Finding Your ONE Thing: How to Align Your Life with a Purpose Greater Than Yourself
This is not a summary, by the way.
To give your life a productive boost, you need to choose something bigger than yourself, something that will guide you regardless of how you feel.
In the book The ONE Thing, the author proposes that you should select one central focus that guides you on multiple levels.
From the big picture to the most mundane behaviors, you should be aware of your purpose. Here’s a big secret: life does not have an inherent meaning; it’s up to you to decide what yours will be.
We can logically derive a set of behaviors that make more sense than others.
For instance, giving your life to drugs, clubs, games, social media, and pornography addiction, without achieving anything, is easier than dedicating your life to a sport and becoming a top-tier athlete.
There is a reason for this.
The capacity that distinguishes humans from other animals is our ability to deny simple pleasure-seeking habits. You might crave sugar, but you have the capacity to resist that desire to achieve a better physique.
A dog cannot do that.
Therefore, being human is more sophisticated and complex than simply acting on animal instincts. Denying a simple pleasure is challenging, but it can lead to significant achievements in life.
Imagine if, for five years, you adhered to a strict diet and followed a rigorous training regimen. You could transform yourself into a completely different person. There is no question about that.
Of course we are still sinners by design. You will have to have sex, to eat fast-food with your wife eventually, and spend a whole night playing games with your friends.
But those are not your primary goals; they are merely necessary and healthy aspects of life.
Selecting the one thing that guides your behavior can help with discernment.
When someone chooses to go to a club instead of going to bed early, it aligns with their internal beliefs, even if they are not consciously aware of it.
Their environment pushes them in that direction. Maybe they don’t value the club or the drinking, but they do value what their friends will think of them if they turn down the invitation.
Maybe he has a persona that he built and wants to keep it for certain reasons.
Maybe his self-identity is based in that environment, in that group of people, and he will feel shattered leaving it all behind. Maybe you identify with that somehow.
Here’s another secret: you can leave your current environment and build a new one. A healthier, one-thing-focused group of friends.
Relationships are built on the exchange of value, and working on yourself is about creating value that you can offer to others. As you improve yourself, new people who align with your values will naturally come into your life.
Pick your one thing and follow it rigorously, and new people will appear in your life. We are social creatures, and I don’t believe in complete isolation for the sake of a goal.
I’ve decided that my one thing is to be an entrepreneur (please comment if you want to know the reasons), and I follow this routine:
Read for one hour a day in the afternoon.
Write until I finish my daily goal in the evening (my one thing).
Handle necessary tasks like posting on Instagram and YouTube at night.
And that’s it. Nothing else. These behaviors are based on my one thing: being an entrepreneur.
I have other responsibilities that I handle in the morning, but they are not related to my main goal, so I don’t spend my mental energy on them.
If I can’t read on a given day for some unavoidable reason, that’s fine. My one thing only demands writing. It’s the activity I cannot allow life to take away from me. It is the action that will lead me to where I need to be—or rather, where I have decided I need to be.
To make it clear
