When people are faced with many tasks, their main impulse is to ignore the most important thing, and do two things at once. However, multitasking fires the stress response and shuts off the frontal lobe that lowers the person’s IQ.

Jay Papasan is the co-author of The ONE Thing, a New York Times bestseller about identifying your ONE Thing and how to do that thing.

On this episode, he talks about that ONE Thing and how it delivers extraordinary results in every situation. When you focus on it and start establishing your productivity rituals in the morning, you can be back in control instead of being adrift in the stream of life.

Key Takeaways

• Complacency at the top is a great recipe for being put out of business.
• Low multitaskers outperformed high multitaskers according to research.
• When we’re multitasking, we’re wasting our time and getting worse results.
• The power of chiropractic adjustment is being in the present.
• Pareto’s principle is this idea that you get the majority of your results from the minority of what you do. It’s also called the 80/20.
• Extreme Pareto exercise:
  • First, identify the handful of things that matter.
  • Then, rank them in priority so you can do them in priority.
• When people ask a big question, they can get a big answer.
• If you do the right thing, not only you can get a lot of result from it, but also, you can build momentum.
• Discipline is training yourself to do something until it’s habitual.
• The length of time it takes to create a new habit is different for every individual.
• Willpower is the ability to say “Yes” to what you need to do and to say “No” to everything else. It is the engine that powers our focus.
• Staying focused isn’t zeroing in on something. It’s eliminating everything else.
• The ONE Thing for businesses is lead generation.
• Don’t neglect the fundamentals and pay attention to the competitive landscape.
• Resources:The ONE Thing