REI119: THE ONE THING
W/ JAY PAPASAN
25 April 2022
In this week’s episode, Robert Leonard (@therobertleonard) talks with bestselling author Jay Papasan about how to find your one thing, stay focused, avoid being misled by common, but incorrect, time management practices, how to delegate, and much, much more!
Jay Papasan is a bestselling author who serves as the Vice President of Strategic Content for Keller Williams Realty International, the world’s largest real estate company. He is also Vice President of KellerINK and Co-Owner, alongside his wife Wendy, of Papasan Properties Group with Keller Williams Realty in Austin, Texas.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
- How to find your one thing.
- How to stay focused on your one thing.
- Why and how people are misled about time management and focus?
- Why multi-tasking is lie.
- How to defend your time.
- How to delegate.
- And much, much more!
TRANSCRIPT
Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.
Jay Papasan (00:03):
Progress beats everything time on the task over time. If you can show up every day and move it forward just one foot, you will outpace most other human beings who just can’t sustain any kind of long race.
Robert Leonard (00:16):
In this week’s episode, I talk with bestselling author Jay Papasan about how to find your one thing, stay focused, avoid being misled by common but incorrect time management practices, how to delegate, and much, much more.
Robert Leonard (00:31):
Jay Papasan is the bestselling author who serves as the Vice President of Strategic Content for Keller Williams Realty International, the world’s largest real estate company. He is also Vice President of Keller, Inc. and co-owner, alongside his wife Wendy, of Papasan Properties Group with Keller Williams Realty in Austin, Texas.
Robert Leonard (00:51):
Jay joined Keller Williams Realty International and, in 2003, he co-authored The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, a million-copy bestseller, alongside Gary Keller and Dave Jenks. His most recent work with Gary Keller on The ONE Thing has sold nearly 2.5 million copies worldwide and garnered more than 500 appearances on national bestseller lists, including number one on The Wall Street Journal’s Hardcover Business List. It has even been translated into 41 different languages.
Robert Leonard (01:21):
The Millionaire Real Estate Investor is one of my favorite books of all time, and I also really like The ONE Thing. Both of these books were authored by none other than Jay Papasan.
Robert Leonard (01:32):
So it’s safe to say that I was super excited to get the chance to talk with Jay himself. Jay certainly didn’t disappoint and I really enjoyed our conversation. I hope you guys enjoy it too and that it helps you find your one thing.
Intro (01:49):
You’re listening to Real Estate Investing by The Investor’s Podcast Network, where your host Robert Leonard interviews successful investors from various real estate investing niches to help educate you on your real estate investing journey.
Robert Leonard (02:11):
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Real Estate 101 podcast. As always, I’m your host Robert Leonard. With me today, I have a very special guest, Jay Papasan. Jay, welcome to the show.
Jay Papasan (02:22):
Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Robert Leonard (02:25):
I’m not really much of a big resolutions person myself. I personally believe that you shouldn’t wait until an arbitrary day or time, like a new year, to start working on your goals. But I did say to myself as 2022 rolled around that this had to be my year of really focusing on my one thing.
Robert Leonard (02:44):
Focus is, without a doubt, my biggest problem. I can never just focus on one thing. So, of course, one of the first things I did was grab my copy of your book, The ONE Thing. So for anybody that’s watching the YouTube version, I’m holding up a copy of it here. I’ve read it in the past, but I needed to revisit it. On the first two pages, there’s a quote that says, “You chase two rabbits. You will not catch either one.” That hit me right in the chest. When we’re trying to focus, how do we find our one thing?
Jay Papasan (03:10):
It’s the heart of the book. We won’t skip all the way there, but basically you just have to take a moment and ask. I spend a lot of time, we spent almost four and a half years, researching and writing the book, and I was worried that folks really would be lost. What I’ve found now, having taught this to tens of thousands of people over … It’s almost nine years since the book came out, that most people do know their one thing, but they’re so busy triaging tasks and chasing obligations and opportunities. They don’t have any reflection time to build in, to go, “What should I be focused on?”
Jay Papasan (03:47):
In my experience, when people pause just to even … I mean that’s one of the good things about the new year. There’s a rhythm that we have, the beginning and ending of things, whether it’d be a year, a decade, a month, a week. We use those as arbitrary moments to reflect back and look forward and cast ourselves forward.
Jay Papasan (04:08):
So I think it first starts with you’ve got to have the space to look at what’s on your plate and identify the thing that’s usually the most important but it’s often hiding in plain sight. There’s a quote in there, “The things that matter most are not the things that scream the loudest.” I find that to be very true, especially if you’re an entrepreneur. You’re wearing multiple hats and it can get confusing, downright confusing, on any given day of trying to figure out your true priority.
Robert Leonard (04:34):
We’ve both mentioned already two quotes from the book. I was going through my notes of the book, and I haven’t finished it yet in this new year, but I already had … I was looking at the notes and I was reading it on my e-book and it tells you what page it’s on. It’s like page 23, 23, 23 … I’m like, geez, I highlight a lot on one page. Then it’s like 25, 25. I’m like, wow, I highlight a lot on this page. There’s so much good content in the book.
Robert Leonard (04:55):
So let’s assume that … And we’re going to break down more how to find your one thing, but let’s assume that we’re able to successfully implement that and we found our one thing. One of the things that I struggle with, and I think a lot of people do, is how do we stay focused on that one thing? How do we fend off all the almost inevitable, shiny object syndrome things that are going to come about?
Jay Papasan (05:16):
Sure. I mean I think the success of the book, a lot of the ideas aren’t actually radically new, but we tried to put them in a framework where people could actually take action on them. I’m pretty pragmatic. I love to read books. You can see the shelves behind me if you’re watching this on YouTube. I’m surrounded by them. I have three more bookshelves just like it. I always got a book under my nose. And so, I just think that people look up and it’s … Simplicity is far underrated and it’s hard to do.
Jay Papasan (05:44):
So basically it goes like this. You have a goal. So you’re like, okay, I would like to get my podcast into the top 10 in the next five years. You have to break it down. But usually we have a process for that we can go into if you want. But based on that, what do I have to do this year, this month, whatever the time period is?
Jay Papasan (06:02):
Then you want to ask the question: what’s the number one activity? This is the 80-20 principle, Pareto’s law. What is the number one activity that I can pursue that will make that outcome happen? For most jobs, there’s usually a clear number one. If you’re a writer, you need to be reading and writing. That’s the activity. It’s not like you show up and because you took a great approach that day, the magic happens. You’ve got to write every day and the magic happens.
Jay Papasan (06:30):
It’s the same in almost everything else. If you’re a coder, you’re coding. There’s an activity if you study success that really screams at you.
Jay Papasan (06:38):
Most people, without any of the … I went at it sideways there, going all the way up to five years. But most people, if you just ask them a straight up question, what’s the number one activity that we can contribute to your success? It’s an activity, not a goal. Activity. What is the thing that drives the needle? Most people actually have an answer if they think about it.
