Choosing Your One Thing

 

I lost eighteen pounds in a month and a half.

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I didn’t exercise harder or longer than usual. I didn’t read a new diet book supported by evidence and filled with rules and recipes. I didn’t go to a trainer.

I’ve done all those things in the past, and some of them worked, but none of them lasted. They were too complicated or too expensive or too cumbersome to continue.

So I made a different decision this time. A much simpler one.

First, a little background on losing weight. Every new diet book explains why it’s better than all the previous ones. This new plan, the author claims with enthusiasm, holds the key to losing weight and keeping it off forever. It will succeed where the others have failed.

So we decrease our fat consumption. Or increase it. We eat more protein. Or less. We raise our intake of carbohydrates. Or reduce it. And the question lingers: Which is the best diet to lose weight?

Well, we now have the answer. A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine put 811 overweight adults through four different diets, each one a different proportion of fat, carbohydrates, and protein.

The result? On average, participants lost twelve pounds after six months and kept nine pounds off after two years. No matter which diet they followed.

Certainly, some diets are healthier than others. But in terms of losing weight? No diet was better than any other. Because all diets work through a single mechanism—they restrict your calorie intake. People lose weight when they eat less.

If that’s true, then the best diet is the simplest one. So I asked myself: What’s the one thing I can change that will make the biggest difference in my calorie consumption? Everyone has one thing.

Mine was sugar. Sometimes I would eat three bowls of ice cream in a day. If I changed that, everything else would work itself out. Cutting out sugar was the one thing that would give me the highest return.

So I stopped eating it. No more cookies, candy, cake, ice cream. That’s the only change I consciously made. I sidestepped millions of complex little decisions that most diets require—counting, weighing, choosing, deciding. No phases, no recipes, no thinking.

Each person’s one thing could be different. For some, it might be fried foods. For others, meat. For others still, soft drinks. What’s important is to keep it simple.

The implications of this are huge, not just for diets but for all behavior change. After all, what else is a diet but behavior change?

Typically, people overwhelm themselves with tasks in their eagerness to make a change successfully. But that’s a mistake. Instead, they should take the time up front to figure out the one and only thing that will have the highest impact and then focus 100 percent of their effort on that one thing.

You’ve just finished this book and no doubt have lots of great ideas about what you could do differently. Over time you can implement many of them. Maybe you already have. If you’re having difficulty starting, though, choose your one thing—the one thing that will make the biggest impact.

Maybe it’s structuring your to-do list around your annual focus. Maybe it’s stopping multitasking. Or maybe, it’s pausing every hour to take a deep breath and refocus.

Choose the one thing that you think—given your particular situation—will make the biggest difference in your life. Choose it and do it.

After that, you can begin to incorporate more aspects of the plan. In fact, they’ll probably start to incorporate themselves.

Once I stopped eating sugar, I began to do other things—like exercise more routinely and eat more vegetables and less fat. I didn’t force myself to do those things. They just seemed to happen once I started avoiding sugar.

A few years ago, a Fortune 100 client asked me to design a new leadership training program. They already had one and had spent several years training people in it, but now they wanted a new one. Why? Because the current one wasn’t having the impact they wanted.

I asked to see the old one. Honestly? While I’d love to say my leadership ideas are far superior, I thought the ones they were using were equally good. Leadership models are no different from diets—most of them are just fine. The brilliance is rarely in the model; it’s in the implementation.

Don’t start from scratch, I pleaded with them. You’ve already spent years spreading the word, inculcating the language, and socializing the concepts of the old leadership methodology. People are familiar with it. Don’t get rid of it.

Just simplify it. Reduce it to its essence. What’s the one thing that will have the greatest impact on your leadership?

After some thought, they concluded that if managers communicated more with their employees, it would solve the majority of their issues. Great, I suggested, focus all your efforts on that. Let everything else go.

Brandon, a friend of mine, called me, disheartened, after his business didn’t work out. He decided to take a few months off before starting his next venture, and we discussed how he should spend his time. It turns out that Brandon is dyslexic and has always had difficulty reading.

We agreed he should do one thing in his time off: Read every day. That’s unusual advice from me. Usually, I tell people to forget about their weaknesses and focus on their strengths. But in Brandon’s case the dividend will be huge. If he can tackle reading, not only will it open doors for him, but he’ll also conquer the one thing he thought he couldn’t do. That confidence will change everything else in his life.

If you’re going to work on a weakness, always choose a single, high-leverage one.

A large retail chain with stores all over the world developed ten “Gold” behaviors they wanted all sales associates to exhibit. Things like greet each customer, ask customers if they want an accessory at the point of sale, measure customers for a good fit, and thank each customer for shopping at the store. Stores in which sales associates exhibited all ten behaviors saw a substantial increase in sales.

After some time, the corporate office sent in mystery shoppers to see how the sales associates were doing. Management was pleased: On average, the associates were displaying nine of the ten behaviors.

I asked the project lead if they had seen a change in sales as a result of this 90 percent success rate. After a short inspection of the data, it turned out they hadn’t.

So we looked to see if the associates were each missing different behaviors or if they were avoiding a specific one of the ten. As we suspected, they were all skipping the same behavior: measuring customers for a good fit. Which means the other nine behaviors—the ones they were already performing—were immaterial since they didn’t impact sales.

“You don’t have ten Gold behaviors,” I told the project lead, “you have one. Measuring customers for a good fit is your one thing.” That was the one thing the salespeople could do differently to make more sales. We instructed the sales associates to focus solely on doing that one thing. Sales shot up.

Choose the one thing you’ve read from this book that will make the most difference in your life and do it. No matter what. Then, naturally, you will start to incorporate others. And, with time, you’ll find that your life moves in a purposeful direction.

Because the moments add up to days, the days add up to years, and the years add up to your life. Making sure that your days and moments are guided by what you want to accomplish with your years means each moment will reflect the life you choose to live. So you’ll know you’re getting the right things done.

It all starts with your one thing.