The ONE Thing, with Jay Papasan – Episode 82 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Author, speaker, and executive Jay Papasan explains a few of the biggest lies about productivity, defines “switch-tasking”, and dives into the science of discipline, LITERALLY feeding willpower, and the demonization of open floorplans.

About Jay:

Jay Papasan [Pap-uh-zan] is a bestselling author who serves as the Vice President of Strategic Content for Keller Williams Realty International, the world’s largest real estate company.

He also cofounded KellerINK and Produktive with Gary Keller, and is a principal owner, with his wife Wendy, of Papasan Properties Group in Austin, Texas.

Jay was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. After attending the University of Memphis, he spent several years working in Paris. He later graduated from New York University’s graduate writing program and began a publishing career that led him to HarperCollins Publishers. There, he helped piece together bestselling books such as Body-for-Life by Bill Phillips and Go for the Goal by Mia Hamm.

After moving to Austin, Jay joined Keller Williams Realty International, and in 2003 he co-authored The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, a million-copy bestseller, alongside Gary Keller and Dave Jenks. He also coauthored the bestsellers The Millionaire Real Estate Investor and SHIFT.

His most recent work with Gary Keller on The ONE Thing has sold over 3 million copies and has been translated into 41 different languages worldwide. The ONE Thing garnered more than 500 appearances on national bestseller lists, including #1 on The Wall Street Journal’s hardcover business list.

Jay resides in Austin, TX, with his wife, Wendy, their children, Gus and Edward and their dog Taco.

Learn more at JayPapasan.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
Jay Papasan is at Keller Inc, which is the publishing arm of Keller Williams Realty. And getting a chance to talk with Jay is excited because Jay is also Gary Keller’s, co author. And they’ve written several best selling books, including The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, which was a New York Times bestseller. And then the one thing and the one thing was a number one, or is a number one Wall Street Journal, business best seller, Jay is the co author. He’s here with us now he is one of the most powerful people in real estate and just an awesome, awesome guy. So Jay, thanks for being here.

Jay Papasan
Thanks for having me.

Host
So if people haven’t heard of the one thing, can you like? What is the main premise kind of overall concept in a nutshell?

Jay Papasan
We wanted to explore, you know how people get extraordinary results. Not average, but extraordinary. What’s an approach that we can take for that? And for us, it was about focus, but we tried to come at it from a new angle. How do you identify the one thing, right? What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else is easier or unnecessary? What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary? You’re looking for the biggest lever in July, to achieve your goals. And we wanted to help people identify that and then implement that day.

Host
In the one thing, Jay, you know, kind of the opening part of the book, you talk about the lies of productivity.

Jay Papasan
Before we talk about what we want you to do, we often say what do we have to get out of your head. And in this book, we call do the lies. And the first lie, which we felt like was the number one was this idea that everything matters equally. And I actually don’t think people argue that or express it, in fact that way, and it’s because our to do list or to fool, our calendars are kind of overflowing. I’ve had moments in my life where I was literally mapping out my days in 15 minute increments. And there are a lot of people who feel that way, we have a lot of opportunity to do stuff. And we’ve have a lot of obligation. And I kind of compare the way we operate. With so many things kind of stressing us out the need to do them all, to like being a character in the BR movie that runs up the stairs, instead of out the front door, we make really bad decisions to spend our time. And so the antidote to that that first line was essentially, you know, we want you to launch your day by identifying the things that you could do, and then identify the handful that you really should do, and then prioritize them for one to whatever. And that’s line number one, the second why people have a lot, they’re looking at all the things they might have to do. The other thing, they’re really tempted in this day and age to do with multitasking. And we make a strong argument that multitasking is a lie. And the big crux there is that, in reality, when we think we’re multitasking, researchers call it switch tasking. If they call anything in their research or multitasking, it’s just in the headlines so they can get it in print. But they call it switch tasking, because what actually happens is, we’re doing our work. And then we decide to switch. And that’s instantaneous. It’s like squirrel. Oh, we’re off to the next thing. The thing that they realize challenged us is when you switch tasks your brain has to reorient to the new role for the game. And there’s a lag. If you’ve ever been like writing a really complex email, and maybe your spouse walks in and starts talking to you, you know, they’re talking to you. You can hear words in the air, but you actually don’t comprehend them. And you say, Oh, I’m sorry, what were you saying? You repeat that? That’s that lag time. And every time we switch between screens, you know, stopping our emails to pick up a phone call, we experienced this lag time. And researchers believe about a quarter of our day 28% is lost to this and we’re not even aware of it. It’s a huge loss. I mean, as an employer, I look, wow, I have five employees when I might need four. If they were all just being efficient with your time. There’s just tons of research out there that the funny one that always kind of, you know, people say this is making me smarter or whatever, you know, I can do all these things. There’s a guy in the College of New London, and he did research into IQ test. And he compared the results of people who were focusing even compared the results of people who were having to multitask. They had to juggle emails and phone calls. Well, they took an IQ test and very hilariously, He compared them to people who were stoned. You know, nobody was surprised that on average, the people who were focused scored 11 points higher than the other two groups, they were shocked that the people who were stoned, on average scored six IQ points higher than the people who are multitasking. So I could go through six ways, we don’t need to go there. It costs you time, it makes you dumb, and you’re just less effective. So we really tried to get people, if not stop multitasking all the time. When you’re doing your main thing, you’re one thing, at least that multitasking, then, if I was actually more focused, when I was at work, that I have more time with my family, I think there’s a real human cost that I think about, and it makes me a little bit sad, you know, the economic cost is one thing, but what’s the cost to my family if I’m working late every day, just because I’m not being as effective as I could be. So the next few slides are just little after July. And then willpower is always on, we’ll call the why. And what we tried to break out two things, discipline, one of the meanings for it, is training yourself to do something until it’s so that you will, when I was giving my welding talk in Nashville, a guy showed up an hour and 15 minutes early, and I went up to him and I said, Oh, wow, you win the early bird award, you know, are you with the team? And he has no, but I’m just here. I’m always early, it’s a habit. I knew that habit word. And I’m like, Dude, you know, tell me more. And it turns out that he had done a Greenbrae. He did, I was nervous for almost two decades. But he’s been in it for 15 years. And he said, I was trying to show up early and observe. And I just can’t shake the habit. Everywhere we go, we’re early, we’re early to dinner to the movies, it drives my wife crazy. And I love that because it’s a perfect illustration that in our sense, and when we were building our construct, we really wanted to hit on this idea that being disciplined all the time, which we go into and willpower, there is some science about how you there is an ebb and flow to your we often call this one that I’m going to call willpower. But this other definition is, if you know what your one thing is, the very next thing you would want to do is make a habit. Because if that became habitual, you work to build the habit, and then the habit would work for you. And kind of the big aha we had here was that when we looked at the research, like how long does it actually take to form a habit, most people conventionally believe it takes either 21 or 30 days. But the most recent research we found, they had asked, I think over 200 graduate students to take on a new health habit, anything from drinking a glass of water to quitting smoking, whatever they wanted. And for a year, they followed them around and said, Did you do it? Yes or no? And how hard was it every single day. And what they discovered is that on average, around 66 days is when it got as easy as it was ever going to get. So it takes us about three times as long as most people think to form a habit, even on average, we want to at least keep our foot on that pedal right for that long. And so that was the discipline thing.