Jay Papasan (06:56):
Here’s where the simplicity kicks in. Go to your calendar and start blocking time to do that thing. We call it time blocking. But we’re actually really, really effective at following our calendars.
Jay Papasan (07:07):
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a lot of alerts on my phone or my watch. But one of the ones that I have not silenced is the 15-minute reminder that says, “You’ve got a meeting coming up.” I actually set it for an hour earlier for this podcast so that I would make sure that I had proper room to think and prepare. But we know that that transition’s coming. During Zoom, a lot of us have just been wall-to-wall. We know how to follow our calendar, even if we don’t like it.
Jay Papasan (07:32):
So make sure that the activities that you believe contributed to it, first and foremost, are on your calendar. Then you have to live it and defend it. I could go through a much longer song and dance, but really if I look at your calendar, are your goals reflected on it? For most people, that is not true.
Robert Leonard (07:50):
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this movie, but there’s a movie called Big Fat Liars. It came out in the early 2000s. In the movie, there’s a guy who lives exclusively by his … Basically it’s an old cellphone. I don’t even remember the name of it. It’s almost like a Blackberry. He lost his phone in the movie and he had no idea what he was doing with his life now because he literally lived exclusively by his phone.
Robert Leonard (08:12):
That’s like how I am, but I don’t schedule my work. I just schedule meetings and maybe the gym, but I don’t schedule tasks. I think that’s one of the big things that I need to take away from what you’re saying in the book is really schedule and time block those tasks into my calendar.
Jay Papasan (08:26):
My life changed pretty measurably when I started working with Gary Keller, the co-author on the book. His name’s in bigger letters for a reason. He’s a self-made billionaire. But when I first interviewed for the opportunity to work with him, the first thing he has to see was my calendar.
Jay Papasan (08:40):
So this was all the way back, and I guess it would’ve been early 2002. I think I was just starting into the world of digital. I held off on cellphones and I got a Treo, kind of a PalmPilot knockoff. But I still kept a paper calendar. It was shaped like a checkbook, if everybody even knows what those are. But it would fit in my back pocket and I could see the whole week.
Jay Papasan (09:02):
I’m an introvert. So I just wrote down my to-dos, like what is it that I have to get done this week? I would usually allocate different days for core activities.
Jay Papasan (09:11):
I remember Gary just flipping through my calendar and asking questions. I mean he was very nosy. But I had no idea until many years later what he was doing.
Jay Papasan (09:18):
Most people see their calendar, their appointments as opportunities to meet with other people. In his world, his effective but simple strategy is that the most important meetings on your calendar are the ones with yourself to do your most important work.
Jay Papasan (09:33):
So those are the first calendars that go on. Actually after vacation, we always try to put vacation down first so we don’t burn out. But right after that, you attack it and you say, “When am I going to do my core activities? When am I going to reflect on my goals?” If you have those three things, vacation, one thing time, and planning time on your calendar and can hold those three appointments, you can go a long, long way in this life.
Robert Leonard (09:56):
Talking from a tactical perspective, is this something we should be doing on Sunday nights? Should we schedule our week ahead? Should we go into our calendar on Sunday nights and schedule our whole week? Should we do it the night before just for the next day? How do we tactically do this?
Jay Papasan (10:10):
Sure. That’s a great question. I have a framework that’s evolved, because my wife, my family, and I, like when you start researching a book in Gary’s world, you have to become your own guinea pig, your own test pilot. So we’ve been living this for some time. One of the habits my wife and I had formed before this was actually an annual goal-setting retreat.
Jay Papasan (10:29):
We had two kids, 16 months apart. It was tough. We both had big jobs. We just realized she gets all the credit. She goes like, “We need to step out of our day-to-day and actually get on the same page.” We’ve been doing that for 15 years now.
Jay Papasan (10:44):
On a big level, sometime around November, it’s getting late … December’s too late, and January, the new year’s already started. Sometime October, November, you’re going to find at least one weekend where I’m going to block it off very early in the year, and that’s my planning retreat. I try to get out of the house, usually with my wife, because we’re a team, and we try to get aligned on where we’re going five years out and, based on that, what’s happening the following year. That’s the first meeting in terms of your big planning.
Jay Papasan (11:13):
On a weekly basis, anytime between Friday and Sunday night, my wife and I have settled into a rhythm, kind of like a Sunday brunch ritual for us. Sometime around 11:30, 12:00 we’re both on with our laptops on the couch, we have our calendars, and we’re comparing notes.
Jay Papasan (11:31):
By contrast, I know a lot of people, they do it on Fridays. They end their week by tidying up. What did I get done? Now based on that, what do I have to do the next week? In fact, in our training company, we built a training company out of this, Jeff Marshall, who’s running that today, he requires everyone who reports to him before noon on Friday to have their goal set for the following week. The idea is that no later than noon on Friday, people could be asking for people’s time that they need to get their goals.
Jay Papasan (12:01):
We were joking about getting on this podcast together. I usually have to reschedule a lot. If you’re really successful … I’m not saying that’s me. If you’re trying to be really successful, your calendar tends to be pretty full. If you wait till Monday to get on my calendar, it’s really hard. So getting ahead of it.
Jay Papasan (12:16):
So I actually … I haven’t done it. I’ve done it for many years on Friday afternoons. I’ve now settled because my wife and I do it on Sundays. I had to advocate some time on Friday. While you’re wrapping up your priorities for the week, start asking what’s carrying over for next week? What does my calendar look like? So I can start getting time with the people I need to achieve my goals. That would probably feel like a really safe best practice.
Robert Leonard (12:39):
I’m very much a planner. So I love this idea of time blocking, putting everything into my calendar. I love it in theory, but what I struggle with in practice is it almost makes it feel very rigid. And so, let’s just say I scheduled a task for 30 minutes and then it takes 45 minutes, what do I do then? Do I just bump things out? Then I have this almost undue stress on myself. I know I shouldn’t really put that stress on myself, but then I’m like, “Oh, what do I do?” or, “What if it’s shorter?” And so, how do you deal with things almost never taking as long as you plan?
Jay Papasan (13:09):
We can go down the planning fallacy and a million other things. Well, first and foremost, a big mistake I see people make … All right, it’s called the one thing. Almost immediately, when I find out … When someone says your book doesn’t work for me, I find out that they violated the cover of the book. They haven’t really internalized because our world doesn’t line up around this. They’re trying to time block everything.
Jay Papasan (13:29):
In the beginning, identify … It’s meant to be a productivity book. It’s a workbook. But I’ll tell you, I told Gary after the first three years, I was like, “I think we set out to write a business book and we wrote a health and fitness book,” because a lot of people, what they needed to address before they even got to the office was their physical health and energy, and they wanted to start.
