Jay Papasan began his career at HarperCollins Publishers, where he helped develop bestsellers like Body-for-Life by Bill Phillips and Go for the Goal by Mia Hamm. After moving to Austin, he joined Keller Williams Realty International and, in 2003, co-authored The Millionaire Real Estate Agent with Gary Keller and Dave Jenks—a book that has now sold over a million copies.
He went on to co-author The Millionaire Real Estate Investor and SHIFT, but it’s The ONE Thing, his #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller with Gary Keller, that’s become his most defining work. Translated into 44 languages and with over 3.8 million copies sold, The ONE Thing has appeared on more than 500 national bestseller lists and remains a go-to resource for anyone looking to live with greater focus and purpose.
Today, Jay continues to speak and teach around the world. Whether helping business leaders, creatives, or parents, his mission is simple: helping people spend more time on what matters most.
1) Like so many, I greatly admire your wisdom when it comes to reverse-engineering big goals. For instance, starting with one’s desired vision of their future and then working backward. Why is it so powerful to begin with the end in mind, and what have you witnessed as the consequences when people skip this step?
We call it “goal setting to the now.” It’s about working backward from a distant goal and chunking it down to what you need to do right now. If I want to write a bestselling book someday, or become a millionaire someday, whatever your big goal is, ask yourself, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do right now that will make everything else easier or unnecessary?”
Most people can’t bridge that gap between their big someday goal and what they should be doing today.
We don’t naturally know how to act on a daily basis in a way that aligns with where we want to go. That was a big idea for me when we started writing The ONE Thing. I remember thinking, “Why did no one teach me this in high school?” It’s a remarkably simple yet powerful process.
Later, I learned that people in the military often do learn this kind of planning as part of their training. But in general, it’s not something we’re taught. We are not taught how to break big goals down into manageable steps so that we can say, “Okay, I made a tiny bit of progress this week.”
Now, more people are writing about this. Folks like Sahil Bloom and Ann-Laure Le Cunff are sharing similar frameworks. That’s encouraging. We actually had a chapter in the book that didn’t make it called The Low-Hanging Fruit Is a Lie. The idea is that if you haven’t looked out into the future to figure out your direction, then every time you look up, you end up defaulting to what’s easy and obvious.
People say, “I could launch a course” or “I could write a short book.” They pick something that fits in a 90-day or one-year window. They want to cross a finish line quickly, so they grab the biggest thing they think they can finish and go after it. From the outside, it appears they’re making progress. But when I talk to them, when they show up at our front door, they’ve been living a version of Groundhog Day (or maybe Groundhog Year!). Every January, they’re back at square one.
They’re moving fast, but they’re not really going anywhere. That’s the cost of prioritizing speed and action over clarity. I think that’s one of the illnesses of our age. If we prioritize for clarity first, then we can get true productivity. That’s the shift.
So yes, work backward from something you believe in today. We can discuss later how inaccurate we are at predicting what we’ll want in the future, but it’s still far better than waking up every day or month and asking, “What’s next?”.
Most people don’t truly believe in their five-year goals when they set them. But if they stick to the activities, they often look up two or three years later and realize they’re about to cross the finish line. That’s why I believe dreaming big is like a muscle. We get better at it with practice.
My wife and I started setting five-year goals 19 years ago. At first, we were terrible at long-term planning. However, over time, especially in areas like finances and health, we have improved. We have improved because we have more reps; goals now feel more predictable. We can look ahead and say, “Okay, if we just do these things, this is where we’ll end up.”
Look, nobody has a crystal ball. Ten years out? I’m still guessing. But five years? I’m confident in certain areas because we’ve just done it so many times.
2) For someone feeling stuck or unsure about what they want ‘someday,’ what strategies can help surface meaningful long-term goals without falling into vague aspirations, societal scripts, or setting unrealistic expectations?
We wrote about Bronnie Ware in The ONE Thing, and since then, it feels like everyone has mentioned her Five Regrets of the Dying. A top regret is, “I didn’t live my own life.” We all fall into that trap. It’s easy to get caught up in expectations from parents, sometimes from a spouse, or even just whatever gives us a sense of validation. A lot of people chase that instead of doing the hard work of figuring out who they really are and what they actually want. And that process is messy. It takes time.
