The One Thing Part 3

BIG IDEAS.

Don't spread your willpower too thin. On any given day, you have a limited supply of willpower, so decide what matters and reserve your willpower for it.

Monitor your fuel gauge. Full-strength willpower requires a full tank. Never let what matters most be compromised simply because your brain was under-fueled. Eat right and regularly.

Time your task. Do what matters most first each day when your willpower is strongest. Maximum strength willpower means maximum success.

Don't fight your willpower. Build your days around how it works and let it do its part to build your life. Willpower may not be on willcall, but when you use it first on what matters most, you can always count on it.

8 A BALANCED LIFE.

"The truth is, balance is bunk. It is an unattainable pipe dream... . The quest for balance between work and life, as we've come to think of it, isn't just a losing proposition; it's a hurtful, destructive one."

-Keith H. Hammonds Nothing ever achieves absolute balance. Nothing. No matter how imperceptible it might be, what appears to be a state of balance is something entirely different- an act of balancing. Viewed wistfully as a noun, balance is lived practically as a verb. Seen as something we ultimately attain, balance is actually something we constantly do. A "balanced life" is a myth-a misleading concept most accept as a worthy and attainable goal without ever stopping to truly consider it. I want you to consider it. I want you to challenge it. I want you to reject it.

A balanced life is a lie.

The idea of balance is exactly that-an idea. In philosophy "the golden mean" is the moderate middle between polar extremes, a concept used to describe a place between two positions that is more desirable than one state or the other. This is a grand idea, but not a very practical one. Idealistic, but not realistic. Balance doesn't exist.

This is tough to conceive, much less believe, mainly because one of the most frequent laments is "I need more balance," a common mantra for what's missing in most lives. We hear about balance so much we automatically a.s.sume it's exactly what we should be seeking. It's not. Purpose, meaning, significance-these are what make a successful life. Seek them and you will most certainly live your life out of balance, criss-crossing an invisible middle line as you pursue your priorities. The act of living a full life by giving time to what matters is a balancing act. Extraordinary results require focused attention and time. Time on one thing means time away from another. This makes balance impossible.

THE GENESIS OF A MYTH.

Historically, balancing our lives is a novel privilege to even consider. For thousands of years, work was life. If you didn't work-hunt game, harvest crops, or raise livestock-you didn't live long. But things changed. Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Pates of Human Societies ill.u.s.trates how farm-based societies that generated a surplus of food ultimately gave rise to professional specialization. "Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers." This freedom from having to forage or farm allowed people to become scholars and craftsmen. Some worked to put food on our tables while others built the tables.

At first, most people worked according to their needs and ambitions. The blacksmith didn't have to stay at the forge until 5 p.m.; he could go home when the horse's feet were shod. Then 19th-century industrialization saw for the first time large numbers working for someone else. The story became one of hard-driving bosses, year-round work schedules, and lighted factories that ignored dawn and dusk. Consequently, the 20th century witnessed the start of significant gra.s.sroots movements to protect workers and limit work hours.

Still, the term "work-life balance" wasn't coined until the mid-1980s when more than half of all married women joined the workforce. To paraphrase Ralph E. Gomory's preface in the 2005 book Being Together, Working Apart: Dual-Career Families and the Work-Life Balance, we went from a family unit with a breadwinner and a homemaker to one with two breadwinners and no homemaker. Anyone with a pulse knows who got stuck with the extra work in the beginning. However, by the '90s "work-life balance" had quickly become a common watchword for men too. A LexisNexis survey of the top 100 newspapers and magazines around the world shows a dramatic rise in the number of articles on the topic, from 32 in the decade from 1986 to 1996 to a high of 1,674 articles in 2007 alone (see figure 9).

It's probably not a coincidence that the ramp-up of technology parallels the rise in the belief that something is missing in our lives. Infiltrated s.p.a.ce and fewer boundaries will do that. Rooted in real-life challenges, the idea of "work-life balance" has clearly captured our minds and imagination.

FIG. 9 The number of times "work-life balance" is mentioned in newspaper and magazine articles has exploded in recent years.

MIDDLE MISMANAGEMENT.

The desire for balance makes sense. Enough time for everything and everything done in time. It sounds so appealing that just thinking about it makes us feel serene and peaceful. This calm is so real that we just know it's the way life was meant to be. But it's not.