Jay Papasan (13:48):
But figure out what your number one priority is, go to your calendar, and just make sure you got it covered. You don’t have to do it all. I usually say establish the beach head. You get 30 minutes of exercise in. Would I love to be hammering it in the gym for 90? Sure. But when you’re building the habit of showing up, start small.
Jay Papasan (14:07):
For your work activities, don’t try to do everything. I want to keep my mornings full of my priorities and my afternoons open to meet with people, help people triage things that ran over. I don’t know, give it a lot more time than you think it needs, because a lot of times you’ll show up, you won’t be inspired. It won’t happen. You’ll have to warm up. You’ll do all the piddly things, but then you’ll at least make progress.
Jay Papasan (14:29):
I’ll just tell you, progress beats everything time on the task overtime. If you can show up every day and move it forward just one foot, you will outpace most other human beings who just can’t sustain any kind of long race.
Jay Papasan (14:41):
So don’t overthink, “Oh my gosh, I time blocked 45 minutes and I needed an hour. Great. Knock out 45 minutes, carry over the 15 to the next day. You can always adjust your time blocks. It’s not about having a perfect day. It’s not even about having a perfect month or a perfect year. You want to have a great career, and that’s a much larger timeframe.
Jay Papasan (15:00):
I can’t remember the quote. There’s a famous quote about technology, about how people overestimate the impact in a year and underestimate its long-term impact. I think if you flip that towards ourselves, I think people massively overestimate what they can accomplish in a single year and they really underestimate what they can accomplish in five, which is not a long time in the grand scheme.
Jay Papasan (15:22):
Yes, you can try to win the day, but try to win that time block, make progress, and then carry it forward to the next. I think you’ll have a healthier sense of time blocking. But if your whole day is blocked and you’re just jumping from task to task, you’re going to drive yourself crazy.
Robert Leonard (15:38):
There’s this thought process that if you really want to know something, you need to ask why multiple times. So if somebody tells you something, you say why, and then they give you a response and why, and you keep going down that path. Does the one thing work that way in that figure out from a very high level, okay, this is my one thing, and then maybe you need to drill down a little bit more, this is that next one thing, and then you drill down and down and down, okay, this is the one thing for the day? Is that the thought process behind the one thing there?
Jay Papasan (16:06):
It’s pretty far back in the book. We have like an iceberg visual in there. I know, poor icebergs. They just always get used for the same metaphor. But when you see someone who’s really productive, we’ve found a pattern that the people who are the most productive, at the very base level of the iceberg, they’re really clear about their purpose, like their bigger one thing. Like why am I here? What am I pursuing? What does all this mean? It’s the big why.
Jay Papasan (16:31):
Because they’re clear about that, they have a really intense sense of priorities that leads to this productivity. Activity and productivity are not the same thing. Productivity is acting on your priority. When we make progress on our priorities, we are being productive. Activity can fool us. “Hey, I had a busy day. I was running around,” but you didn’t really move the needle. So as long as we have that contrast.
Jay Papasan (16:53):
But when you know what you’ve said yes to, those bigger things, like why am I here, why am I working so hard, why do we want this business to succeed, it’s not about money. It’s about something bigger. When you say yes to that, it makes the nos a lot easier. Your priorities start to really get apparent.
Jay Papasan (17:10):
When we wrote the book, I’ll just give you an example, because I’m a writer. The book is about 220 pages. We wanted it to feel maybe not quite an airplane read, but something that someone could digest in a relatively short amount of time. When we dropped off the main script, it was over 440 pages long.
Jay Papasan (17:26):
I remember our publisher Ray Bard, at the time, he was very funny. He goes, “Hey, guys. When someone buys a book called The ONE Thing, they don’t expect a door stop. So apply the book to the book and get back to me.” Over about three months, we cut the book almost in half.
Jay Papasan (17:42):
That was hard, but we asked the question, what do, fundamentally, we want people to achieve from this book? The number one thing we wanted for them to do was to ask the question: what’s my one thing?
Jay Papasan (17:52):
So what’s on the back cover? You just held it up. Instead of testimonials and all the things we could have done, we got the question, because the habit we want you to form is to start your days, to start your weeks with asking, okay, of all the things I could do, what’s the one thing I should do? That habit will really take you a long ways.
Robert Leonard (18:11):
Is there a part two of The ONE Thing coming out with those 220 pages that got cut?
Jay Papasan (18:17):
They’ve shown up in my keynotes, in our training. It wasn’t that they were useless facts. We had case studies in there. It just wasn’t that it drove home the core ideas. In the beginning of the book, we tell the lies and it’s really like what are all the ideas that get in the way of doing this? What’s the big core idea? Figure out your one thing, time block it, and then how do we live it over a longer period of time? Those are to me, in my mind, the three parts of the book so that people could get the bad stuff out, get the good stuff in, and then have some sort of rhythm that they could leave with the book. But it’s all out there.
Jay Papasan (18:56):
I’ll just tell you something funny, because it’s almost April 1st. Maybe it’s after April 1st when people are listening to this. I think about three years after it came out, everybody was wanting sequel, sequel, sequel. We actually created a cover for one more thing and put it out there like everybody.
Jay Papasan (19:10):
But it was funny, our Korean publisher started frantically calling our foreign rights agent. He’s like, “Why didn’t you let us know this book was coming out?” We were like, “No, it’s April fools. It’s a cultural thing. It’s just a joke.”
Robert Leonard (19:20):
That is too funny. I would’ve pre-ordered it, for sure. With Gary, you were also part of the millionaire series, The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, The Real Estate Agent. A lot of people listening to this show will be working a day job, a regular W-2 job. A lot of them have a side hustle where it’s not related to real estate, but then a lot of them are also real estate investors. They’re probably struggling. I know they probably are because I am myself is. How do you pick your one thing when you have your one thing for real estate or your side hustles, and you also have your one thing at your job? How do we apply a one thing mentality to these kind of situations?
Jay Papasan (19:58):
First off, I’ll just say I’m a W-2. I am. I actually like being a part of a team. I own businesses. I have some 1099 income, but I am fundamentally a W-2. My wife and I have made the decision to try to live on my salary and everything else we use to invest and magnify. That’s created some lifestyle discipline for us.
Jay Papasan (20:19):
So early on, when we were younger and really in the build stage, the first disciplines we learned were how do we live on less than we earn? There’s two ways to be financially free. You can have more income than you need to live or you can live like a monk so that you don’t need much income to live.
