080: Finding and Doing the One Thing with Jay Papasan

Pete Mockaitis
Jay, thanks so much for being here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Jay Papasan
Hey, thanks for having me, Pete. This is exciting.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to dig into it as well. Now, I’m intrigued… So your book, The ONE Thing, you say the articulation of the message kind of had some inspiration from Curly from the movie City Slickers. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen that movie. Could you refresh our memory, and what’s the inspiration there?

Jay Papasan
Yeah, it’s funny. That was one of the last sections to go in the book, even though it’s right in the beginning. And we had the manuscript, we were circulating it to people and sharing the idea. And everybody kept saying, “Oh, it’s like that scene in City Slickers where Curly holds up his finger and says, ‘You know the meaning of life’.” And it was like, at some point I turned to Gary and I said, “We can’t not write about that.” So we went back and in one of the early kind of final drafts we added that to it. So, if you remember the scene, and I guess we can evoke it.

Pete Mockaitis
Evoke away.

Jay Papasan
Jack plans… I cannot imitate him; he was one of a kind. But he just said, “It’s one thing, just one thing. If you stick to that and get that right, everything else doesn’t mean squat.” And it’s just that good moment, where in a comedy, there’s that moment of truth about identify what matters, identify the big thing, the one thing. And here’s a simple guy that had figured it out relaying it to the sophisticated guy who hadn’t figured it out. So a lot of people connect that to this book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So identifying the one thing – and this is reminding me a little bit of essentialism.

Jay Papasan
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, can you lay out a bit of of that philosophy or the anti-philosophy? So what do you mean by “the one thing” and what comes up against that?

Jay Papasan
This book was born from a hypothesis. I got the chance to start writing books with Gary Keller back in 2002, and I’ve watched him build a company from then 6,700 independent contractors to the largest in the world with 148,000. And the thing that he does well is identify the priority.
And so this idea that the greatest successes in his career have always come when he increased his focus – instead of doing more things, did fewer. It came out of an essay, long story short. And I remember immediately thinking as someone who’d been books and publishing for a long time like, “That’s it. That’s your book.”
And we then spent five years with two full-time researchers trying to make sure that our hypothesis lined up with the facts. So the big idea – and it’s nothing new, and we didn’t claim that it was anything new – is just like with a magnifying glass and the Sun – if you focus your efforts to fewer things, or one thing in this case, then you truly have the ability to do something at an extraordinary level. If you divide your efforts between many things, not only does that stress you out, you don’t tend to do any of them that well.
And so, there’s always exceptions to every rule, but the great, vast majority of people will benefit from this idea of, “Let’s just do fewer things with more effect than a whole bunch of stuff with side effects.” And by side effects I mean stress, poor results, mistakes. There’s just a lot that goes on when we try to be all things to all people and get everything done instead of just focusing on what matters.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that is resonating and making some great sense. Could you maybe light a fire, with some inspiration in terms of sharing a tale or two from some people or readers or clients who made the shift? Where were they before, what did they do, and then what kind of extraordinary results did they see?