If you think of balance as the middle, then out of balance is when you're away from it. Get too far away from the middle and you're living at the extremes. The problem with living in the middle is that it prevents you from making extraordinary time commitments to anything. In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets its due. Sometimes this can be okay and sometimes not. Knowing when to pursue the middle and when to pursue the extremes is in essence the true beginning of wisdom. Extraordinary results are achieved by this negotiation with your time.

FIG. 10 Pursuing a balanced life means never pursuing anything at the extremes.

The reason we shouldn't pursue balance is that the magic never happens in the middle; magic happens at the extremes. The dilemma is that chasing the extremes presents real challenges. We naturally understand that success lies at the outer edges, but we don't know how to manage our lives while we're out there.

When we work too long, eventually our personal life suffers. Falling prey to the belief that long hours are virtuous, we unfairly blame work when we say, "I have no life." Often, it's just the opposite. Even if our work life doesn't interfere, our personal life itself can be so full of "have-tos" that we again reach the same defeated conclusion: "I have no life." And sometimes we get hit from both sides. Some of us face so many personal and professional demands that everything suffers. Breakdown imminent, we once again declare, "I have no life!"

FIG. 11 Pursuing the extremes presents its own set of problems.

Just like playing to the middle, playing to the extremes is the kind of middle mismanagement that plays out all the time.

TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE.

My wife once told me the story of a friend of hers. The friend's mother was a schoolteacher and her father was a farmer. They had scrimped, saved, and done with less their entire lives in antic.i.p.ation of retirement and travel. The woman fondly remembered the regular shopping trips she and her mother would take to the local fabric store where they would pick out some fabric and patterns. The mother explained that when she retired these would be her travel clothes.

She never got to her retirement years. In her final year of teaching, she developed cancer and later died. The father never felt good about spending the money they'd saved, believing that it was "their" money and now she wasn't there to share it with him. When he pa.s.sed away and my wife's friend went to clean out her parents' home, she discovered a closet full of fabric and dress patterns. The father had never cleaned it out. He couldn't. It represented too much. It was as if its contents were so full of unfulfilled promises that they were too heavy to lift.

Time waits for no one. Push something to an extreme and postponement can become permanent.

I once knew a highly successful businessman who had worked long days and weekends for most of his life, sincere in his belief that he was doing it all for his family. Someday when he was done, they would all enjoy the fruits of his labor, spend time together, travel, and do all the things they'd never done. After giving many years to building his company he had recently sold it and was open to discussing what he might do next. I asked him how he was doing and he proudly proclaimed that he was fine. "When I was building the business, I was never home and rarely saw my family. So now I'm with them on vacation making up for lost time. You know how it is, right? Now that I have the money and the time, I'm getting those years back."

Do you really think you can ever get back a child's bedtime story or birthday? Is a party for a five-year-old with imaginary pals the same as dinner with a teenager with high-school friends? Is an adult attending a young child's soccer game on par with attending a soccer game with an adult child? Do you think you can cut a deal with G.o.d that time stands still for you, holding off on anything important until you're ready to partic.i.p.ate again?

When you gamble with your time, you may be placing a bet you can't cover. Even if you're sure you can win, be careful that you can live with what you lose.

Toying with time will lead you down a rabbit hole with no way out. Believing this lie does its harm by convincing you to do things you shouldn't and stop doing things you should. Middle mismanagement can be one of the most destructive things you ever do. You can't ignore the inevitability of time.

So if achieving balance is a lie, then what do you do? Counterbalance.

Replace the word "balance" with "counterbalance" and what you experience makes sense. The things we presume to have balance are really just counterbalancing. The ballerina is a cla.s.sic example. When the ballerina poses en pointe, she can appear weightless, floating on air, the very idea of balance and grace. A closer look would reveal her toe shoes vibrating rapidly, making minute adjustments for balance. Counterbalancing done well gives the illusion of balance.

COUNTERBALANCING-THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT.

When we say we're out of balance, we're usually referring to a sense that some priorities-things that matter to us-are being underserved or unmet. The problem is that when you focus on what is truly important, something will always be underserved. No matter how hard you try, there will always be things left undone at the end of your day, week, month, year, and life. Trying to get them all done is folly. When the things that matter most get done, you'll still be left with a sense of things being undone-a sense of imbalance. Leaving some things undone is a necessary tradeoff for extraordinary results. But you can't leave everything undone, and that's where counterbalancing comes in. The idea of counterbalancing is that you never go so far that you can't find your way back or stay so long that there is nothing waiting for you when you return.