Jay Papasan (20:36):
We did a little bit of both. We shrunk our lifestyle and we made sure that we were saving as much as we could so we could go put that stuff to work. We both did side gigs. For the first three or four years, I had at least $10,000 in net income coming from side gigs. And you’re giving up weekends. You can’t just say, “I’m going to … ”
Jay Papasan (20:55):
I had this ethical dilemma. Gary Keller is my partner, but he’s also my boss. When I’m at my W-2, he doesn’t own my time. I owe him my time and his attention. He’s paying me to do a job. If I’m doing a side gig at work, maybe it’s who I was raised, but I feel like I’m stealing. I want to make sure that I’m getting my job done, I’m nailing my job, and then moving to those side gigs. Otherwise, you should just, if you can, as quick as you can, quit the job and go all in on your side gig. Most people would be surprised, if they have little savings, how quickly they can replace that income if they’re not sitting on the fence.
Jay Papasan (21:30):
I just think you have to learn to say no to stuff. There was a lot of stuff because a lot of our investing, real estate investing, was driven how do we save the next downpayment? Didn’t get any new cars, didn’t get the big screen TVs. There were a lot of lifestyle choices that we had to make. Not literally brown bagging it to lunch. That’s not how you do it. But by saying yes to something, we said no to other stuff.
Jay Papasan (21:53):
So if you’re going to have a side gig and you’re going to honor your W2, you need to start getting up early. I would always advocate, if you want to write a novel while you’re holding down a job, start getting up at 5:00 AM. Get up early when there’s no distractions.
Jay Papasan (22:07):
I’m a night owl, I’m a writer. I thought all the inspiration happened after 2:00 AM, so I just say that. But I’ve trained myself over the years to be productive in the morning. I’m up at 5:00 AM. I knock out a lot of my personal priorities before I ever have to show up at work. You can also do it after, but you have a lot less control of your time in the afternoon and evenings. That’s when social calls. You’re hungry to hang out with your friends, maybe to find that future spouse. You’re always tempted to cheat.
Jay Papasan (22:35):
There’s nobody texting you at 5:00 AM. You don’t need to watch Game of Thrones or Yellowstone. Those temptations don’t really exist. If you’re going to go ahead and crawl out of bed, you might as well make it worthwhile.
Jay Papasan (22:47):
So that would be my advice is don’t even give up all of your weekends. Build a habit where before 8:00 AM, when most workers expect you to show up, maybe 9:00 AM if you’re lucky, get up a little earlier. You will have to go to bed earlier, but you can get up and knock out an hour, hour and a half every single day.
Robert Leonard (23:06):
What you just explained is the heart of what I think a lot of people listening to this show are dealing with. So what was your one thing in that situation? You had your side gigs, your writing, and your W-2. What did you say your one thing was? How did you use this process of the one thing to apply it to that situation?
Jay Papasan (23:22):
Well, my one thing is fundamentally I started as an editor before I identified as a writer. I always wanted to write, but the first book I collaborated on with Gary and Dave Jenks, who’s passed away this last year, we wrote The Millionaire Real Estate Agent, which has gone on to sell, I think, 1.6 million copies now. We wrote it in less than a hundred days.
Jay Papasan (23:40):
They had to combine 50 years of real estate experience, and they had an outline. But when I showed up, I was just a writer/editor. I was helping them organize their thoughts. I was getting it on paper. They were editing the crap out of me because their voices were very different. But over time, as I got to do more of the research with them, like with The Millionaire Real Estate Investor, I spent two years doing the research before I showed up in the writing room, and we were all writing together then.
Jay Papasan (24:05):
But early on, editor. So I was getting editing gigs. I had worked at Harper Collins. I had a decent network in New York at that time. I remember the last book I took was a book on Bruce Arena, who was going to then be the coach for the US Men’s National Team. Kind of a soccer weeny. I did Nia Hamm’s book, I worked on Brandi Chastain’s book in, and had a chance to work on his book. That ended up falling through and another offer came through.
Jay Papasan (24:31):
I just remembered going to Wendy and going, “I feel like my creative energy now needs to all be aimed at the partnership I’m in. I think I need to stop doing the side gigs around this skill and be married to this opportunity.” But that took about three and a half, four years before I’d earned the right to have a business opportunity at my job.
Jay Papasan (24:53):
We formed a company together and I started having more opportunity than just W-2 income, so I went all in on that to maximize it. But there’s no magical moment. You just know. It’s like, all right, I can make a paycheck, $10,000. But if I write the next book with Gary and Dave, I get royalties for life, and that’s a bigger, long-term opportunity. I started moving as much of my time as I could towards those bigger opportunities.
Jay Papasan (25:19):
I mean I know that the world of writing may not be a parallel for other people, but here’s one way to look at it. Is your side gig job income or business income? If you’re literally trading time for money and you don’t see a path to have a system or software or other people leverage generating that income so that you start to get that magic leverage to it, then at some point you have to make harder choices. But if I can write code and sell it, and get royalties, if I can get business income because I can hire someone to work that coffee trailer, and they’re working it on the weekends and I just have to manage them, maybe you have to work the occasional weekend. I’m trying to get more out of my hours and magnify my dollars per hour.
Robert Leonard (26:06):
The beginning of your book talks about some of the ways that we’re misled or derailed. Some of those are being told that we can multitask, or that everything matters equally, or that willpower is always on will call. Your book The ONE Thing says there are six lies between us and success. Tell the audience and I a few of the most common ways you see people being misled in this realm.
Jay Papasan (26:29):
Nobody argues that everything matters equally, but if you actually aren’t working from priority, that’s how you’re treating it. You’re just going to the next most urgent thing. You’re allowing things that are urgent but unimportant to command your time, and they’re commanding your best hours.
Jay Papasan (26:43):
The first thing most people do when they wake up is, what? Putting you on the spot. We didn’t rehearse this. So I’m just curious, what would your answer be? What do you think most people do when they first wake up? Check their phone. They check social and they check email. One is just a pure distraction, social, unless that’s your profession. But email is almost always other people’s priorities.
Jay Papasan (27:05):
One of the core habits in our community we try to teach people to do is like when you wake up, before you look at email, can you first look at your goals? I try to look at my goals in my calendar so I know what was it that I was supposed to achieve today before I start potentially getting the path of other people’s priorities? Because, otherwise, you’re going to start making commitments in your inbox that are actually violating the day you already designed last Friday. First off, everything doesn’t matter equally. Identify what matters most.
Jay Papasan (27:34):
I guess this would be a good time to talk about the focusing question. It’s the heart of the book. It’s why we have that on the back page. What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else is easier or necessary? What’s the one thing? Not 10, not 20.
Jay Papasan (27:49):
I’ve found that our brains are really surprisingly good at narrowing it down often getting to one immediately, “Oh, I should do that,” such that by doing it just means that it’s a leveraged activity. There’s something else that happens after. Everything gets easier or unnecessary.
Jay Papasan (28:06):
So you’re looking for the biggest lever you currently have in your life to achieve your goal. Most people really want that unnecessary. But in my experience, things just get easier when you do your one thing. When they get easier, a lot of times you can afford to have other people do them, and that’s how they become unnecessary for you, but they probably still have to get done by somebody.