Jay Papasan
Well, I’ll give you the thumbnail, right? So here’s the, “Don’t have to buy the $25 book if you could actually take this an implement it.” We have a question: What’s the one thing I can do, such that by doing it everything will be easier or unnecessary? And that has a lot of back history behind it, but it’s this specific question to try to get you to that answer.
And I can tell you that when most people, and almost I’d say 99% of the people that I’ve talked or worked with, and that’s now numbering in the tens of thousands, you’re looking up, they know the answer and they feel guilty for not doing it. “What’s the one thing I can do for my marriage?” They know that it’s, “I just need to listen to my wife”, or, “I just need to put out my dirty clothes in the morning.” That one little thing would make a big difference. Most people know that thing that they’re not doing as much as they should, and they don’t ask the question ’cause they’re kind of afraid of the answer.
So, I think most people do know their answers or they just haven’t paused for the brief amount of time it takes to arrive at it. And then we teach people to kind of go all in. If you know that this is important to you – my marriage, my family, my business, you fill in the blank, my health – you identify that one thing and then you try to make that thing just habitual.
And so, we launched a course earlier this year called Time-blocking Mastery, where we walk people through 10 weeks of trying to build a habit. And one of the big findings in that research is, every book that I’d ever read said that it took 21 days or 30 days to form a habit. But the actual science suggests that it’s more like 66 days – a lot longer. And so, we’ve led… I’m looking at my little board, so far this year 7,677 is the last number I wrote up there – people, we’ve taught them how to kind of time-block their one thing and do it for 66 days.
And so I’ve watched people, and I’d say the number one thing that I’ve seen, regardless of the habit, is when people take control of a small amount of their time. They’re just going to take 10 minutes to meditate in the morning, or they’re going to exercise for 30 minutes with their wife for 3 days a week. They make a stand, they go on in like, “Everything in my life is going to support this one thing.”
When they take control of that 30-minute sliver of time, it gives them the confidence to start taking control of everything else. And I could go through example after example after example, but that’s been the generic experience is people focusing on one thing, they put it on their calendar so that they have to do every single day. That’s what we call the time-blocking – you make an appointment with yourself to do something. Not with someone else, but to do something. And then you keep that commitment until it becomes a habit.
And BJ Fogg is a researcher at Stanford University; he taught 10,000 people how to floss their teeth using a similar method, and he just told them to floss one tooth every day. And the reality is, if somebody pulls off the string to do one tooth, they’re probably going to finish it. But he also understood the idea of momentum. And if you really just don’t want to do it but you don’t want to break the streak of doing it day in and day out, you can do one and say, “I did it.” But over time… He got 10,000 people. My mom is a dental hygienist and she couldn’t get me to regularly floss my teeth growing up. So it’s just one of those things that we all know should be doing and we’re not, and there’s a few tricks and trades.
So the two big ones are, time-block it, or BJ Fogg would say, piggyback it – attach it to an existing habit. He said, “After I brush my teeth, I will floss this tooth.” I would say that’s definitely how a lot of my habits work. But at 5:30 a.m. I’m going to work out with my wife for an hour, and that’s become a habit that she and I have done for 6 years. And I went from 245 pounds to 199. That’s with two surgeries in there. Yeah, I was in a bad place and I got to a better place and it didn’t happen overnight; I’ve been doing this for 6 years now I guess. And you look up and you go, “Oh, but big change did happen.” It just happens slower than people think in the beginning and then faster at the end.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there’s so much good stuff to dig into here, so I’ve got to prioritize myself.

Jay Papasan
I know, I have so much I want to share.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, let’s hear that question one more time.

Jay Papasan
Sure, it’s at the heart of the book. We call it the “focusing question”. What’s the one thing I can do, such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jay Papasan
And to break it down, it’s what’s the one thing – not two or three – you’re asking your mind to come up on the singular best thing that you can do, not that you could, should or would. And we have one of my favorite poems in the margins of the book: “All the would’ve, could’ve, should’ves all ran away and hid from one little did.”
Because on any journey, just start with what you can already do, and get the feedback cycle going. That one tooth, or one push up, or one mile. Start with that and then build on that, such that by doing it just says that it’s got to have some Pareto’s Law in there, it’s got to have some leverage. If you knock over one thing, it’s got to have multiple impacts on the other side and the scale of that leverage is, everything else gets easier or unnecessary. It’s a very specific question and we find it it gives people very specific answers. And while they may not be perfect, if they start doing that thing, they’ll quickly get to the right solution.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, and so when you say “the one thing”, you sort of mean within a domain, like the one thing within marriage, within fitness, within my career.

Jay Papasan
That’s correct. It’s ostensibly a business book, right? So most of the book we’re writing about what’s the one thing for your career – if you’re a programmer, you need to program; if you’re a writer, you need to be writing; if you’re a violinist, you need to be practicing. There’s usually one activity that if you studied people who have truly reaped extraordinary results, whether they were conscious or not conscious, they put in the time on that thing, and that’s what made them extraordinary. So that was the fundamental thing. And companies tend to have one thing. People look at Google now, it’s called the alphabet, it’s got so many different businesses. But what’s the foundation of it all?

Pete Mockaitis
Search and AdWords.

Jay Papasan
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s an and, that’s an and.

