I’ve been reading The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. Rather fitting, the book discusses one main theme: To be successful, focus on ONE thing and one thing only. It’s full of great quotes, useful analogies and anecdotes to apply the principles behind achieving success. About half way through the book I started to think, “What’s my ONE thing?” which led me to writing this post.
My Challenge
I’ve been blogging on/off for the last couple of years, and have recently tried to improve the frequency and consistency of my content output. I’ve been proud of the work thus far, but always wish I could do more.
Many successful daily bloggers talk about only publishing content that they are truly proud of. Since writing is a in-my-spare-time endeavor, my challenge has been balancing prioritizing between my day job and family and the time needed curate and edit quality posts. I’ve been struggling to find that time needed to write the quality content that I would be proud of.
Quality vs. Quantity
I am conflicted with the advice of these bloggers… to only publish extremely high quality content. For starters, it’s a subjective valuation of the content. Is it my opinion or the readers? Surely, it’s the readers, right? For example, I might be overly anal about grammar, while a reader has mostly ignored my punctuation and is more interested in the story. You get the point.
Also, I believe doing is better than thinking. Rather than spending more time thinking about a single post, I’d rather spend that time working on a second or third post…
The entrepreneur in me says, more/regular posts are better than writing the “perfect” post.
Figure It Out
While the major premise of the book is discussing the idea of focusing on ONE thing, there is an undertone of “getting started immediately” as well. The best quote of the book is found early and is taken from the movie City Slickers. It’s the part of the movie where Mitch and Curly, who haven’t seen eye-to-eye up to this point, leave the group to herd stray cattle. As they ride together alone, they seem to bond over a conversation about life.
Curly: “Do you know what the secret to life is?”
Mitch: “No. What?”
Curly: “This.” [holds up one finger]
Mitch: “Your finger?”
Curly: “One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*t”
Mitch: “That’s great, but what’s the ‘one thing’?”
Curly: [smiles] “That’s what you’ve got to figure out”
Just Start
This introduces my newest experiment: figure out what my ONE thing is…and I plan to do that by writing more regular posts. Same types of content, just shorter and more regular. My current plan is to attempt to post content every other day or so and focus solely on keeping the schedule.
I’ll be keeping these posts separate, under the category: daily.