Jay Schwedelson: We are back for Do This, Not That, and we have an enormous guest here. Like, a guy who's a really big deal. So who is here? Jay Papasan. Now, you probably know him 'cause you've read the book, The ONE Thing, but he's literally one of the most influential business thinkers of the last two decades. He has written 12 books. Six of them became national bestsellers. They've sold over seven million copies. The ONE Thing became a worldwide phenomenon. It completely changed how entrepreneurs, executives, marketers, high performers, they think about success. And the thing about The ONE Thing, if you've ever read it, you may think it's a productivity book, but I don't think it is. It's a book about purpose, and we're gonna be talking about all those different things. But he didn't just write The ONE Thing. He helped build Keller Williams. Now, you're like, "Keller Williams? You mean that big, giant real estate company?" Yes. He joined Keller Williams, uh, when they had 27 employees a zillion years ago, and he helped to build this thing with Gary Keller, and he led their publishing and their education, their strategic content. He is a beast of a human being, and we're gonna talk about The ONE Thing because The ONE Thing went on to become a coaching company, a podcast, a training methodology, and now Jay is the CEO of a company called Produktive, which is the company behind making sure The ONE Thing methodology seeps into all of our brains. We are gonna become more everything today, more purpose, more everything today. Jay, I'm so excited to have you here

Jay Papasan: That was amazing. Like it's really awkward to hear someone introduce you sometimes, but that was great. Thank you so much for all the kind words

Jay Schwedelson: Well, I, I, I, um, that you deserve them. You deserve a lot more words. And, and today's gonna be almost more like a therapy session for me, 'cause I'm gonna be very honest. I have, I've had a problem, I continue to have a problem that I, I make lists of things. I say, "I'm gonna do this productivity hack. I'm gonna time block. I'm gonna do this." And I wind up, I go home, I feel good for five minutes, and then I lose my mind, and I'm like, I'm less productive than ever. And so The ONE Thing, people think it's a productivity book, but it's about a, it's about, is it about... It's about purpose. Like, what are we getting wrong when we think about being productive? What, what is The ONE Thing all about?

Jay Papasan: Well, I think a lot of people right now, there's a backlash on this optimize everything lifestyle. It is absolutely kind of bonkers. I wrote about it recently where I woke up in the middle of the night. We have an Eight Sleep that tracks our sleep score. The dog started barking, and I remember getting in bed and I was like, "Oh, I wonder if this is gonna impact my sleep score," which then of course impacted my sleep score. And I'm just like, "Okay, I, I gotta ditch some of this." Like, I wanna measure to learn, and then I've gotta get out of this everything is optimizing for perfection. So I like that you just put the book in a different category. Most people think of the book as a productivity book, and it does that job well. But the ultimate kind of supercharge to get yourself to do things that you wouldn't normally do is to imbue it with meaning. And that's the word purpose for us. We could've said your big why, we could've said meaning, but when you attach meaning to your work, hard work becomes less stressful. It becomes something we can endure longer. It gives us a reason to stick to it. And in my coaching and in my consulting work, a lot of times they come in wanting a tactical change to their structure of their productivity. And what we really have to go back down to is, is there an identity disconnect between the work they're doing and the life they wanna lead? Can they attach purpose back to the work they're doing to get them where they wanna go? And usually, when people can make that weird connection that, you know, yes, my underwater basket weaving habit is actually meant to cure cancer because I'm gonna raise so much money for it, right? I know that you're raising money for cancer. We attach meaning to something and the hard work gets easy, and a lot of people miss that with our book

Jay Schwedelson: So how do you find that clarity? 'Cause for me, when I, when I think about the one thing, I'm like, "Okay, my purpose is my family. I wanna take care of my family, okay?" Okay, great, and then I come to work, I go, "Jay, you lazy piece of garbage. Work harder 'cause you wanna take care of your family." I feel like I have some version of clarity, but I don't know how to translate it to my every day