Jay Papasan
Yeah, I know. But the and only happens if the first one happens. If the search had sucked, they would’ve had no ad revenue. And with no ad revenue, they couldn’t have driverless cars and everything else they’re doing. So, you really look under the hood and with rare exceptions… Like the one big one that comes to mind is Microsoft. Without the operating system, could they have done Office? I don’t know, but their revenue was almost 50/50 for years on those products. But I do think that if they hadn’t started with the operating system they would’ve never had the chance to have a monopoly on the Office.
But you can start seeing how great businesses – not average ones, great businesses – tend to have one thing, a tip of the spear that makes everything possible. And if you can realize that about your business or your career, you can give that thing disproportionate focus and give yourself disproportionate chances to succeed.
Now, outside of that, I absolutely… We have a whole page dedicated to it – page 114 – it’s the only page I have memorized, like the 7 big areas of your life where you would take this philosophy. I don’t think that asking, “What’s the one movie I can watch on Netflix tonight?”… That’s trivial. I’m OCD, I can go there and not be completely out of my mind, but for the average person that’s a waste.
But for your health, for your spiritual life, for your personal life, for your key relationships, for your job, your business, your finances – those are all big, big buckets in our lives and I would hope if we want to have an extraordinary life we would want to have those things operating at a pretty high level. We usually teach people to just do one at a time, but in the course of one year, you could knock out five or six new habits.
Right, 66-day challenge – I think it’s five, mathematically. You can knock out five of those areas and build a really powerful habit that would serve you for the rest of your life. And so I do think that’s the super human trick you see the Tim Ferrisses doing – they build things into ritual and to habit, and then when they got one thing down they add another and another. And we look out three or four years later and we think, “Oh my gosh, that person’s special.” Well, they look special now, but they just built on what most people had. Maybe a few extraordinary things tacked on, but the package is the combination of all those things stacked on each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well so, I’m curious… I want to talk about so many potential “one things”. So let’s just zoom in on maybe some potential common issues for folks in their careers. And let’s say a common challenge is, “Oh my gosh, I feel a sense of stress, overwhelm, too many inputs and things coming at me all at once that I got to deal with.” In your experience working with folks, what is, or maybe a couple one things you’ve seen pop up for folks in that milieu that they were able to ritualize, habitualize and rock and roll?

Jay Papasan
One of the first things we try to teach people to do is take their to-do list and bring priority to it. The reality of most people’s to-do list, and the vast majority of workers use some form of a to-do list, whether it’s an app or whatever, it’s basically a long list of things that they know they need to do. Because life is busy and they have to have that David Allen bucket, a trusted bucket to remember all that stuff with, right? And you have task lists and all that.
But we just say take 3 minutes, and then of all the things that you could do, identify the handful that really need to get done this week or that day. I usually look at my week, my month – those are separate little sessions. What do I have to get done this month to be on track for my year? What do I have to get done this week to be on track with my month? What do I have to get done today to be on track for my week?
But you look at that long list and you say, “Well, if I can only get one thing done to be on track for my week, to be on track for my month, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what’s that going to be?” Usually you know what it is. And so that just becomes your number one. Well great, if I knock that sucker out, and I can do two things, what’s the next thing? And that becomes number 2. And when you give people 3 to 5 minutes – you don’t want them to overthink it – and just kind of go with their instinct and what they kind of know, most people will take a list that’s like two pages long down to four or five things that are clearly prioritized.
And that simple act of identifying your priorities on a daily basis… And there’s all kinds of journals that help people do this now. The 5-minute journal. There’s lots of people who are on the same track, but that simple habit right there – boom! When everybody else is still on Facebook, you spend 3 minutes figuring out what really matters for you, and you’re going to tackle that between all the distractions and meetings so that you know that those things get done. That would be massive for most people.
And the other big thing is, how do I get more control of my time? ‘Cause you said the word “career”. This is not business owners, right? These are people who work for other people. And I’m a manager – I screw people up all the time, because I’m empowered to walk by them and give them new assignments, right? And so I think another tactic that you can help people with is, they’ve identified their one thing. I would then encourage them to set an appointment with themselves to do it, literally block off their calendar. Their co-workers will go, “Oh, I wanted to set up a meeting with you between 9:00 and 11:00 but you’re busy. Can you do something for me?” It’s like, “I’m sorry, I already have another commitment.”
Nobody needs to know that that appointment isn’t with another human being. If you have to go to an unused warehouse or the conference room in your building and hide – go do it, if that’s where you have to go to do your work. But first and foremost, time-block it.
There’s some research that we added to the book, I don’t know which edition people have. But it was published in the British Journal of Health Psychology – they tried to get people to do 20 minutes of exercise a day. And I’m going to do the speed version, but they just told people to do it, and for two weeks about 35% of those people did it. They gave another group motivation. They said, “If you do 20 minutes of exercise, you’ll have better heart health, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” – and again 35%-38% did that. They had a third group. They gave them the same motivational pamphlet, but then they asked them to do one additional thing – they had to make a written commitment, “On these days, at this time, at this place I will exercise for 20 minutes.” They had to write down when and where they were going to do the activity. And those people were 91% successful.

