient to do several things at the same time", and "self-discipline and willpower can solve everything...... Actually, these are all lies about success. To achieve something extraordinary, you have to know what is the most important thing you can do, and then work backwards around that core goal to find the most important thing in the moment. Think about what is most important to you now.
Written by: Dai Ning; Source: Get APP Listening Book Column
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