What's the ONE Thing we can do to decrease our dropout rate to zero... ? Raise our test scores by 20 percent... ? Increase our graduation rate to 100 percent... ? Double our parent partic.i.p.ation... ?

YOUR PLACE OF WORSHIP.

What's the ONE Thing we can do to improve our worship experience... ? Double our mission outreach success... ? Max out our attendance... ? Achieve our finance goals... ?

YOUR COMMUNITY.

What's the ONE Thing we can do to improve our sense of community... ? Help the homebound... ? Double our volunteerism... ? Double voter turnout... ?

After my wife Mary read this book, I asked her to do something. She turned to me and you know what she said? "Gary, that's not my ONE Thing right now!" We laughed, high-fived, and I got to do it myself!

The ONE Thing forces you to think big, work things through to create a list, prioritize that list so that a geometric progression can happen, and then hammer away on the first thing-the ONE Thing that starts your domino run.

So be prepared to live a new life! And remember that the secret to extraordinary results is to ask a very big and specific question that leads you to one very small and tightly focused answer.

If you try to do everything, you could wind up with nothing. If you try to do just ONE Thing, the right ONE Thing, you could wind up with everything you ever wanted.

The ONE Thing is real. If you put it to work, it will work.

So don't delay. Ask yourself the question, "What's the ONE Thing I can do right now to start using The ONE Thing in my life such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"

And make doing the answer your first ONE Thing!

Onward...

Gary Keller.

ON THE RESEARCH.

Although I've lived the lessons of this book for some time, we began researching The ONE Thing in earnest in 2008. Since then, we've archived a collection of well over a thousand scholarly articles, scientific studies, and academic papers; hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles; and a large library of books written by the foremost experts in their fields. Binder after binder of discoveries, facts, and anecdotes literally covered every inch of our writing s.p.a.ce.

If you want to dive deeper into what you've learned from this book, you can find an extensive list of our references organized by topic and by chapter at ThelThing.com. This website is a gateway into our minds-we mention the authors who have inspired us, provide links to articles that are available online, and list those white papers that educated our thinking. We've also thrown in some additional interesting factoids and even a fun video here and there. Enjoy the journey.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

When we were putting this book together, we agreed to do our best to organize it using the principles of The ONE Thing. Most books follow the Chicago Manual of Style's traditional guidelines and have a half-t.i.tle, t.i.tle, copyright, endors.e.m.e.nts, author bio, foreword, acknowledgments, dedication, and epigraph pages all before you ever get to the table of contents and the actual text. Really?

It all got tossed out the window. In terms of advocating for you, the reader, we felt this was the ONE "design" Thing we could do to improve your experience. As a result, the acknowledgments ended up in the back of the book. In reality, if you were to reorder the book in terms of what's most important to the authors, this section may well have fallen just inside the front cover.

We began outlining this book in the summer of 2008 and submitted the first full draft to our publisher on June 1, 2012-a four-year journey we certainly couldn't have navigated without help. Lots of it.

Family comes first. Without the love and support of my wife Mary and son John, this book wouldn't be what it is. My writing partner, Jay, is equally thankful for the love and encouragement from Wendy and his kids, Gus and Veronica. Spouses, especially wise, literate ones like ours, get the largely thankless job of reading all the rough drafts rife with flaws and riddled with errors that eventually become a finished book.

We also benefited from a great support team. Vickie Lukachik and Kylah Magee loaded us up with so much research it took us close to half a year to digest it. Valerie Vogler-Stipe and Sarah Zimmerman did their ONE Thing and kept our plates and calendars free so we could stay focused on the book. The rest of our team, Allison Odom, Barbara Sagnes, Mindy Hager, Liz Krakow, Lisa Weathers, Denice Neason, and Mitch Johnson, also stayed on their ONE Thing so we could do ours.

My Keller Williams Realty partners and senior leaders each lent their ideas and support along the way: Mo Anderson, Mark Willis, Mary Tennant, Chris h.e.l.ler, John Davis, Tony Dicello, Dianna and Shon Kokoszka, and Jim Talbot. Thanks guys! You rock! Our marketing team, led by Ellen Marks, worked extensively on the design of the book, including all the ways you likely heard about it: Annie Switt, Hiliary Kolb, Stephanie Van Hoek, Laura Price, the super-talented designers Michael Balistreri and Caitlin McIntosh, as well as Tamara Hurwitz, Jeff Ryder, and Owen Gibbs on our production team, and the web team of Hunter Frazier and Veronica Diaz. Cary Sylvester, Mike Malinowski, and Ben Herndon coordinated our IT work inside and outside the building with partners like Feed Magnet and NVNTD. Anthony Azar, Tom Freireich, and Danny Thompson worked with our vendor partners as well as with our partners in the field to make sure we got the book in as many hands as possible. Special thanks to Kaitlin Merchant of KW Research and Mona Covey, Julie Fantechi, and Dawn Sroka of KWU for their work pre- and post-publication.