Pete Mockaitis
Hot dog!

Jay Papasan
Yeah, thank you. Hot dog, indeed. Right? So you get it – that’s just a calendar invite. They had to actually navigate, “Yeah, I want to do that.” “Great, when?” That simple act of thinking it through made you three times more likely to do it. And the bonus here is, now when your boss says, “Hey, I need you in my office”, you say, “I’m sorry, I’ve already got another meeting. Do I need to cancel it?”
Most bosses would say, “No, no, I’ll catch you on the other side. When are you coming at?” “11.” “Great, I’ll see you then.” They want to dump things, but they don’t necessarily have to have it done now; they just want to know when it’s going to happen. So giving people the empowerment to say, “Awesome! I’m happy to take care of this for you, boss. When do you need it? Will next Tuesday do?” That’s my standard answer. “How about next Tuesday?” And the assumption is, if you ask them, “Do you want it done right now?” They’ll always say, “Right now”.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, I’d love that.

Jay Papasan
But you can say “No” now, “Yes” later, is effectively what we’re saying. So you time-block it then you have to do a little protecting of that time. And then for your average career person, entry-level employee, they’re trying to make some “Hey” in their career, they can buy themselves a couple of hours of freedom, so that 5 days a week they put in a couple or three hours maybe; maybe it’s just an hour or maybe it’s just 30 minutes, but they’re going to be doing those essentials that will slowly make them essential. That’s how people end up standing out; that’s why people are given executive assistants – the company recognizes they’re so good at that thing that they don’t want them doing the other stuff, and they pay a whole other human being to do that stuff for them. So it’s been around but people just don’t recognize it for what it is.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that so much. So, with regard to scheduling that time, and I’m thinking in particular about this notion of identifying the priorities – 1, 2, 3 for the day, etcetera – that’s come up many times in the fast faves as habits from guests. So would your proposal be that you determine a regular occurring time and place to do that – maybe in the morning – or any pro tips, best practices for when and where work optimally?

Jay Papasan
Yeah, and a lot of your young listeners may want to fight this. And I just tell them, “If you’re fighting this, what I’m about to say, you maybe are going for average. But if you really go out and study…” And we spent five years studying successful artists, entrepreneurs, athletes – they understood something that we explain in the science, that if you really want to do something and you want to do it every day, the best time to do it is early in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jay Papasan
And I know, I’ve got young people in my life and they don’t love the idea of getting up at the crack of dawn. But you listen to, you read the biographies, and with rare exceptions there’s something magic that happens in the morning. You have the ability to focus; far more ability than you do later in the day. There’s less noise in your life, and you then have the ability to add rituals when there’s no interference.
So, I usually encourage people if they really want to make a big leap in their life, maybe start doing that hour of core activities before they even get to work. Now, if you really want it to happen, now their boss can’t even tell them not to do it. They can’t have anyone else interfering with them ’cause they’re not even at work yet.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Jay Papasan
Right? And you read and you listen to Tim Ferriss and you listen to some of these guys and they interviewed these people and you hear they have some pretty serious rituals in the morning – they’re reading, they’re meditating, they’re exercising. They’re getting some really core,important stuff done and they’re having a great day before 8:00 a.m.
So, I learned this from Gretchen Rubin, ’cause I’ve been on this morning thing for a while, and I’m a writer – I would love to stay up to 2 a.m. every night, binge-watching shows and being creative. But I know now that as a career writer who’s now written 11 books, sold over 2.5 million copies, that the idea of being creative and actually putting out product are very different things.

