Step Nine: YOUR ONE THING
Create the roadmap to your ideal life
To get where you want to go in life, and to live life the way you want to live it, you have to make a plan.
So, if you have been wondering how to create your happy life, or how to make a roadmap that really gets you where you want to go, then you have come to the right place!
This Step helps you create a roadmap to your ideal life.
There are 4 sections to this Guide:
Aim Your Energy
Start With One Thing
The One Thing Life Plan
Make It Actionable!
There is one tool for this step: The One Thing Life Plan Worksheet.
Additional guidance for creating a roadmap to your ideal life is offered in the video that accompanies this step.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
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Aim Your Energy
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Start With One Thing
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The One Thing Life Plan
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Make it Actionable
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The One Thing Life Plan Worksheet
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Your One Thing Video
1. Aim Your Energy
The roadmap to your happy life starts with recalibrating your external action steps based on your individuality, not the decrees of others.
And it requires just one thing: aiming your precious life energy in the right direction.
Direction in this sense means focusing on your passion and doing one thing in that place.
It doesn’t matter what your one thing is if you don’t know where to aim your energy.
Your passion is the place to aim your life force.
If you don’t know what your place of passion is, then your personal one thing this year might be to discover your place of passion.
Career Coach Ken Coleman writes that:
“passion is simply the work you love to do. You’re deeply committed to doing this work and doing it well. You’ll get a lot of joy out of it, but it will also come with a lot of struggle and effort—and you’ll know the whole time that it’s worth it.”
The first action on The One Thing Life Plan Worksheet is to write your place of passion.
By identifying your passion, you remind yourself of the best place to focus your gifts, talents, and purpose.
It’s you aligning your energy with your direction.
2. Start with One Thing
Now that you are pointed in a direction, it’s time to take your first big step in the form of one thing.
Why just one thing?
The One Thing, a profound concept that is the brainchild of Gary Keller, is about going small to achieve big results.
In his book The One Thing, Keller offered:
“Going small” is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you want to do with what you want. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.”
The One Thing expands upon Pareto’s Principle, or the 80/20 Principle.
In his book The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less, Richard Koch offers that:
“The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards.”
By using The One Thing, you narrowly focus on the specifics of living your best life, or what brings you effortless joy, abundance, and good health. This focus offers the most benefits.
Keller explained the reasoning behind this hyper-focus in The One Thing:
“You only have so much time and energy, so when you spread yourself out, you end up spread thin. You want your achievements to add up, but that actually takes subtraction, not addition. You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.”
If you are determined to bring your hopes and dreams, or intentions, into the physical world from the place of thought, you have to let go of the things that aren’t as important and make your one thing your priority above all else.
It’s the pathway to a happy life.
3. The One Thing Life Plan
Using Keller’s explanation of The One Thing, I created a process for operationalizing his idea of externally manifesting intentions and captured that process in The One Thing Life Plan Worksheet.
Its purpose is to guide you through selecting a life goal for this year.
This goal is called your one thing goal.
You can use the worksheet for each new year to plan where you are going for the rest of your life.
By doing so, you can materialize the life of your dreams each year in bigger and bigger ways.
The first step of The One Thing Process is to identify your one thing. As you choose your one thing, the law of subtraction becomes important. In his book The Laws of Subtraction: 6 Simple Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything, Matthew May wrote:
“At the heart of every difficult decision lie three tough choices: What to pursue versus what to ignore. What to leave in versus what to leave out. What to do versus what to don’t. I have discovered that if you focus on the second half of each choice—what to ignore, what to leave out, what to don’t—the decision becomes exponentially easier and simpler. The key is to remove the stupid stuff: anything obviously excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly...
This is the art of subtraction: when you remove just the right thing, in just the right way, something good usually happens.”
Each one of your choices should move you in the direction of your one thing. Doing so requires you to remove the right things.
And that means the conversation starts by narrowing your focus.
For most adults on most days, our focus is split between two things: our personal lives and our professional lives.
Home and work are where our best energy goes most of the time.
Thus, we should identify what we want to achieve in those two domains.
To understand what you want to achieve this year, I recommend you start The One Thing Process by thinking about how you see this particular scenario playing out:
For me, if I am happy personally and professionally, everything else will fall into place.
That might not be true for you — so be sure to pick the one or two domains to focus on that feel most important to you.
For step one, write down on the worksheet the one thing in each domain for this year.
It might be helpful to have a personal and a professional worksheet.
A written goal offers multiple benefits. First, having a written goal means you are more likely to succeed.