We also had the benefit of working with a publisher that truly gets The ONE Thing and lives it, Ray Bard of Bard Press. He a.s.sembled an excellent team that advised, supported, and encouraged us when we were writing and later, during the editing, pushed us to the edge to make it as good as it could be. Our extended publishing team includes managing editor Sherry Sprague, editor Jeff Morris, copy/ production editor Deborah Costenbader, Randy Miyake and Gary Hespenheide of Hespenheide Design, proofreader Luke Torn, and indexer Linda Webster.

Publicist Barbara Henricks of Cave Henricks Communications and social media pro Rusty Shelton of Shelton Interactive provided early feedback and led the media campaign. We also had a group of veteran readers who, with some select members of our team, provided feedback on our early draft: Jennifer Driscoll-Hollis, Spencer Gale, David Hathaway, Robert M. Hooper, Ph.D., Scott Provence, Cynthia Robbins, Robert Todd, and Todd Sattersten.

Thanks to the super-responsive researchers, professors, and authors who answered our questions on a variety of topics: Dr. Roy Baumeister, a Francis Eppes Eminent Scholar at Florida State University and Social Psychology Area Director; Dr. Myron P. Gutmann, Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation; Dr. Eric Klinger, Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, Morris; Dr. Jonathan Levav, a.s.sociate Professor of Marketing at Stanford University; Paul McFedries, author of the unique website wordspy.com; Dr. David E. Meyer, Professor of Psychology in the Cognition and Perception Program at the University of Michigan and director of the University of Michigan's Brain, Cognition, and Action Laboratory; Dr. Phyllis Moen, McKnight Presidential Chair in Sociology at the University of Minnesota; Erica Mosner at Historical Studies-Social Science Library at the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study; the super-helpful Rachel from Bronnie Ware's website; Valoise Armstrong at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library; Dr. Ed Deiner, author and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois; and James Cathcart, Senior Leadership Consultant at Franklin Covey. We're also grateful to The Keller Center in the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University and Casey Blaine for her research on mult.i.tasking early on in our journey. And last, I'd be remiss if I didn't thank my business coach Bayne Henyon for his insights all those years ago that changed the way I looked at things and reshaped the way I worked.

Thank you everyone for everything!.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS.

GARY KELLER.

Professionally, Gary's ONE Thing is teaching. He excelled as a real estate salesperson by teaching clients how to make great home buying-and-selling decisions. As a real estate sales manager, he recruited agents through training and helped them build their careers the same way. As cofounder and chairman of the board, he built Keller Williams Realty International from a single office in Austin, Texas, to the second largest real estate company in North America by using his skills as a teacher, trainer, and coach. Gary defines leadership as "teaching people how to think the way they need to think so they can do what they need to do when they need to do it, so they can get what they want when they want it."

An Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and finalist for Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year, Keller is recognized as one of the most influential leaders in the real estate industry. He has also helped many small business owners and entrepreneurs find success through three nationally bestselling books: The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, and SHIFT: How Top Real Estate Agents Tackle Tough Times. A book, after all, is just another way to teach, but one with an infinitely large cla.s.sroom. As a business coach and national trainer, Gary has helped countless others realize extraordinary results by narrowing their focus to their own ONE Thing.

Unsurprising to those who know him, Gary believes that his single greatest achievement is the life he's built with his wife Mary and their son John.

JAY PAPASAN.

Jay is the executive editor and vice president of publishing at Keller Williams Realty and president of Rellek Publishing. Professionally, his ONE Thing is writing. He attempted to write his first book on an electric typewriter in junior high and was hooked. At least one high school teacher thought his writing had promise and circulated one of his essays to the entire staff. Jay paid the bills in college by working in a bookstore. He got his undergraduate degree in writing and later, his Master's. After graduation, Jay took a job in publishing. During his years at HarperCollins in New York he worked on bestselling t.i.tles like Body for Life by Bill Phillips and Go for the Goal by Mia Hamm. More recently, in the ten years he's worked with Gary, Jay has coauth.o.r.ed numerous award-winning or bestselling t.i.tles, including the Millionaire Real Estate series.

Jay is pa.s.sionate about sharing the ideas in his books and regularly speaks at conventions and training events. He is a member of the Keller Williams University International Master Faculty.

Outside of work, Jay co-owns a successful real estate investment business and sales team with his wife Wendy. They enjoy life in Austin, Texas, with their children Gus and Veronica.

Now that you understand the concept, it's time to put The ONE Thing into action in your life. Visit The1Thing.com to start thinking big by going small and focusing on your ONE Thing today! Find up-to-date information on our seminars and coaching programs, as well as exclusive ONE Thing tools. See real-time updates from others joining the worldwide movement and share your ONE Thing. Experience your ONE Thing today.

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