When I started writing and treating it like a job and doing it in the morning, is when the books started coming up. And so she said… Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before – great book, absolutely buys into this, and she gave me an amazing cheat – if you really struggle to wake up early in the morning, but you want that extra hour, I can’t remember the date, but we’re like a month away from when we fall back on daylight savings time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jay Papasan
So, instead of grabbing an extra hour of snooze time, just keep getting up at the exact same time but it’ll be an hour earlier than the rest of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Brilliant.

Jay Papasan
So, with zero baggage, you can go from an 8:00 a.m. wake up time to effectively 7:00 a.m., without any change in your physical habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and the light will feel just the same, and all that.

Jay Papasan
But now you’ve bought yourself an hour to write that novel that you’ve always meant to write, or to get that exercise in that you’re not finding the time to do, or whatever that one thing is for your work, your health or whatever – you’ve now bought yourself an hour, this runway before the rest of the world usually is awake or interfering. There’s nothing on Facebook, there’s nothing on TV; this is just you time. And it tends to be very peaceful and you can get a lot done.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. Alright, so I guess I want to hear a little bit now, in terms of, you’ve got your systems and your 66 days. Does anything sort of change over the course of those 66 days, or is it really just kind of the same thing, like, “Hey, that thing you did yesterday – do that again.” Or is there any kind of nuances or phases there?

Jay Papasan
The answer is yes and no. You’re doing the same thing but you’re not the same person doing it. I actually think that most extraordinary success is really boring repetition. That’s been my experience, is that you’re doing the hard work most people are unwilling to do on a daily basis. It’s not that exciting, it’s not like they make it out in the movies; you’re just putting in the hours. And over time you’re getting, you’re growing a mastery – the old 10,000 hour rule – I wrote about that in the book too. But you get better and better and better, and your output gets more and more powerful, often doing the same things.
There’s a fabulous classic book on mastery by a guy named George Leonard, I believe is his name, and it’s called Mastery. And it was about his journey in becoming a black belt in Judo. And his fascination was that 5 years later he’s doing exactly the same exercises, but because he’s done them so many times, the nuances of his wrist and where his fingers are and all of that, he was so aware of it and it was actually more interesting.
So I think success, you’ll get bored in the beginning, like, “Oh my gosh, I have to go for another run. Oh my gosh, I have to write another chapter. Oh my gosh.” Right? But then at a certain point on the other side, there’s this tailwind that kicks in when you start to appreciate the nuances of what you’re doing.
There’s been a lot of research on expert performance with swimmers, and they talk about feeling the water between their fingers, like the subtle position of their hand. Everybody else is just swimming the back stroke, but because they’ve done it longer – the same activity – they’re focused on the nuances, the little tiny 1% edges that make the difference in sports that are measured in thousandths of a second, right? Most success is kind of repetitive; it’s going to be a little boring before it doesn’t get boring.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. That’s good words. I think we have so much more to say, but I know what our calendars hold, so you tell me – is there anything else you want to make sure you put out there before we shift gears and hear quickly about some of your favorite things?

Jay Papasan
I think that we hit some of the real essentials. I know that you had wanted to talk maybe a little bit about multi-tasking. I think that that’s a temptation for people to think that they can do multiple things at once. I do think you can have multiple things going on in your life, but one of the fundamental truths that we did find in the research is that you’re only going to effectively do one thing at a time.
I do find a lot of people want to fight that, they want to be doing their thing with their second screen open on Twitter, they want to be texting friends in between. But if you identify that one thing that really matters, I don’t care if you multi-task the rest of your day, but for that little period of time that you’re trying to make this big investment in your career or your life, I would encourage people to not multi-task during that time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I will trust in that. I’ve heard good data that say more things in support of that, and that often it is just like a dopamine deception, like you think you’re good at multitasking just ’cause it feels good to switch tasks a lot, but you’re kind of not actually putting out as much great output.

Jay Papasan
No, it literally lowers your IQ by 6 or 7 points. People who are stoned on average will have a higher IQ than people who are multi-tasking. So it doesn’t really benefit your work, but I do think that we do fool ourselves. I think the poet laureate called it “monkey mind”. We think that we’re doing better, but we’re just kind of driving ourselves bananas.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well, that’s a nice note there. So how about you kick us off by sharing a favorite quote?