Jay Papasan (28:26):
You ask the question and you nail that down. That’s Pareto’s principle. I hope everybody who’s listening to this knows the 80-20 principle. We just did that on steroids. If you take the 20% of the 20% of the 20%, eventually you get to one thing that sits at the very top of the heat. It’s not that you don’t do those other things, you just start there.
Robert Leonard (28:45):
Let’s talk about that a bit more, because your book says that the 80-20 rule, which is known as Pareto’s principle as well, is as real as the law of gravity, and yet most people fail to see the gravity of it. Explain a little bit more in detail, what is Pareto’s principle or the 80-20 rule and why it’s so important?
Jay Papasan (29:03):
I could go into the history of it. There was a guy named Joseph Duran. He was a quality control engineer who popularized it. It became Pareto’s law instead of Duran’s law. Not quite sure how that happened, but at least a lot of quality control engineers recognized that he was the dude that saw the pattern.
Jay Papasan (29:19):
Originally, it showed up in compensation distribution. Not everybody in an organization was being compensated equally. That followed this 18th century economist, Vilfredo Pareto, who had seen that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people.
Jay Papasan (29:37):
I’ll just say that the numbers 80 and 20 aren’t magical. What’s magical is you look at any system that’s big enough to have any sort of numbers play, you’ll find that a handful of things, usually one thing, has a disproportionate impact on the system. If you can identify and harness that, you have a massive advantage.
Jay Papasan (29:56):
That’s like why in software engineering, you clear the most prevalent bugs. Not all of them, but if this impacts 100% of users, knock that one out first, because that impacts the experience. You just start working based on this.
Jay Papasan (30:09):
But the reality is you have to stop and think. You have to look. What’s the biggest lever? What’s the most important thing of all of these things? Where should I begin? It doesn’t mean you don’t do all of them, but if you start with a first, it just gets progressively easier.
Jay Papasan (30:23):
So I don’t know how to … I can pin it on your shirt. Gary had a sign in his office, “Until my one thing done is done, everything else is a distraction.” He literally had that written in Sharpie in different places in his office as long as I’ve known him, before the book was even around. But this idea of figuring out what is the one thing I should to be focused on, that’s his superpower.
Jay Papasan (30:45):
People say, “Oh, he can do that because he’s Gary.” No, he’s Gary because he does that. It’s a really interesting thing. You say, “Oh, Elon Musk can do that because he’s Elon Musk.” No, he became Musk because he adhered to a few principles really hard in his life, and that manifested all of these other things. Yes, at a certain point you can have four personal assistants trailing you, but that’s earned.
Robert Leonard (31:08):
This is something that I need to get better at, because almost every single day, I have anywhere from three to, say, five different things that absolutely “have to be done” today. I really struggled with that, because today I had a podcast interview right before this one and then this one. So I had preparation that I had to do before both of those that I consider something that is essential. It has to be done before I can do the podcast.
Robert Leonard (31:36):
Then recording the podcasts are also essential, but I also have a flight at 6:00 PM tonight and I haven’t packed yet. So it’s also essential for me to pack, because if I don’t pack, I can’t go on my flight. So I really struggle with this back and forth of like I have so many things that I feel are essential and I guess I just need some more Gary Keller-esque abilities in my life.
Jay Papasan (31:55):
Well, I think one thing that happens, before you start playing this game at a higher level … It doesn’t mean that I don’t have those same things. I am notorious for waiting till the morning of my trip to start throwing stuff in my bag.
Jay Papasan (32:05):
I’m a big guy. And so, my wife looks and she’s like, “Gosh, you’ve got so many clothes in there,” and we’ll take them out. I have the same number of article of clothings that she does, but mine is bigger. So it bulks it up. But I’ll just throw it in there. Here’s the reality, if you don’t pack well, what will you have to do at your destination?
Robert Leonard (32:22):
Buy more?
Jay Papasan (32:24):
Yeah, and it’s not the end of the world. Sometimes it’s fun.
Robert Leonard (32:28):
That’s always exactly what I say. It’s funny you mentioned that because I always say people stress about packing. For me, I’m like, eh, if I forgot something, I’ll just buy it. As long as I have my wallet, I mean I’m pretty much good.
Jay Papasan (32:38):
You can start with incremental systems. I think that’s where James Clear, he won the pandemic with this book, great book, Atomic Habits. But having spent a little bit of time with him and studied him long before the book showed up, I mean he does live that. He works from systems and habits.
Jay Papasan (32:56):
And so, if you know that you’re traveling regularly, just have a suitcase ready. Have your go bag. My toiletries thing is just a science now, because one time you show up for a speech and you don’t have a razor or whatever, it is a pain in the butt. But I just have a little drawer and I stock all that crap in there so that I don’t worry about those pieces. I can throw them in my bag.
Jay Papasan (33:18):
All I have to do is pick two outfits. I’ve got my sport coat that I know will pack. You just start assembling a wardrobe that you know I can throw this in my backpack and it’ll come out looking like it’s not wrinkled. I can go. So I’ve shortened that to where, with lots of practice, it doesn’t require much thought. That is very much packing. That’s an 80% activity. It actually doesn’t have to happen.
Jay Papasan (33:42):
If you’ve got your license and a credit card, theoretically you take that trip. If it was between you and missing two weeks in France, you would do that in a heartbeat. You’d be like, crap, this is going to get really expensive. I’m going to have to buy all my clothes when I’m there. But people lose their bags and they do that already.
Jay Papasan (33:57):
But your one activity, if you’re building your business around this podcast, was preparing so that you could show up as a great host. I appreciate that. Thank you for doing it. It matters a lot to your guest and it makes them want to reflect.
Jay Papasan (34:10):
I think Paul Moore, one of your guests, recommended me to you. He wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t shown up the way you do. That’s how you start to get a snowball, a positive, virtuous cycle in your life is by focusing on the right things. Over time, they do make things easier.
Jay Papasan (34:26):
But, anyway, give yourself a break. You feel like the kind of person, and I’m in that vein too, that you really want to get it right. You’re very compelled. You hold yourself accountable at a high level, but a good mantra to put somewhere is perfection is overrated. Progress, progress over time.
Jay Papasan (34:46):
I promise you, it’s a … And I heard Dave Ramsey say this once. He had dinner with Warren Buffett and he asked him what his favorite book was. He said the Tortoise and the Hare. He goes, “No matter how many times you read, it shouldn’t surprise us, but the tortoise always wins.” Just realizing if I can make incremental progress in a very relatively short period of time, you will look superhuman to most people. But on a given week, I mean success is just a series of failures.
Jay Papasan (35:16):
Most really successful people are just a grab bag of anxieties that have been harnessed in a really pot direction. Businesses are all just universal messes. Nobody runs it perfectly, but the people who prioritize come out on top in the long run.