In “The Psychology of Writing Down Goals,” Brett Greene shares,
“There’s a simple trick to make your dreams come true more easily and faster, and it doesn’t cost a lot of time or effort: Writing down goals.”
He cited a Harvard Business study that demonstrated that people who wrote down their goals were three times more likely to succeed than people who just had some plan in mind.
He also offered research that evidenced a 1.4 times higher chance of success by just committing your goals to paper. Greene’s article also shared that writing down your goals does these important things:
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Engages your brain differently so that, unbeknownst to you consciously, your mind is always focusing on ways to help you achieve your goals;
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helps you clarify them;
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leaves no wiggle room;
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are a constant reminder of your commitments.
An example of a one thing goal that allows you to include more than one domain is “to live into my purpose in every aspect of my life.”
If you just completed the purpose worksheet included in Step 8, having this as your one thing goal is a great starting point.
The video for this step walks you through the worksheet using my professional one thing as an example so you can see exactly how to complete the one thing process.
After you have formulated the big picture by selecting your personal and professional one thing goals, the next step is to go smaller by focusing on the three things you have to do this year to make your one thing happen.
Then you go smaller by choosing three things for each quarter that support the three things for the year.
To live your everyday life aligned with your intentions, I recommend you go even smaller.
I do so by asking myself,
“What will I do this week that moves me toward my quarterly three things, that moves me closer to my annual three things, and results in achieving my one thing!”
To keep yourself in this narrow focus mode weekly, I recommend an accountability partner.
Each week you and your partner can review each other’s progress.
Here are sample questions to use with an accountability partner each week:
What one thing did you set out to accomplish for yourself last week (in the last 7 days)?
Did you do your best over the last week to accomplish this one thing?
Rate yourself from 1-10, with 10 being the best, and explain your rating.
What is the one thing you’re going to do this week (in the next 7 days) to make progress towards your One Thing?
Accountability partners can make a big difference in achieving your goal.
In his article, Green cited a study by the Dominican University of California that showed that
“writing down your goals, and what actions you take to achieve them, and then sharing these and your progress with a friend gives you the best chance of success.”
Having an accountability partner to complete The One Thing Life Plan Worksheet with and to check in with each week will give you your best chance of success!
If you want to learn about the psychology of writing down goals, you can read the article here.
4. Make It Actionable!
Once you have your three most important things, they need to be made actionable.
To make them actionable, turn them into guiding questions that you can ask yourself before agreeing to participate in whatever is in front of you.
As you think about making your most important things actionable, here are a few guiding questions I’ve used in the past:
If what I am about to say yes to is not built on the balanced exchange or it can’t transition there, then it’s a no for me.
If what I am about to say yes to is not an amazing human experience or it doesn’t
have the potential to be that, then it’s a no for me.
If what I am about to say yes to is not going to allow me to grow with effortless joy or it doesn’t have the potential to do that, then it’s a no for me.
These sample questions also appear on the worksheet.
For your choices to be in harmony with your intended direction, you have to say no to certain, misaligned things and yes to other, forward-moving things.
When your choices align with your one thing, you create synergies that propel you in the direction of a life filled with what you seek.
That’s because you are creating internal and external alignment and that is a powerful attractor.
What you focus on focuses on you.
By taking incremental steps toward your intentions each and every day, you affirm to the universe you are serious about living a life that you design.
That type of intention and action creates magic.
I have discovered that as I set intentions, make choices that moved me toward those intentions, and allow the universe to respond, what is delivered is always more amazing and bigger than what I could have planned for myself.
As you make the incremental movements toward your one thing, remember that you still have to chop wood, tote water.
That means you have to do the everyday, mundane things that sustain your life, such as shopping for groceries, going to the dentist, feeding the dog, etc.
An essential requirement of The One Thing Process is knowing that everything that shows up in response to moving toward your intentions is for you.
Even when it looks like a big disaster, the event is still for you and can offer opportunities for incremental growth that propel you toward your intentions.
It is about accepting, without reservation, that every event in your life has divine meaning as it leads you closer to happily ever after.
Thus, going forward, when life happens, you don’t ask, “Why me?”
Instead, you boldly proclaim, “How is this moment for me?”
I personally follow-up that question with this statement: “Allow me to see what needs to be seen so I can learn the lesson and continue to grow my happiness.”
As you make the big choices aligned with your one thing, you will find there is a trickle-down effect.
You become more intentional about the smaller choices, too.
When all of your actions move you in the direction of your intentions, a happier life is a natural result.