Jay Papasan: So most of the time when people say that, they're bullshitting. Sorry. And I don't say that you are. Their family's important to them, and that's what we're taught to say, "Oh, I'm working hard for my family." And you talk to them long enough and you're like, "Is that why you missed their soccer game? Is that why you were on your phone when they were at a birthday party?" No. No. It's like, yes, I wanna be a great parent too. I wanna be a great husband, all of those things, but there's different levels of meaning. So that's probably in the constellation. Um, when we started the journey for the book, I realized, like I didn't have a mission statement, and I started to feel guilty. It's like, how can I author a book when I can't author my own mission statement? And frankly, I thought a lot of them were BS. Like a lot of corporate mission statements are just baloney. It's words that look good on the wall, but you don't actually see them in action. And I went on a journey throughout the course of the book, and if I could go back and add one chapter, we would have a whole chapter on core values. And so I think this is the hack. You can go and download any of the, the, the core values exercises on the web. It's actually a standard list of words that psychologists use. And I teach people, you go through the list, you start by circling all the ones that you like. Oh, I like family, I like creativity, I like impact, I like abundance, I like money, I like whatever. I like travel. And then you have to go through the slow process of going back and forth through it until you only have three, and you have to rank them in order. And for me, it's impact, family, and abundance, and it has changed over time. It used to be family, impact, and abundance, and the way I use that is a compass for making decisions. And so if I'm gonna make a big decision, am I gonna write this book or not gonna write this book? Am I gonna start this business or not start that business? Am I gonna take this job or not take that job? This is not about picking what movie to stream on Netflix tonight. I ideally want it to be a 9 out of 10 on all three of those. And I realized that those were the authentic things that drove me, and I, at some point I had to realize that family really wasn't first for me. It's up there, but once my kids became teenagers and wanted to spend less and less time with me, and now we're this close to being empty nesters, I realized I wasn't making my big decisions around that first. I was asking, "What kind of impact will this make?"

Jay Schwedelson: All Right? well

Jay Papasan: So that's the short form. It's a easy 30-minute exercise to give you a compass

Jay Schwedelson: Okay. I need, uh, uh, I'm gonna make this about me for a second. So my, uh, I have a son who's gonna be a sophomore in college and my daughter's gonna be a freshman, so in about a few weeks I'm gonna be an empty nester. And, you know, to your point, um, my why is always my family, but my why is likely going to change. I, I, and I guess on a practical level, I'm curious about something. If I went ahead and I looked at your calendar, your Outlook calendar, whatever calendar, your Google calendar, and I looked at the last 30 days of your calendar and, and I didn't, you didn't tell me what your three things were, would I be able to know what your purpose and your one thing was by looking at your calendar? 'Cause I understand, okay, it's abundance. Do I go on Jay Papasan's calendar and it says, uh, uh, this and dash abundance? Like, like how does it line up on a very, very minute level?

Jay Papasan: Well, I-- what I love, what you just said, it's a test. Like, if I followed you around for a week and I saw how you actually used your time, would I see your values reflected? So the family would, right? For the last, I think, 16 years, 17 years, every Wednesday night my wife have date night. And very early on we realized, 'cause we had kids 16 months apart and our second one was colicky and we had no family in Austin. So I was leading a huge division at work. I was writing a book. My wife was winding down her business to become a full-time mom. It was stress central. So we eventually, as soon as our youngest was baby city, ba-baby city sitter ready, we established our date night. We tried it on Fridays and Saturdays. We couldn't make it stick. We eventually moved it to Wednesdays. And I believe if you looked at the vacations and the time off I have planned out sometimes a year in advance or longer, you would see the family show up. Impact, you have to know what that means to me. How do I make an impact? I make an impact by writing. So you would see a minimum of four days a week with a two-hour writing block to launch the day. You wouldn't know whether or not I honor that every day, 'cause just like you, I get distracted, but my intention is to spend my time. So if you understand how people take action on their values, you can make that, but that is the ultimate test. Does your calendar reflect your values? Does your calendar reflect your goals? I want my goals to reflect my values and then my calendar to reflect both. And I actually wrote like a ChatGPT thing to like go through people's calendars, and I was like, "This is kind of a waste of a time," right? I'm just now having fun with AI instead of doing the hard work, is asking the question: Am I really investing my time where I say? Does the, the video match the audio? And I feel like most weeks I'm there. And but like everybody else, people write the books they need to read. Just you have to know that. So just like everybody else,

Jay Schwedelson: say that again. What does that mean?

Jay Papasan: people write the books they need to read. talk to the people who get obsessed about a topic. They often are obsessed about it because it's also the thing they're seeking

Jay Schwedelson: That is so... I mean, maybe everybody knows that. I haven't been an author for long enough. I've been an author for five minutes, but to me, that's very profound because I'll tell you, I wrote that in my book, Stupider People Have Done It, and then sometimes I feel like a fraud. I'm gonna be honest. Because what happens is in the book, there's a lot of this motivation stuff. "You can do it. Don't stop." All this garbage, and there's a lot of days where I wake up, I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm a total failure. I'm an imposter syndrome. I don't know what I'm doing." And then my wife will say to me, "I think you need to read your own book."