This is so important that your very life may hang in the balance. An 11-year study of nearly 7,100 British civil servants concluded that habitual long hours can be deadly. Researchers showed that individuals who worked more than 11 hours a day (a 55-plus hour workweek) were 67 percent more likely to suffer from heart disease. Counterbalancing is not only about your sense of well-being, it's essential to your being well.

FIG. 12 Extraordinary results at work require longer periods between counterbalancing.

There are two types of counterbalancing: the balancing between work and personal life and the balancing within each. In the world of professional success, it's not about how much overtime you put in; the key ingredient is focused time over time. To achieve an extraordinary result you must choose what matters most and give it all the time it demands. This requires getting extremely out of balance in relation to all other work issues, with only infrequent counterbalancing to address them. In your personal world, awareness is the essential ingredient. Awareness of your spirit and body, awareness of your family and friends, awareness of your personal needs-none of these can be sacrificed if you intend to "have a life," so you can never forsake them for work or one for the other. You can move back and forth quickly between these and often even combine the activities around them, but you can't neglect any of them for long. Your personal life requires tight counterbalancing.

Whether or not to go out of balance isn't really the question. The question is: "Do you go short or long?" In your personal life, go short and avoid long periods where you're out of balance. Going short lets you stay connected to all the things that matter most and move them along together. In your professional life, go long and make peace with the idea that the pursuit of extraordinary results may require you to be out of balance for long periods. Going long allows you to focus on what matters most, even at the expense of other, lesser priorities. In your personal life, nothing gets left behind. At work it's required.

In his novel Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas, James Patterson artfully highlights where our priorities lie in our personal and professional balancing act: "Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five b.a.l.l.s. The b.a.l.l.s are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four b.a.l.l.s-family, health, friends, integrity-are made of gla.s.s. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered."

LIFE IS A BALANCING ACT.

The question of balance is really a question of priority. When you change your language from balancing to prioritizing, you see your choices more clearly and open the door to changing your destiny. Extraordinary results demand that you set a priority and act on it. When you act on your priority, you'll automatically go out of balance, giving more time to one thing over another. The challenge then doesn't become one of not going out of balance, for in fact you must. The challenge becomes how long you stay on your priority. To be able to address your priorities outside of work, be clear about your most important work priority so you can get it done. Then go home and be clear about your priorities there so you can get back to work.

When you're supposed to be working, work, and when you're supposed to be playing, play. It's a weird tightrope you're walking, but it's only when you get your priorities mixed up that things fall apart.

BIG IDEAS.

Think about two balancing buckets. Separate your work life and personal life into two distinct buckets-not to compartmentalize them, just for counterbalancing. Each has its own counterbalancing goals and approaches.

Counterbalance your work bucket. View work as involving a skill or knowledge that must be mastered. This will cause you to give disproportionate time to your ONE Thing and will throw the rest of your work day, week, month, and year continually out of balance. Your work life is divided into two distinct areas-what matters most and everything else. You will have to take what matters to the extremes and be okay with what happens to the rest. Professional success requires it.

Counterbalance your personal life bucket. Acknowledge that your life actually has multiple areas and that each requires a minimum of attention for you to feel that you "have a life." Drop any one and you will feel the effects. This requires constant awareness. You must never go too long or too far without counterbalancing them so that they are all active areas of your life. Your personal life requires it.

Start leading a counterbalanced life. Let the right things take precedence when they should and get to the rest when you can.

An extraordinary life is a counterbalancing act.

9 BIG IS BAD.

"We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal."

-Robert Brault The Big Bad Wolf. Big Bad John. From folktales to folk songs, the suggestion that big and bad go together has been a common theme across history-so much so that many think they're synonymous. They're not. Big can be bad and bad can be big, but they're not one and the same. They aren't inherently related.

A big opportunity is better than a small one, but a small problem is better than a big one. Sometimes you want the biggest present under the tree and sometimes you want the smallest. Often a big laugh or a big cry is just what you need, and every so often a small chuckle and a few tears will do the trick. Big and bad are no more tied together than small and good.

Big is bad is a lie.

It's quite possibly the worst lie of all, for if you fear big success, you'll either avoid it or sabotage your efforts to achieve it.

WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD BIG?.

Place big and results in the same room and a lot of people balk or walk. Mention big with achievement and their first thoughts are hard, complicated, and time-consuming. Difficult to get there and complex once you do pretty much sums up their views. Overwhelming and intimidating is what they feel. For some reason there is the fear that big success brings crushing pressure and stress, that the pursuit of it robs them of not only time with family and friends but eventually their health. Uncertain of the right to achieve big, or fearful of what might happen if they try and fall short, their head spins just thinking about it and they immediately doubt they have a head for heights.

