Book notes: The One Thing — a simple truth about getting extraordinary results

I had picked up and read through this book a long time ago and the one takeaway that I got from the book was to focus on the one thing that is going to make everything else easier. If you are starting a business, focus on selling. If you are developing a keynote speech, you want to work on the outline and message because from there, you’re going to have a much easier time writing out your speech.

But I picked up the book again and decided to re-read it and boy am I glad I did. I found a few more things that while not amazing, were certainly worth reminding myself again. I also like how this book also shares a number of findings and lessons learned about discipline, multi-tasking, willpower, living a balanced life and then talks about how to achieve extraordinary results (read my takeaway above). Here is what I got from the book that I found useful:

Multi-tasking is a myth

I used to think that I could be a good multi-tasker. I would switch from task to task or try to do different tasks at the same time and thought I was really successful, but what I didn’t do was actually measure the time it took me to do the different tasks at once (and then compare that with the time it would take to do them separately) and then assess the quality of the outputs of the…