Jay Papasan: Yes

Jay Schwedelson: know? And, and so it's, it's nice to know that that's like a... Is that, that's, you, like for yourself, for example, have you ever chased the wrong one thing for a period of years? Have you always been like, "Nope, I got it right"?

Jay Papasan: Of course I have. Of course I have. Like, when we turned in the manuscript for this book, the book clocks in at about 230 pages. When we turned in the manuscript after working on it for four and a half years, and our publisher did not publish a single book for two years waiting on it, right? He sent it back to us and he said, "Jay, when people buy a book called 'The ONE Thing,' they don't expect a doorstop. Apply the principles of the book and cut everything that doesn't belong." And the book was 440 pages before we cut it down to its final incarnation, because just like everybody else, our bias is towards addition. So when we want something more, we add more activities. When we want to have something, we add, add, add. That's just our bias. And so we keep adding new things to our commitments, new things to our calendars. "Oh, I should do this habit too," instead of subtracting. So I've had coaches for the last 18 years. I'm rarely without one, and kind of their number one job is to look at my goals and my calendar and what I say is important to me, and call me on my own BS. So yeah, I've hired the wrong people. I've written many, many books that'll never see the light of day because I get about halfway through it and I'm like, "Oh, I'm not really into this." Like, I was excited about it, but not write a whole book and publish a whole book and promote a whole book excited about it, 'cause that's a long journey. So yeah, I've-- I'm as guilty as anyone, and Gary is very entrepreneurial. He will chase ideas, too. So people throw our book at us all the time, especially our spouses

Jay Schwedelson: Well, I, I think that's so healthy for everyone to hear, especially coming from you, that, you know, you haven't always had, knew the right one thing or, or chased the thing or whatever. But in general, for everybody out there, I mean, there is no shortage of productivity hacks, uh, that people do. Are, are there, like, do you think there's a point where people are doing these productivity hacks that actually become some form of, like, procrastination? Or, like, do you think productivity hacks are like, yeah, do them, it helps you get to the, the thing or whatever?

Jay Papasan: I think, uh, oh, I can't remember the name of it. It's, uh, somebody's law, but basically when the measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. And I feel like we're playing that game where the act of organizing our productivity and tracking our habits and doing all the little things, and most of those little things will give you a 1% edge. They're not the fundamentals. If you wanna be a great writer, you need to write regularly, you need to study craft, and you need to read good books. It's not more complicated than that. And everybody's out there going, "Well, I need the Hemingway app," or, "I need to have my Claude account set up with all of my past things." That's all great, but those are all like 1% advantages, so when you're an Olympic athlete, that matters. You're not doing the fundamentals. So I feel like when we overcomplicate things, we are pre-loading our excuse for failure. That is all it is. What-- I see people who are busy all the time, Jay, they're hiding. Because being productive and working long hours is celebrated, and it looks like you're doing important shit. But most of the time we're avoiding the very thing we're afraid of. So yeah, I think it's a tell. I think when people are so indexed on this living the perfect day, God bless them if they're really trying, but all they're gonna do is give themselves heartburn and anxiety. It's, it has to be simple for us to live it on a daily basis. So like you're edging into my soapbox territory, so I'll sh- I'll cut myself off.

Jay Schwedelson: No, no, no. Okay, uh, this is very important for me to hear all this 'cause I, I, I, I... All right, now I need to ask you a few rapid-fire questions before I run out of time with you. Number one, is multitasking bad?

Jay Papasan: It depends on if one of the actual activities matters to you. I can listen to a podcast and walk my dog. It is not the ideal walk for my dog, but my dog does not deserve the ideal walk every damn day. I also should entertain myself so that I walk my dog more often. I can talk on a Bluetooth while I drive. There's lots of things that we do at the same time. But if I'm at the dinner table with my wife for a precious few hours, our phones should not be in our sights,

Jay Schwedelson: Okay

Jay Papasan: There are activities in life, driving a car, flying a plane, doing surgery, right, where it's basically illegal to multitask because lives are at stake. I think when we're doing our most important work in any area of our life, right? For me, when I'm writing, I should not be multitasking. When I'm on date night with my wife, which is the cornerstone habit of our relationship, like that's that-- She's an entrepreneur too, so that is where at least once a week we get to connect, and we've made it a ritual. I don't need to be distracted. Are there some weeks that I am? Yes. So it, it matters when it matters, and I know that's a fuzzy answer, but it's a

Jay Schwedelson: it's good.