Robert Leonard (35:33):
It sounds to me that people, including myself, we need to schedule time to really think, because as you just explained that to me, it became so obvious what my one thing was. My schedule is so filled that I don’t have that time to just sit and think. I think if I spent the time … And I think a lot of people are this way, if they sat and just thought for 30 minutes … And you mentioned Warren Buffett. We study him a lot on the show. He says he has hours and hours every day. All he does is just sit and think.
Jay Papasan (35:57):
Yeah. Early in my writing career, I met with a guy who wrote the book FedEx Delivers. He was a guy from Memphis, my hometown. My dad had set up the meeting. Something he said struck me. He goes, “When you do creative work, one of your core jobs is connecting the dots. But here’s the trick. The person with the most dots to connect usually wins,” which means I have to have a rigorous amount of time and schedule for digesting the dots.
Jay Papasan (36:24):
For me, that’s books, sometimes podcasts. I don’t have a long commute, so I don’t get to listen to as many as I like. But I have to be very purposeful in assembling the dots so that later I can pull them together. So figuring out what your core of two to three habits have to be to be successful, it’s wonderful.
Jay Papasan (36:41):
It’s also empowering when you know that those are the real drivers and you are willing to give it faith, because in any given week, it feels like that’s a disaster. But over the course of a long period of time, you just have to tolerate everything else being a little less efficient so you can optimize those core activities. Then all the other stuff starts to really get in line behind the big dogs.
Robert Leonard (37:04):
You’ve mentioned a couple systems between time blocking, even just packing for trips. I’ve heard you on other podcasts say that it’s not just about saying yes or no to things. Really, it’s about setting up systems. One of those systems that you have is what you call your virtual FAQs. I know you said that that has saved you a lot of time. What is a virtual FAQ and how can we set up systems in our lives to help with something similar?
Jay Papasan (37:28):
Most business people tend to answer the same 10 questions over and over again ad nauseam. Because they’re written from different people in different times, we don’t always recognize that there’s a real pattern there.
Jay Papasan (37:40):
So this again takes thinking time, a big block of creative time where you could go into your sent inbox and start sorting. I get requests all the time to be on podcasts. So I built a system for it. You get requests around questions around certain books. There are certain books that tend to generate a lot of questions from our audience. You figure out what those are and you spend a little bit of time investing in a broad, generic answer versus a specific one, and now you can copy and paste.
Jay Papasan (38:09):
If you can afford … Like we’ve got Cyberbacker Virtual Assistants is a company that I’m not an investor. I just know the founder and believe in him. So I’ve had virtual assistants. I’ve had virtual EAs, which I think is a different thing, and I have an in-person EA now. When you can have low-cost relative to your time, people to help you administer to those things, essentially I’ve got a series of scripts, just like a help desk would.
Jay Papasan (38:34):
This is the problem that presents, this is our standard reply. You can just add, did that cover it? Do you have other questions? Sometimes you bounce between three things. But now those don’t even reach my desk. I’ve got a few people administratively between me and the world. At times, you can use it with auto-replies and other things to get there.
Jay Papasan (38:54):
I was chatting with my EA. Now you can … I’ve noticed that on LinkedIn, you can do auto-replies. It really bugs me having to check the different social media outlets because I get a lot of speaking opportunities. People reach out to me and they don’t necessarily go through my website. And so, okay, I don’t want to miss out on those opportunities.
Jay Papasan (39:13):
But I just said let’s design … It’s not in place yet, but let’s design an auto-reply that says … Most of the people who reach out to me often have these three questions. “Can Jay make an appearance on my podcast?” Just put a link in there, go here, fill out the form. If you’d like to see if Jay can speak at your event, go here. What are the four or five reasons? If you’re just connecting, yay, happy to be connected. There’s a pattern.
Jay Papasan (39:38):
I spend a lot of time on people that want to book me for an event or a podcast in social media. If I can set up that system, then I’m not in those inboxes as much, and I’m not worried that I’m missing something. So you just ask, “How can I automate this? How can I delegate this to a lower cost?”
Jay Papasan (39:56):
I mean I said it earlier, if you know what your dollars per hour are … If you make $100,000 a year, your dollars per hour is around $50, about half of what that bulk is. If you can delegate it out to someone who costs significantly less than that, you’re usually moving ahead.
Jay Papasan (40:12):
My friend Ben Kinney makes a distinction. There’s leverage in luxury. I will tell you that paying someone to mow my yard is luxury because the odds of me … I don’t need to be spending four hours in the Texas heat doing it anymore at this stage of my life. I can afford to have someone else do it. But also on Saturday afternoon, I’m not writing a novel during that time. I’m probably relaxing or spending time with my family.
Jay Papasan (40:36):
But these tasks that happen during the work day, that’s leverage. Can I automate it? Can I delegate it or just make it go away altogether? Those are the kinds of systems we’re talking about.
Robert Leonard (40:46):
You’ve said that it can take upwards of 30 hours to delegate a one-hour task. I’ve never put numbers to it myself, but I’ve found the same relationship. I’ve found that when I try to delegate a relatively simple task, like you just mentioned, the emails or direct messages, I probably get significantly less than you do, but I still get quite a few, and I need a system for it.
Robert Leonard (41:07):
But what I find is that when I try to delegate that, it takes a lot longer than if I just did it myself. So what ends up happening is I end up just … I just do it. I’m like, all right, this is just quicker. I’ll just do it myself. Then it never gets delegated. Explain to us why it takes so long to delegate a one-hour task, and then why it’s so important to still do it anyway.
Jay Papasan (41:25):
All right. Well, first off, I’ve said that, but I usually try to make sure I credit Rory Vaden. That idea came from his book. I think it’s called Procrastinate on Purpose. In the back of it, he shares that he was sitting on an airline with someone, and they shared that the reason most people don’t delegate, it takes about 30 times as long as it takes you to do something is to teach someone to do it acceptably well. But that trade-off, that hour-long task, if every week you’re saying invest 30 hours or do it, in one year, you’ll be negative a full work day or two. It’s another 20 hours that you’ve taken on the task rather than delegating it.
Jay Papasan (42:02):
So it’s a long game. Am I willing to invest upfront to get all of those hours back? That short circuit a lot of entrepreneurs, because I’ll tell you, entrepreneurs in general tend to be a little ADHD. One of our super strengths is noticing our environment and taking action on it. That’s one of the reasons we are successful.
Jay Papasan (42:22):
So we don’t want it to go away all together, not the clinical version. I’m speaking anecdotally. If you have ADHD, I’ve got two kids, I’m sorry, but it also can be harnessed. The other thing is we tend to be highly impatient. We want to get moving.
Jay Papasan (42:36):
And so, it’s really about that long game. The host of our podcast for many years is a guy named Geoff Woods. Together, we worked out, it’s like, look, our core job with teaching this book is teaching people how to invest their time. If you think about time is not something that you spend but you invest, it makes those sorts of investments much more appealing.