All of this reinforces a "dis-ease" with the very idea of big. To invent a word, call it megaphobia-the irrational fear of big.

When we connect big with bad, we trigger shrinking thinking. Lowering our trajectory feels safe. Staying where we are feels prudent. But the opposite is true: When big is believed to be bad, small thinking rules the day and big never sees the light of it.

FLAT WRONG.

How many ships didn't sail because of the belief that the earth was flat? How much progress was impeded because man wasn't supposed to breathe underwater, fly through the air, or venture into outer s.p.a.ce? Historically, we've done a remarkably poor job of estimating our limits. The good news is that science isn't about guessing, but rather the art of progressing.

And so is your life.

None of us knows our limits. Borders and boundaries may be clear on a map, but when we apply them to our lives, the lines aren't so apparent. I was once asked if I thought thinking big was realistic. I paused to reflect on this and then said, "Let me ask you a question first: Do you know what your limits are?" "No," was the reply. So I said that it seemed the question was irrelevant. No one knows their ultimate ceiling for achievement, so worrying about it is a waste of time. What if someone told you that you could never achieve above a certain level? That you were required to pick an upper limit which you could never exceed? What would you pick? A low one or a high one? I think we know the answer. Put in this situation, we would all do the same thing-go big. Why? Because you wouldn't want to limit yourself.

When you allow yourself to accept that big is about who you can become, you look at it differently.

In this context, big is a placeholder for what you might call a leap of possibility. It's the office intern visualizing the boardroom or a penniless immigrant imagining a business revolution. It's about bold ideas that might threaten your comfort zones but simultaneously reflect your greatest opportunities. Believing in big frees you to ask different questions, follow different paths, and try new things. This opens the doors to possibilities that until now only lived inside you.

Sabeer Bhatia arrived in America with only $250 in his pocket, but he wasn't alone. Sabeer came with big plans and the belief that he could grow a business faster than any business in history. And he did. He created Hotmail. Microsoft, a witness to Hotmail's meteoric rise, eventually bought it for $400 million.

According to his mentor, Farouk Arjani, Sabeer's success was directly related to his ability to think big. "What set Sabeer apart from the hundreds of entrepreneurs I've met is the gargantuan size of his dream. Even before he had a product, before he had any money behind him, he was completely convinced that he was going to build a major company that would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He had an unrelenting conviction that he was not just going to build a run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley company. But over time I realized, by golly, he was probably going to pull it off."

As of 2011, Hotmail ranked as one of the most successful webmail service providers in the world, with more than 360 million active users.

GOING BIG.

Thinking big is essential to extraordinary results. Success requires action, and action requires thought. But here's the catch-the only actions that become springboards to succeeding big are those informed by big thinking to begin with. Make this connection, and the importance of how big you think begins to sink in.

FIG. 13 Thinking informs actions and actions determine outcomes.

Everyone has the same amount of time, and hard work is simply hard work. As a result, what you do in the time you work determines what you achieve. And since what you do is determined by what you think, how big you think becomes the launching pad for how high you achieve.

Think of it this way. Every level of achievement requires its own combination of what you do, how you do it, and who you do it with. The trouble is that the combination of what, how, and who that gets you to one level of success won't naturally evolve to a better combination that leads to the next level of success. Doing something one way doesn't always lay the foundation for doing something better, nor does a relationship with one person automatically set the stage for a more successful relationship with another. It's unfortunate, but these things don't build on each other. If you learn to do something one way, and with one set of relationships, that may work fine until you want to achieve more. It's then that you'll discover you've created an artificial ceiling of achievement for yourself that may be too hard to break through. In effect, you've boxed yourself in when there is a simple way to avoid it. Think as big as you possibly can and base what you do, how you do it, and who you do it with on succeeding at that level. It just might take you more than your lifetime to run into the walls of a box this big.

When people talk about "reinventing" their career or their business, small boxes are often the root cause. What you build today will either empower or restrict you tomorrow. It will either serve as a platform for the next level of your success or as a box, trapping you where you are.

FIG. 14 Choose your box-choose your outcome.

"The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher."