Jay Papasan
Oh gosh. My favorite quote is going to be Reed Hastings. He just said, “As a business, I would rather be selling aspirin than vitamins.” And for whatever reason that just stuck with me. And the idea that the things that matter most… We’re going to behavior change. This is what a lot of our book… If you’re going to change your behavior to do your one thing, I think it helps us to identify not just the benefits of doing it, but the pain that we’re preventing.
Because if you have a headache, you’re going to take some aspirin. But vitamins – there’s no feedback loop on that. The headache doesn’t go away because you take vitamins. Vitamins we take on faith. So I love that quote – it reminds me as a business person, and it also reminds me when I’m thinking about what I want to do with my life, I often will ask an additional question – what’s the cost if I fail? And that usually will get me to the emotional center of why I want to take on a challenge. And if there is no emotional response, it might not be the right thing for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Okay. And how about a favorite study or a piece of research?

Jay Papasan
I’m just going to say… Oh gosh, the multi-tasking research, I spent so much time with that guy, but I’m going to go to Ericsson. And he’s the guy who did most of the research on expert performance and the 10,000-hour rule. So I would say if you haven’t dove into that idea, of the 10,000-hour rule – it’s pretty accessible, there’s a lot of books on it. But if something’s really important and you really want to be extraordinary, understanding what it takes, knowing the commitment upfront is a really important thing. So I love Ericsson’s research; pretty awesome stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit of yours? You’ve explored habits so much; is there a top one that you’d say has been the biggest difference-maker or game-changer?

Jay Papasan
The health habit. I think I had back surgery and then rotator cuff surgery. I think I shared I ballooned up to 245 pounds. And the series of habits I followed… Usually with a coach’s help. I’ve got a friend tell me about portion control, then I started doing 10,000 steps ’cause I wasn’t physically able to work out.
And I did a series of habits that led me to working out with my wife, and that one has stuck. Where the other ones have come and gone or I’ve gotten better but it didn’t stick exactly, we still 3 days a week have a trainer show up at 5:30. And recently our 12-year old son started setting his alarm to work out with us. And there’re so many things that came into alignment.
I’m not trying to be that dude with the 6-pack abs; I just want to be healthy, and I want to feel good and I don’t want to be overweight. But that became kind of an anchor habit. And doing it with my wife and now my son, it’s actually become one of the more important times that we spend together. Doing burpees at 5:30 in the morning is pretty raw. So it’s kind of like, we’re going through our own little personal bootcamp; and it’s been very bonding and it’s made us closer.

So, if I had to pick one habit that I had zero regrets, that was really hard to do. I’m not a morning person. In the beginning we did it at 5:00 a.m, not even 5:30, ’cause that was when we could do it. I knew we could do it every day, and you know what? It just stuck, and I just don’t see us ever dropping that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. And would you say there is a particular nugget that when you speak it, it’s highlighted a lot in the Kindle versions of your books, an articulation of your message that really seems to jive with people?

Jay Papasan
Probably the most Instagramed quote in the book is the Josh Billings quote early in the book. “Be like a postage stamp – stick to one thing till you get there.” And it just kind of makes people chuckle. The other one’s Will Rogers, “Even if you’re on the right road, you’ll just get run over if you sit there.” And it’s the idea of, figure out where you want to go and just start making progress. You said quote in the book; those are the first two that came to mind, ’cause I tend to see them hashtagged “the ONE thing”, all over Twitter, and I see them underlined in the book quite a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what would you say is the best way to get in touch with you if folks want to learn more or check out your stuff, where would you point them?

Jay Papasan
Definitely check out The1Thing.com, with the number 1. We’ve got a 66-day calendar there that you can download, stick it on your wall and just kind of do your own challenge. And I’ve done them. We’re trying to do a whole group in our company to do one towards the end of the year, where they pick one stress relieving habit. And we just had a little conference call earlier today, getting people’s suggestions.
It’s like, pick your habit and see if going into the Christmas season, when we can all kind of get strung out pretty bad, can we go into it with a habit that will protect us? Right? So I love that, and checking out the resources. And my name, Papasan, I’m actually the guy behind my social media accounts. It’s pretty easy to Google. So just Google it, reach out, send me a Facebook message if you’ve got a question and if I can help you. That’s why we write the books; I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Jay, this has been so much fun. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your wisdom. It’s been a blast, and I wish you all the best!

Jay Papasan
Thank you so much for having me, man!