Host
So clarify the willpower part. So then what’s what what’s the distinction? What would you call willpower?

Jay Papasan
So we dove into the science of you know, how we say yes to what we need to do, and how we say no to everything else. But the researchers, the scientists, right, the guys in the lab coats, we’re calling it willpower. And they define that as the power to say yes to what you need to do, if I’m on a diet, I mean, you know, carrot sticks and hummus and no to everything else, so no nachos for me. And both of those they measure it literally take energy out of your system. And kind of shockingly, your brain is 1/50 of your body mass, and it takes up 1/5 of all of the energy you consume. It’s the hungriest organ in your body after the liver. And so literally, if you make a decision, you know, I am wearing black shoes today in a black tie that little tiny decision, they can measure the glucose in your bloodstream will drop. But there’s things that require a lot more power, like I’m going to focus on this task, I’m not going to go play on Twitter, I’m going to focus on my work, I’m not going to go hang out by the coffee machine, saying no to those temptations or saying yes actually uses a lot of energy. And that was our big aha Is that what you’re calling discipline in what we’re calling willpower is actually really fragile. It’s a lot more like the battery on an old phone, it’s always going to zero and it’s plugged in all the time. So for us our big highs you tend to have the most in the morning. That’s what it’s always highest. And you can replenish it by eating properly. So we tell you give willpower the time of day and feed it. It’s not that you’re you know, willpower is hungry. I think about kids, right? You have a kid a young child, what is the mom do for a young child every day around three o’clock. At snack that’s like an essential thing that come up from school. The first thing they do when they outgrow the nap, they get both when they hit certain age, they get a snack. They’ve used up all of their discipline at school sitting in their chair straight walking in line waiting. And so we tell you make it a habit in the morning, right you’re one thing do it in the morning and you naturally have the willpower to say yes to it. And then throughout the day if you’ve looked in my office, I’ve got power bars, I’ve got nuts. I’ve got foods that are high in protein and complex carbohydrates to get I want my brain out have all that discipline or willpower it needs throughout the day. And those tend to feed your bloodstream for long periods of time versus just slacking it sugar, that we wanted to talk about making things a habit and managing that discipline willpower thing throughout the day itself. I’ve kind of observed, like, you know, open floor plans have been kind of all the rage. And they’ve looked at some of these and I do foster more creativity, but they haven’t necessarily fostered more productivity. And my theory, and it’s not been mentioned yet is, if I’m in an open office, and I’m in an environment full of distractions, I’m using a lot of my willpower to focus on the task at hand. And you know, we have noise cancelling headsets in our office, in the cubes, people literally put up like shower curtains and they do all kinds of things to try to get more focused so that they have to the distractions take less of a toll. But I do think that, you know, an environment is one of the things that I became aware of is your environment, support your work and your focus? Because that can say no to all that stuff can be really tough.

Host
So how do I know what my one thing is? And I know that kind of comes back to the premise that we started with, but do you have any, like practical ideas for how to find the thing that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or or not necessary?

Jay Papasan
On the simplest level, we want people to put down the book and ask that question, what’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier, unnecessary. And for a fair number of people, they kind of know what it is, and they feel guilty for not doing it. They just haven’t been told that you know what, you’re smart enough to know your own answers. For those that are still struggling. And I find especially a lot of younger people. Maybe people go through transition. It’s the idea of thinking, what’s my big reason for being here? And then you work backwards to and what do I need to be doing right now?

Host
I love it. Well, Jay, thank you for making the time here. Thank you so much, Jay, for being here.

Jay Papasan
Thanks.