- Thomas Henry Huxley Big gives you the best chance for extraordinary results today and tomorrow. When Arthur Guinness set up his first brewery, he signed a 9,000-year lease. When J. K. Rowling conceived Harry Potter, she thought big and envisioned seven years at Hogwarts before she penned the first chapter of the first of seven books. Before Sam Walton opened the first Wal-Mart, he envisioned a business so big that he felt he needed to go ahead and set up his future estate plan to minimize inheritance taxes. By thinking big, long before he made it big, he was able to save his family an estimated $11 to $13 billion in estate taxes. Transferring the wealth of one of the greatest companies ever built as tax-free as possible requires thinking big from the beginning.

Thinking big isn't just about business. Candace Lightner started Mothers Against Drunk Driving in 1980 after her daughter was killed in a hit-and-run accident by a drunk driver. Today, MADD has saved more than 300,000 lives. As a six-year-old in 1998, Ryan Hreljac was inspired by stories told by his teacher to help bring clean water to Africa. Today his foundation, Ryan's Well, has improved conditions and helped bring safe water to over 750,000 people in 16 countries. Derreck Kayongo recognized both the waste and hidden value in getting new soap into hotels every day. So in 2009 he created the Global Soap Project, which has provided more than 250,000 bars of soap in 21 countries, helping combat child mortality by simply giving impoverished people the chance to wash their hands.

Asking big questions can be daunting. Big goals can seem unattainable at first. Yet how many times have you set out to do something that seemed like a real stretch at the time, only to discover it was much easier than you thought? Sometimes things are easier than we imagine, and truthfully sometimes they're a lot harder. That's when it's important to realize that on the journey to achieving big, you get bigger. Big requires growth, and by the time you arrive, you're big too! What seemed an insurmountable mountain from a distance is just a small hill when you arrive-at least in proportion to the person you've become. Your thinking, your skills, your relationships, your sense of what is possible and what it takes all grow on the journey to big.

As you experience big, you become big.

THE BIG DEAL.

For more than four decades, Stanford psychologist Carol S. Dweck has studied the science of how our self-conceptions influence our actions. Her work offers great insight into why thinking big is such a big deal.

Dweck's work with children revealed two mindsets in action-a "growth" mindset that generally thinks big and seeks growth and a "fixed" mindset that places artificial limits and avoids failure. Growth-minded students, as she calls them, employ better learning strategies, experience less helplessness, exhibit more positive effort, and achieve more in the cla.s.sroom than their fixed-minded peers. They are less likely to place limits on their lives and more likely to reach for their potential. Dweck points out that mindsets can and do change. Like any other habit, you set your mind to it until the right mindset becomes routine.

When Scott Forstall started recruiting talent to his newly formed team, he warned that the top-secret project would provide ample opportunities to "make mistakes and struggle, but eventually we may do something that we'll remember the rest of our lives." He gave this curious pitch to superstars across the company, but only took those who immediately jumped at the challenge. He was looking for "growth-minded" people, as he later shared with Dweck after reading her book. Why is this significant? While you've probably never even heard of Forstall, you've certainly heard of what his team created. Forstall was a senior vice president at Apple, and the team he formed created the iPhone.

BLOWING UP YOUR LIFE.

Big stands for greatness-extraordinary results. Pursue a big life and you're pursuing the greatest life you can possibly live. To live great, you have to think big. You must be open to the possibility that your life and what you accomplish can become great. Achievement and abundance show up because they're the natural outcomes of doing the right things with no limits attached.

Don't fear big. Fear mediocrity. Fear waste. Fear the lack of living to your fullest. When we fear big, we either consciously or subconsciously work against it. We either run toward lesser outcomes and opportunities or we simply run away from the big ones. If courage isn't the absence of fear, but moving past it, then thinking big isn't the absence of doubts, but moving past them. Only living big will let you experience your true life and work potential.

BIG IDEAS.

Think big. Avoid incremental thinking that simply asks, "What do I do next?" This is at best the slow lane to success and, at worst, the off ramp. Ask bigger questions. A good rule of thumb is to double down everywhere in your life. If your goal is ten, ask the question: "How can I reach 20?" Set a goal so far above what you want that you'll be building a plan that practically guarantees your original goal.

Don't order from the menu. Apple's celebrated 1997 "Think Different" ad campaign featured icons like Ali, Dylan, Einstein, Hitchc.o.c.k, Pica.s.so, Gandhi, and others who "saw things differently" and who went on to transform the world we know. The point was that they didn't choose from the available options; they imagined outcomes that no one else had. They ignored the menu and ordered their own creations. As the ad reminds us, "People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the only ones who do."