SPECIAL GUEST!! The ONE Thing AUTHOR! 7 Million Copies Sold! Jay Papasan 🔥 REAL Secret to Productivity 🔥| Ep. 545

0:01Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. 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's here? Jay Papasan. Now, you probably know him because 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 7 million copies.

0:41The 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 going to 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 when they had 27 employees a zillion years ago. And he helped to build this thing with Gary Keller.

1:14And he led their publishing and their education, their strategic content. He is a beast of a human being. And we're going to 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 Productive, which is the company behind making sure the one thing methodology seeps into all of our brains. We are going to become more everything today, more purpose, more everything today. Jay, I'm so excited to have you here. That was amazing. Like, it's really awkward to hear someone introduce you sometimes, but that was great.

1:45Thank you so much for all the kind words. Well, you deserve them. You deserve a lot more words. And today's going to be almost more like a therapy session for me because I'm going to be very honest. I have I've had a problem. I continue to have a problem that I make lists of things. I tell them to do this productivity hack. I'm going to time block. I'm going to 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 purpose. Like, what are we getting wrong when we think about being productive?

2:22What is the one thing all about? 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 going to impact my sleep score, which then of course impacted my sleep score. And I'm just like, okay, I got to ditch some of this. Like I want to measure to learn. And then I've got to get out of this. Everything is optimizing for perfection.

3:00So I like that you just put the book in a different category. Most people think of the book as 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 have said your big why. We could have 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.

3:41And 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 want to lead? Can they attach purpose back to the work they're doing to get them where they want to 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 going to raise so much money for it. Right. I know that you're raising money for cancer. You attach meaning to something and the hard work gets easy. And a lot of people miss that with our book. So how do you find that clarity?

4:20Because for me, when I think about the one thing, I'm like, okay, my purpose is my family. I want to take care of my family. Okay. Okay, great. And then I come to work and go, Jay, you lazy piece of garbage. Work harder because you want to 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. So most of the time when people say that, they're bullshitting. Sorry. Yes. And I don't say that you are. Their family is 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?

4:58Is that why you were on your phone when they were at a birthday party? No, no. It's like, yes, I want to be a great parent too. I want to be a great husband, all of those things. But there's different levels of meaning. So that's probably in the constellation. 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.

5:38And 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 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.

6:19And 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 as a compass for making decisions. And so if I'm going to make a big decision, am I going to write this book or not going to write this book? Am I going to start this business or not start that business? Am I going to 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 nine out of 10 on all three of those. And I realized that those were the authentic things that drove me. And at some point I had to realize that family really wasn't first for me.

7:01It'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? All right. So that's the short form. It's an easy 30-minute exercise to give you a compass. Okay. I'm going to make this about me for a second. So my son is going to be a sophomore in college. My daughter is going to be a freshman. So in about a few weeks, I'm going to be an empty nester. And to your point, my why is always my family, but my why is likely going to change.

7:46Yes. 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 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? Because I understand, okay, it's abundance. Do I go on Jay Papazian's calendar and it says this, uh this and dash abundance like like how does it line up on a very very minute level well 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 yes 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 because we had kids 16 months apart and our second one was colicky and we had no family in Austin.

8:45So 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 babysitter 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.

9:26So 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 because 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 chat GPT thing to like go through people's calendars. And I was like, this is kind of a waste of a time, right?

10:08I'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 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. Wait, say that again. What does that mean? People write the books they need to read. go 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 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 my book stupid people have done it and then sometimes i feel like a fraud i'll 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 like oh oh my God, I'm a total failure.

11:03I'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. Yes. You know, and so it's nice to know that that's like a, 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? 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.

11:39Right. 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.

12:24I'm rarely without one. And the 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. Because that's a long journey. So yeah, 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.

13:11Well, 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 chase the thing or whatever. But in general, for everybody out there, I mean, there is no shortage of productivity hacks that people do. 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 thing or whatever. I think, I can't remember the name of it. It's somebody's law.

13:45But 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 one percentage. edge. They're not the fundamentals. If you want to 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 thing.

14:24That'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. 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 going to do is give themselves heartburn and anxiety.

15:18It 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 cut myself off. No, no, no. Okay. This is very important for me to hear all this. Cause I, I, I, all right. Now I need to ask you a few rapid fire questions before I run out of time. Number one, is multitasking bad? 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.

15:59There's lots of things 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. Okay. Right? 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.

16:45I don't need to be distracted. Are there some weeks that I am? Yes. So it matters when it matters. And I know that's a fuzzy answer, but it's a truthful answer. It's good. I like this. All right. Another rapid fire one. You're probably one of those well-read human beings that I know. I want to know a book that you've read three times. Oh, gosh. I can think of about three. Wow. Yeah, 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 cliff notes if they're really good. I've read Give and Take probably at least three times by Adam Grant.

17:26Yes, excellent. Really changed how I approached my default instinct of being generous. Because I am one of those people who could easily be taken advantage of because I want to help people. But I often can do it at the detriment of my own goals. 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. 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.

18:07And if you manage young people, it's got lots of wonderful early in life advice. I'm going to read. And the other one is 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 charged 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? All right. The first one I read, the next one I'm going to read, another random question before we wrap up. Why did you have an ostrich for a pet? You dug a little bit.

18:44So we bought a ranch in 2014 today. Today is the anniversary. It showed up on my calendar that we bought Hammock Ranch. And this guy was the sheriff of Coriel 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 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 name. We called her Elda and she would lay down and let me pet her.

19:28She 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. Wow. I mean, who's ever said, I don't, you're the first person certainly on this podcast that I ever met that a pet ostrich certainly named elda so i that's just trivia they have the largest eyeballs of any land mammal they big eggs too right 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.

20:17Wow. Do you, this is the dumbest question I've ever asked. Do you eat scrambled ostrich eggs? Is that bad to say? 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. Wow. It filled up the whole pan. Wow. So, um, but very yolky. I told Wendy, if we'd really been clever before she passed away, maybe we would have made some flan or some creme brulee, like something that really just requires a lot of egg yolk.

20:56And it might've been really unique, but we never got around 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 Jay Papasan, but it's spelled P-A-P-A-S-A-N, but it sounds like a Z. Okay. And then 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 follow Jay. He's an amazing guy. And Jay, it's just an honor for you to be here. Thank you so much. 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.

21:37This is a very readable book. Thank you. I appreciate it means a lot coming from you. It really does. And we're going to get you back for part two. So thanks again. Wait, don't go anywhere. There's two really important things I want to tell you. First off, my book is out. Stupider people have done it. And I don't know how, but this book has made it to the USA Today bestseller list, one of the top books in the entire country. Now, all net author proceeds are going to the V Foundation for Cancer Research. And between this book and things that we're doing, we've now donated$130 ,000 in the fight against cancer.

22:13If you buy this book, if you buy the Kindle, the audio on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, anywhere, money is going to fight cancer. We need your help. Please grab a copy of Stupider People Have Done It. The second thing is I wanna work with you. I wanna amplify your brand. I want my agency to help you get more customers, more subscribers, more whatever. I want to partner with you in so many different ways. All you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com, jschwedelson.com. And then there's a button in the upper right-hand corner that says partner. Fill out that form. Let's work together. Let's do stuff.

22:45And if this wasn't the worst podcast you've ever heard, it would be amazing if you follow the show, if you leave a comment, if you tell your friends about it, I appreciate you and go out there and crush it.