Jay Papasan (42:56):
If each week I can knock and automate one task, in the short run, I feel busier and I’m making less progress. You look up in four or five months and you’ve got massive amounts of time that you’ve given back to yourself, but you never get there without those investments, or hiring someone to make those investments for you. That’s the cheat.
Jay Papasan (43:15):
If you’re just successful enough … Most of us don’t love to build systems. I’m an engineering brain, so I like it. But the moment you can afford it, bring on a quality EA. An experienced EA has been building leverage systems for their executives for years. The difference between the cost of an assistant and an EA is not as much as most people would think.
Jay Papasan (43:37):
For an additional $15,000, in today’s market, maybe $20,000, you’re going to get someone who’s a whole category higher in terms of their excellence and what they can deliver back to you. Their job is to give you your time back, period. A VA does not work that way. I like Cyberbackers because in our industry, the founder runs big real estate teams. So he trains them in advance to do a lot of the normal task. So he takes that burden off of you.
Jay Papasan (44:03):
But I think of a VA, especially if you have a second language maybe sometimes as a barrier, you have to be very explicit not to run into errors. And so, I just go straight to … I’m going to hire a part-time EA. I’m going to bring in someone who’s very experienced and say, “How have you kept other executives out of their inbox and not made them lose their mind with worry?” That’s a challenge that they want to … They live for those challenges. Then accept their systems. They won’t be exactly like you want them. Don’t micromanage. Just get out of the way.
Robert Leonard (44:33):
So have you found, for systems like these, that you need an EA rather than a VA? I think one of the issues is that I’ve defaulted to a VA rather than an EA, and it hasn’t always been the best experience. And so, I think that’s partially why I’ve reverted back to doing it myself. I mean if you do some research, there’s books, Virtual Freedom’s a very popular one, they all say hire a VA. So I thought that that was the right way to go.
Robert Leonard (44:53):
But it sounds like maybe the system and thought process that I was trying to implement isn’t wrong, but rather the process by which I was doing it is wrong. Maybe I’ll have more success with an EA.
Jay Papasan (45:03):
It’s all about the individual you’re working with. My wife hired a VA recently that had run a bank. I mean this person is so overqualified to be doing the work that she’s doing, and she’s delivering at a really high level very quickly. So I don’t want to speak in generalities and throw every virtual assistant under the bus. But I will say, broadly speaking, you can expect that that’ll take a bigger upfront investment.
Jay Papasan (45:26):
What you’re doing is you’re making that investment of your time to save money, because the dollars per hour is very attractive. I had a friend that had 11 VAs working in his business that didn’t cost as much as one senior operations person. And so, you look at that and you’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s so economical. It’s so thrifty,” and there’s wisdom in that.
Jay Papasan (45:45):
If you can’t afford an EA, then start with the VA. But you also … A lot of people don’t think about it, “Well, what if I shared a fractional executive assistant?” Their whole company is the deal in fractional executive assistants. I used one for years. I think it’s called Base Now, but it was 33Vincent. These were highly qualified EAs that you’re getting for maybe 20 hours a week.
Jay Papasan (46:06):
And so, you’re able to make it a variable expense, which is what we want, we’re in startup mode, but get a higher quality individual. So it doesn’t have to be full-time assistant right upfront. It could be part-time or it could be virtual. You can find ways to save, but you should insist to make a stand on having someone you can communicate clearly with and who can take an idea from you, hear the outcome you want, and problem solve for that.
Jay Papasan (46:31):
The ideal relationship … And sometimes it’s earned. It takes time to build that working relationship. Here’s the outcome I want administratively, and then they go build the system and check in with you.
Robert Leonard (46:43):
You mentioned at the top of the show that you’re a big reader. You’re a writer. You’ve written some of the bestselling real estate and business books. What books do you like to read? What books have had the biggest impact on your life? If anybody’s watching, they can see a bunch of books behind you. If they’re watching on YouTube, they can see a bunch behind you. Which of those books … Maybe it’s on one of your other three bookshelves. Which ones have had the biggest impact on you?
Jay Papasan (47:04):
Well, it’s actually the shelf right here. These two shelves, in small ways, are shelves that I find myself referring back to them frequently. So they tend to be, oh yeah, I mean Good to Great. Atomic Habits made that shelf. Thinking Fast and Slow.
Jay Papasan (47:19):
That doesn’t mean anybody should run out and get those books, though. I would just say figure out what you need to learn and then read with a purpose. I’m passionate … I mean I’m a French/English major. The fact that I’ve become an investor and a business owner is very low probability if people had known me younger, when I had John Lennon glasses and shoulder-length hair and was living in Paris as a translator. That was not something people predicted.
Jay Papasan (47:43):
But you look up and you’re like, “Okay, I need to start learning about this.” When we wrote The Millionaire Investor, I interviewed 120 investors. That in itself, I still have the binders and still go back and reread some of those interviews, because you get to do this on a podcast. I was just on the phone, recording it, getting it transcribed, but it’s the same sort of education. If you go deep in a territory, over time you’ll get smart.
Jay Papasan (48:08):
So after of that initial burst, when we wrote the book, I probably skimmed or read 50 investment books. I had to accelerate my education to get on even footing with Gary and Dave to write that book.
Jay Papasan (48:20):
But since then, every year I probably read five new investment books. I just space them out. A lot of them are for fun. Every now and then, you just get a great winner. In 2020, I read The Simple Path to Wealth by J. L. Collins, one of my all-time favorites. I read The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, like probably in my top 10. Every now and then, you just hit this gold mine and you’re underlining everywhere in the books and just getting great ahas.
Jay Papasan (48:47):
But to do that, you have to read a lot. I try to read with purpose around the things that matter. For me, it’s usually time. How do I invest it better? I want to invest money better and do well there because, for better or worse, it’s the currency of exchange for our lives. For me, it’s not even about lifestyle anymore. It’s about how can we give as much as we want in health and relationships? Those are big topics I tend to hit.
Jay Papasan (49:11):
But my system … Again, build a system … every year, I set out to read 50 books. This is going back to, I think, 2009, and I’ve never done it. Every year, around December, my wife’s like, “Why don’t you just read a bunch of short books?” and I’m like, “Because that’s not the point.” The point is every week I’m looking up going, “I need to keep moving this forward.”
Jay Papasan (49:32):
I love fiction. Every time I read a nonfiction book and I focus on it and take notes, I reward myself with a good detective thriller or a fantasy novel or something purely for fun. So it’s almost exactly 50-50. I just read something for my mind and then something for my mind to unwind. That’s my system, and it’s been serving me really well.
Robert Leonard (49:52):
I echo the same thoughts about J. L. He’s great. I had the honor of having him on the show, I think, last year. It was great. I love his book as well, one of the most impactful for me.