To be totally transparent, when we were writing the book, I remember turning to Gary and saying, “I don’t have a purpose. At least, I haven’t articulated it.” And I was about to go on the road and teach this to people. I felt like a bit of a fraud. I spent that summer thinking about it, and the best I could come up with (and it’s still at the top of my goal sheet, by the way) is to be the best husband and father I can be.
I needed something short and clear that felt real to me. It had to be authentic and work as a decision-making tool. When I speak with people trying to figure out their life purpose, I often ask, “What will that do for the world?” And once they answer with excitement, I’ll follow up with, “Okay. Now imagine we talk again in twenty years, and you’ve made no progress. You’re pretty sure you’re going to fail. How does that feel?”
If failure doesn’t evoke a strong emotional reaction, I’ll usually tell them they might be heading in the right direction, but that the goal is probably still more aspirational than authentic. Because if you can think about failing at it and not feel anything deep, it probably isn’t a purpose-level goal.
And I always emphasize that your purpose is personal. No one else has to understand it. Someone might look at your purpose and say, “How does that even move you to do anything?” But if it stirs something in you, that’s what matters.
For me, the moments in life I regret most are when I disappointed the people I love, namely my spouse and my kids. I tell my kids I want them to live a certain way, and they’re smart. I’m blessed and cursed with smart kids. They’ll call me out if I’m being a hypocrite. And I don’t like that. I want to live in integrity, especially for them, because I know how powerful role models can be.
That might not motivate anyone else, but for me, if I connect my actions to earning the respect of my spouse and kids, that lights me up. They know I’m doing my best. Even if I’m not always winning, they see that I’m trying to live my best life. That keeps me going. I won’t quit. I’ll run a marathon or whatever it takes. But again, that’s my fuel.
If people want to live their best life, not someone else’s version of it, they have to give themselves permission to ask, “What really pulls me forward?” That answer doesn’t come overnight.
That’s also a test to determine whether the goal is aspirational or authentic. Aspirations are fine in goal setting, but purpose is something deeper. Purpose pulls us through hard choices. It’s the thing that helps us decide which direction to take when the path isn’t clear. And we have to recognize that discovering it takes time.
Furthermore, when we’re younger, we often don’t have the life experience to know what we’ll need later. I learned that from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. We’re poor predictors of our future selves. You’re not a unique snowflake. If you think you might want to live in Pittsburgh, go talk to people in Pittsburgh. If they like it, odds are you will too. Because we are poor predictors when we are young, we have people play with their purpose statements. And I always joke with them, “Please don’t run out and get this tattooed on your arm.” At this stage, your purpose should serve as a guiding compass, a tool to help you make informed decisions. You’re going to test it. You’re going to succeed and fail with it. What matters is paying attention to whether it resonates over time.
When we researched this topic, we found that by around age 30, only about 20 percent of people had a clear sense of purpose. And most of that 20 percent were deeply religious, meaning religion was where their purpose came from. That data gave me some relief. I realized I wasn’t behind. I didn’t need a big road-to-Damascus moment where everything suddenly made sense. That’s not how it works for most people.
But it is worth pursuing. Because when you do start to tap into your purpose, it becomes a tailwind. It doesn’t make you unstoppable, but it sure helps you keep going when things get tough.
3) To your point, clarity of purpose can be an amazing filter for what matters now, but a growing body of research suggests that we often mislead ourselves initially when it comes to purpose. How do you reconcile long-term vision with the messiness and unpredictability of real life?
There’s a story Jonathan Haidt tells in The Happiness Hypothesis about the rider and the elephant. The image is a four-ton elephant walking through the jungle with a 40-pound kid on its back, holding a bamboo stick, supposedly guiding it. Haidt says, intellectually, you know the kid isn’t really in charge. If the elephant doesn’t want to go somewhere, it’s not going to go.
The trick is recognizing that the rider is your head and the elephant is your heart. Your heart is always in charge. I used to share Haidt’s analogy when I was teaching purpose, because it illustrates how we think we’re driving the bus, but we’re not. That’s why we have to look backward for clues. When did you feel truly fulfilled? When did you feel regret? If you’re young, you may not have many of those moments yet. But the clues are there.