Jay Papasan: answer

Jay Schwedelson: It's good. I like this. All right, another rapid fire one. You're probably one of the most well-read human beings that I know. I wanna know a book that you've read three times

Jay Papasan: Oh, gosh. Uh, I can think of about three. Um, yeah, I don't, I don't love to rewrite books. I take copious notes in my books so that I can just open them up and I've got my own CliffsNotes if they're really good. I've read "Give and Take" probably at least three times by Adam Grant. It really changed how I approached my default instinct of being generous, 'cause I am one of those people who could easily be taken advantage of because I wanna help people, but I often can do it at the detriment of my own goals and like-- and in order to not disappoint a total stranger, I'm actually disappointing both my family and my future self. So that book gave me a framework for strategic giving. Um, there's a book called "The Defining Decade." I don't even know why I've read that book multiple times, but I've done it because I wanted to read it with my nieces. I know that was one time. I read it for myself and one other time, and if you manage young people, it's got lots of wonderful early in life advice. And the other one is, uh, Peter Drucker. It's actually an essay called "Managing Oneself," and it's one of those like little Harvard essays they bound into a book and charge three times what the paper cost would be. So, but it's tight, timeless, just about reminding yourselves how do we know ourselves better so that we can live better?

Jay Schwedelson: All right, I'm-- The first one I read, the next two I'm gonna read. Uh, I, uh, another random question before we wrap up. Why did you have an ostrich for a pet?

Jay Papasan: You dug a little bit. So we bought a ranch four-- in 2014 today. Today is the anniversary, it showed up on my calendar, uh, that we bought Hammock Ranch, and this guy was the sheriff of Coryell County, still is, I believe. He owned a fence company, so he had put up high fences, and being kind of an eccentric sheriff type in Texas, he had populated that place with all kinds of ca- crazy critters. At one point, he had kangaroos on there, which are dangerous. But he had multiple ostriches. He had gotten rid of the dangerous ones because of his grandkids, but there was a really sweet ostrich named... We called her Elda, and she would lay down and let me pet her. Um, she would let you-- she would-- it was a little scary, but she would eat food out of your hand, and she would follow us around the ranch. So for the, gosh, for the first six and a half years we owned the ranch, she was our pet, but unfortunately, she passed away during COVID.

Jay Schwedelson: Wow. I mean, who's ever said... I don't, you're the first person certainly on this podcast that I ever met that had a pet ostrich certainly named Elda, so I, that, that's

Jay Papasan: Trivia, they have the largest eyeballs of any land ma- mammal

Jay Schwedelson: They have big eggs too, right?

Jay Papasan: Yeah. Yeah. My kids, their first entrepreneurial venture is we rounded up emu and ostrich eggs. I showed them how to blow them out and clean them. They went to the school fair, sold them for 25 bucks each, and they both got their first Xboxes that way

Jay Schwedelson: Wow. Uh, uh, do you... This is the dumbest question I've ever asked. Do you eat scrambled ostrich eggs? Is that bad to say?

Jay Papasan: Uh, I'm sure some people do. We tried-- We had emus too. We tried both emu and ostrich, and all I can say is it's very, very, very yolky, which is not great for a scrambled egg. But it is just a giant... Like, one ostrich egg is the equivalent of about 14 large eggs in terms of it filled up the whole pan.

Jay Schwedelson: Wow

Jay Papasan: um, but very yolky. I told Wendy if we'd really been clever before she passed away, maybe we would've made some flan or some crème brûlée, like something that really just requires a lot of egg yolk, and it might've been really unique. But we never got

Jay Schwedelson: honored her with flan. Um, well, listen, I'm honored that you have been here. Everybody listen. Everybody needs to go follow Jay on Instagram. We're gonna put it all in the show notes, everywhere. It's Jay Papasan, but it's spelled P-A-P-A-S-A-N, but sounds like a Z. Okay, and then, uh, he's just incredible, and get the book, The ONE Thing. If you do nothing else today, get this book. It really will give you a purpose and clarity and, and follow Jay. He's an amazing guy. And Jay, it's just an honor for you to be here. Thank you so much

Jay Papasan: And thank you. And if you haven't read Jay's book, you should too. I was just telling him I was reading it to bone up on this podcast, and you did a good job here, man. This is a very readable book. Thank you

Jay Schwedelson: I apprec- it means a lot coming from you. It really does. And, uh, we're gonna get you back for part two, so thanks again