Jay Papasan (50:03):
I just wanted him to adopt me as an honorary grandson or something. I just like … This guy, like, what a great mental presence. He just seemed like a really nice guy to hang out with.
Robert Leonard (50:14):
Well, it was crazy. At one point, he only lived like 20 or 30 minutes away from me, and I had no idea.
Jay Papasan (50:18):
Oh wow.
Robert Leonard (50:18):
In this little state of New Hampshire. I’m like I had no idea. Because if you look at his website, it’s jlcollinsnh.com. So I asked him, I said, “Hey, what is the NH, like New Hampshire? I live in New Hampshire.” He’s like, “Yeah, actually … ” It just so happened that, yeah, we were not too far. So it’s too funny.
Robert Leonard (50:33):
But as we wrap up the show, I like to give people something really actionable. We’re talking about reading books, all this theory, and I think education’s really important. But I think people really need to get out and take action on what they’re learning. So what would you say is the number one thing people listening to this show, and even myself, what should we do when this episode is over to really get on the right path of focusing or focusing on our one thing?
Jay Papasan (50:57):
Maybe you took notes. Maybe you walked out of this with four or five ideas that you would like to implement. I want to build FAQs. I want to start time blocking. My admonishment would be start with one of the three or four things that you think you want to implement after hearing Robert riff on whatever it is I said. Great. What’s the one that you want to make a stand around? Then go start allocating time to make that happen.
Jay Papasan (51:19):
It won’t happen until you start allocating time. As you point it out, you’ll probably underallocate in the beginning. You think, “I’m going to knock it all out in one Saturday afternoon,” and you really just figure out the size of the problem that Saturday. It’s okay, go ahead and start blocking a regular time to start making progress towards that goal and see how that works for you.
Jay Papasan (51:39):
Again, it’s about progress. What I found is once people figure this out, wow, with just 30 minutes a day. I just bookmark 30 minutes a day, that’s my thinking time. I reflect and I journal, whatever that is. You pick something that can open up this … Once people realize they have control over their calendar and they practice defending that little beach head that they want to control really importantly, they realize they can do it everywhere else.
Jay Papasan (52:05):
They realize that when they say no to people, they’re not going to be offended most of the time. Most people are thankful when you hand back their time. “Hey, Robert, I know we were supposed to meet this week, but I really have to postpone it. Can we pick another date farther in the future? I’m behind on my goals. I realize if I don’t really hit it on Friday afternoon, I’m going to be in a world of trouble.” Just honest, direct, straightforward.
Jay Papasan (52:28):
Most people, they’ll be like, “I’m disappointed,” but they’re actually relieved, because they just got a Friday afternoon back to themselves, too. Just like you, they’re overbooked and overcommitted. Defending that calendar, learning that it is possible, it’s a breakthrough for most people.
Robert Leonard (52:44):
Before we close out the show, I want to give you a chance to tell the audience … If they don’t already know, which I’m sure many of them do, but in case they don’t, where’s the best place to connect with you, find all your resources, and all the great books that you’ve been a part of writing?
Jay Papasan (52:57):
Well, we’ve been talking about The ONE Thing mostly. So I would go to the1thing.com, with the number one. We’ve got all kinds of free resources and stuff there for people to play with if they don’t feel like they want to get into the library and it’s out of stock right now. I don’t want them to have to drop $20 on a book to start this. They just need to go do it.
Jay Papasan (53:15):
I’ve got a wonderfully Googleable name, Jay Papasan, all A’s. I think I’m the only one in the world, certainly the only one in the United States. So if they Google my name, they’re going to find me on whatever their platform of choice is. If they’ll just be patient, they can reach out and we can connect. If there’s a reason for us doing it otherwise, just go to the1thing.com and start small, think big, and start making progress today.
Robert Leonard (53:40):
I’ll be sure to put a link to The ONE Thing, the book that we’ve talked a lot about today, in the show notes for anybody that’s interested. But also check out The Millionaire Real Estate Investor. When I get a lot of people that reach out and ask me for advice on real estate and which books I recommend, that is always the number one book I recommend. It’s probably my favorite real estate book. Jay was part of writing that one as well. I recommend you guys check it out.
Jay Papasan (53:59):
I’ll give you a little backstory on that. I know we’re writing close on time. When we wrote that book, I remember that it was towards the end of Gary’s father’s life. He has a son, and he was really reflecting on what is it that was really, really important for him to communicate around that topic.
Jay Papasan (54:16):
And so, I actually think the best, most timeless part of the book is the first 120 pages. We wrote other books, HOLD and Flip, with other people on the mechanics, but those first 120, 130 pages, I really felt like this is a self-made billionaire’s letter to … A time capsule for his son. Like, “This is what I want you to understand about money. This is what I want you to understand about investing.”
Jay Papasan (54:41):
He put a lot of heart into that. He’s a great writer. I’m not his ghost writer. We collaborate together. There’s a lot of, I think, timeless brilliance in those first pages. I would give themselves … It’s a big book. Just pick it up and read the beginning, and then you can go and listen to BiggerPockets and you can listen to your podcast and go down the worm hole of specifics.
Robert Leonard (55:03):
Yeah. It’s one of those books. Like you said, like your wife mentioned, why don’t you just read a couple short books? It’s not one of those books you want to just rush through to add another check off or number to your list. This is a book that you really want to thoroughly read and enjoy. It’s, like I said, one of my favorites of real estate.
Jay Papasan (55:16):
But you should never read a book just to check it off.
Robert Leonard (55:18):
I agree 100%.
Jay Papasan (55:20):
The whole reason is to learn. Listening to it at three times speed on Audible, you can say you read it, but what are you absorbing? How are you implementing it? That’s actually what makes books make you better is by reflecting, “Now what from this can I bring to my life besides just understanding?”
Robert Leonard (55:39):
That was exactly one of my biggest failures, I would say, over the last three to five years is that one year I read like 75 books and I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t take action. I barely remembered anything, because I just read on Audible, 2X speed or just rushing through them. I’m like, “This is pointless. It’s a vanity metric, and it doesn’t do anything. I need to slow down, take notes, apply things.” That’s why I added taking that action question to the end of the podcast.
Jay Papasan (56:02):
I love that. That’s great.
Robert Leonard (56:04):
I really appreciate it. Jay, honestly, it’s truly been an honor. I’ve read your books, read all of your content for a long time. This is really, really great. I appreciate you joining me.
Jay Papasan (56:12):
Hey, thanks for having me. This has been a lot of fun. I love talking with a well-prepared host that actually knows his stuff.
Robert Leonard (56:18):
All right, guys, that’s all I had for this week’s episode of Real Estate Investing. I’ll see you again next week.
Outro (56:24):
Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin and every Saturday, we study billionaires and the financial markets.
Outro (56:39):
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