Honestly, I felt a lot of relief when I realized I didn’t need to have a perfect purpose statement right away. I had already been on a path, probably for reasons I couldn’t yet articulate. So I agree with the research. Life is messy. Imperfection is part of the process.
If we were to write a second edition of The ONE Thing, I think we’d include core values as a stepping stone to discovering one’s purpose. We’ve worked with tens of thousands of people, and we’ve found that most can identify their top three values in about thirty minutes. And once they have that, they’ve got something to guide their decisions. That’s the point of all this: having a compass for making big decisions.
People often want a long list—ten things that matter to them—but we ask them to focus on the top three and put them in order. I was influenced by Essentialism, which discusses hiring criteria. They identified three top qualities for new hires, and if a candidate didn’t score a nine or ten on all three, they were not advanced to the next round. That kind of clarity was eye-opening to me.
My values are impact, family, and abundance. They each have their own definitions and rules because I’ve lived with them for a while. When I face a big decision, I run it through that filter. How does it rank on those three? That gives me something solid to work with.
We’ve been using this approach for about seven years. When people go through our coaching programs, we have them revisit their values every quarter. What we’ve seen is that the wording may shift slightly, and the order might change, but the core values remain mostly the same. Maybe someone swaps “creativity” for “creation,” but it’s still in the same ballpark. Over time, the picture becomes clearer.
Values give you a faster path to a reliable compass. When your decisions align with your values, there’s a strong likelihood that you’ll be satisfied with them in the long run. That’s the idea we’re working from.
4) There are so many great resources where you get into the model of purpose, priority, and productivity, I’m not going to make you go down that road here (READER: if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of The ONE Thing). Given this model, though, I’m curious where our friend Shawn Blanc’s concept of margin sits. How does “making space” fit into The ONE Thing methodology, if at all?
It’s really important to build in mental space so we can actually make good decisions. Without it, we end up like that character in a horror movie who barricades themselves in the bathroom instead of running out the front door. We make urgent decisions without thinking clearly, and it doesn’t take as much time as people think to avoid that.
I’ll credit Keith Cunningham here. He’s an Austin local who wrote a book called The Road Less Stupid. The whole premise is that he lost millions and realized, “I don’t need to do smarter things, I just need to do fewer stupid things. And to do fewer stupid things, I need thinking time.” He suggests an hour a week for entrepreneurs.
Not to one-up that, but we try to get people to start with just 30 minutes. If you can do an hour, great. But even half an hour makes a real difference. I often say we support doers who need space to dream. They’re always doing, but without margin, they never get to step back, see what they’ve built, and ask where it’s headed. That’s what margin is to me. You don’t dream while you’re doing. You need space for that. You need thinking time.
I also believe the world doesn’t need a new way to set goals. What people need is a way to have a relationship with their goals. That’s why I tell people: go on a weekly date with your goals. It takes about 30 minutes. You look at your goals and your calendar, and you ask, “Does my calendar reflect my goals?”
If it doesn’t, you cancel things. The idea is that your goals should align with your purpose and core values. So now the rubber meets the road. If you said you’re writing a book this year, there should be multiple writing blocks on your calendar each week. Or at least research blocks. If they’re not there, your time isn’t reflecting your priorities.
That 30-minute check-in keeps you in conversation with what you said you wanted. It also gives you the freedom to revise. I do this all the time. I’ll look up at the end of the first quarter, review my annual goals, and think, “Why is that on there?” Maybe I wrote down “Buy a boat” and haven’t thought about it once since. I don’t care about it. It was just an idea.
It is important to note that this is not about lowering the bar. I’m not talking about people who say they’ll make 100 widgets, realize they won’t, so they revise the goal to 50 just to say they hit it. That’s different. I’m talking about making sure the goal was even real in the first place.
So each week, I revisit: Is it still aligned? I do this with my wife as well. When we had small kids, it helped us stay on the same page. Who’s doing drop-off? Who’s picking up? These days, it’s things like, “We just bought an investment property. Who’s going to the closing? Are we doing it remotely?” That kind of coordination happens during our weekly check-in.
It usually takes us about 20 to 30 minutes. At the beginning of the year, it takes longer, but with practice, it becomes a rhythm. That’s the real function of margin in the ONE Thing framework. It gives you space to step back and check the alignment between what you said you wanted and how you’re actually spending your time.
5) What advice do you have about the methods and cadence one should have in revisiting and revising their long-term vision? Do you have any rituals or checkpoints that you personally use to assess whether you’re still on the right track?
We call it the rhythm of accountability and achievement. One of the things I was taught early on, and now tell all my team members, is to block your vacation time at the beginning of the year. Don’t wait until you’re burned out and suddenly need an emergency vacation, because that’s how you end up sitting on the beach with your laptop.
Just pick a week in June, another in August, maybe one in October. You don’t even need to know where you’re going yet. Work will begin to flow around it. It’s like putting a boulder in a stream; the water naturally adjusts to its presence. That idea really stuck with me the first time Gary (my business partner) showed me his month-at-a-glance paper calendar. It was around October or November, and he photocopied the following year’s version so we could sync our writing days. I noticed every other month, he had a vacation week blocked. I asked where he was going in April, and he said, “I don’t know, but I’ll probably need it.” That stopped me in my tracks. You can claim that time before life fills it for you. If you don’t end up needing it, fine. But if you do, it’s already protected.
That’s why, in The ONE Thing, the first thing we tell people to do is time-block their time off. Even if you can’t take full weeks, maybe it’s one Friday a month for a long weekend, do it. My wife used to block off Saturday mornings for walks with her best friend. That was her time. People might say that’s not spontaneous, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s important, so we schedule it.
We’re generally pretty good at following our calendars. That’s why we have a date night every Wednesday night. It’s not flashy or spontaneous, but it’s consistent, and we have a great time.
One of the most important rituals my wife started was our annual couples retreat. When our kids were young, we realized we needed something that was specific to reconnecting with one another. She booked a cabin in Wimberley and hired an overnight babysitter, which felt like a huge deal at the time because they were really young. She brought a list of questions: How do we feel about our relationship? Our time? My job? It was a little awkward at first, but powerful.
The key was that we had to leave the house. If we stayed home, I’d get distracted by dishes or mowing the lawn. Even if we just rented a room downtown on Priceline, the rule was: leave home, make it at least a day and a half, and include something rewarding. Back then, sleeping in was the reward. I’d order room service and read the newspaper in bed. No one is crawling on me—pure luxury!
That became our ritual. During that annual retreat, we’d set our “someday” and five-year goals. We’d ask, where are we going as a family? And based on that, what do we want next year to look like? We’d often finish by planning something we were excited about, like a big trip, and then conclude by going out for a fun dinner. That was the reward for doing the work.
From that foundation, we each created our own annual goals. These days, I keep my goals in an analog notebook: my someday goals, five-year goals, and one-year goals that my wife and I agree on. I also carry a one-page “heads-up display” with my professional and personal goals for the year. From there, I break things down: What does this mean for the month? What do I need to do this week?
Every week, I spend 20 minutes reviewing all of that. I review what I said I’d do this month, then ask: what do I need to do this week to stay on track? It’s all chunked down, but it’s aligned. These days, our lives are more complex, so annual planning requires more effort. But in the early years, it was pretty simple. Hit my quota, get a raise, maybe learn to fly fish. One year, I looked back and realized I had no professional goals at all, just hobbies. I don’t know who that kid was anymore, but I like him.
Now, it’s really about two core things. First, can you get away and think and dream big about your life? And second, if you have a spouse, partner, or even a business partner, can you do that together?
From there, build a rhythm. Start with the big picture once a year. Then break it down: What does that mean for this quarter or month? What do I have to do in the near term to stay on track?
Every week, I have a short list of priorities. It’s not a million things—it’s usually four or five. I’m looking for seven to ten hours a week that reflect those priorities. The rest is soccer practice, Zoom calls, and all the other stuff that fills up our time. But those few hours are sacred, and I protect them.
That’s the rhythm. That 20-minute check-in each week is where all the alignment and all the magic happen.