چیزی برای تمرکز روی انگلیسی

017 - The ONE THING to Focus on for English

Hey there! Kevin here, with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast coming to you from the lovely, beautiful, fun city of Denver, Colorado! How are you? What are you doing out there? I can see you!

Today’s episode, I’m going to talk about a book called the “One Thing”. This book is by Gary Keller and J. Patterson. These two guys are very successful realtors, two guys in the real estate industry, meaning they sell property and houses. And they’ve also written a lot of books including this one, the One Thing.

This book is all about success coming from focusing on one thing.

In order to be successful, we really need to figure out what we have to focus on, and in the book, they specifically give you ways to figure out what to focus on and how to avoid distractions.

Which I find quite useful. As in a lot of these books I’m talking about this because, I’m trying to apply these lessons to my life and sharing them with you. And in this episode, I’m going to give you some insights from the book the One Thing, on how to choose what to focus on, how to avoid distractions and how to little more successful life.

Okay, let’s get started! So the first lesson in the book that I’m going to talk about is all about thinking big. Failing to think big can limit your opportunities. If you think big enough, meaning about your future about your goals, if you don’t think big enough, you might miss out on some of the opportunities you will have in the future. A couple of examples from the book; Mr. Guinness, the founder of Guinness beer, an Irish beer ,maybe you know it.

It’s that nice heavy thick black creamy beer. I’m not a big fan of it; I like my beer to be a little crispier, a little more bubbly, but it can be good. Have you ever had a car bomb shot? Anyway getting a sidetracked here. When Guinness founded his company in the 1700s, he signed a 9000-year lease on the property. A lease is when you rent something and you make a contract to rent the property. So Mr. Guinness wasn’t thinking well let’s just do a five-year lease and see if this works. He signed a 9000-year lease on the building where he makes beer. The brewery thinking big, and obviously now, Guinness is a huge beer company, very successful and still around. Even a few hundred years, 300 years later. So when you’re deciding what your goals are. It helps to think big, your actions will be bigger and more important. Got it?

So the second lesson in the book that I’m going to talk about is, based on a Mark Twain quote. The quote is, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started, the secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks and starting on the first one.”

When we have big projects in the future, or things that we really want to get done, but they just seem overwhelming, meaning they seem like there’s just too many things to do and it’s just too difficult and it’s overwhelming, the best way to get started on these is to break the tasks into small manageable tasks and start on the first one. So the focus question from this book, probably the most important phrase in the whole book is this; “What’s the one thing I can do? Such that by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary.”

Let me repeat that; “what’s the one thing I can do? Such that by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary.” And we can break this question down into two levels.

First, on a macro level, the focusing question can help you see the big picture and identify your overall goal, the long-term goal, where you want to be in the future. The one thing you want to do and achieve in your life. Maybe it’s your career goal, being the president of the company. In a second, more practical short-term level, brings up the question of prioritizing immediate options and selecting the most effective task to start with. Here you’re looking for that one thing, that you can do right now. For example, making that phone call, or sending an email or helping out somebody at the company who you think might be able to get you ahead. So in my podcast, on a macro level obviously, I’m going to have a podcast that thousands of people listen to every week, I can share my lessons, I can pass what I’m learning to others to help them to improve their lives and their business skills and also become more confident English speakers. That’s the big macro level, the big picture, and on the more practical short-term micro level, what’s something that I can do right now?

Well I’m doing it. I’m recording a lesson; I’m recording a podcast.

Are there thousands of people listening to this? No! But it’s the step that I need to take to get to that point. So that’s what I’m doing right now, to get to my big goal which is having a podcast that a lot of people listen to.

And the last lesson of this book is about accepting chaos. Chaos is when things get crazy. You have to develop faith and trust and the fact that if you focus on what’s right, if you focus on the right tasks, all of that other stuff, that crazy chaos will become easier. You can’t let fear of other things not working out right take you away from doing what you need to do. Here is an example; maybe for you. You want to take the IELTS or the TOEFL exam. You know it’s important, but to do so and to do good job on it, you have to start learning how the test works, how to perform on the test, what kind of techniques can help you get a better grade on the test, a better score. You have to start listening and reading to more English. So you know this is what you have to do, you know where you want to be. If you get the IELTS or the TOEFL, you could possibly get a job in another country or a better position at your company or go to school in another country; you know the dream you have, you know what you need to do to get there. And then you even figure out the task that you need to do to get you to that point. However, life gets in the way and you get distracted and sometimes you lose faith. Oh, I don’t think this is going to happen. You have to learn how to accept all of that chaos around you and stay focused on what you know can happen. Have faith in yourself and know that you can do this and stay on course.

Okay, so time to take action. What can you do from here? What are the action steps that the book wants you to take?

1. First thing, think about your future. Visualize the future that you would like to have. Let’s say in five years from now, or even 10 years.

2. The next step is to start visualizing this process to get there.

Visualize the steps it will take, visualize the habits and the skills that you will need to get to that point. They actually did a study once, they tested students who were going to take a test. Half of the students visualize their outcome, they visualize getting good scores before the test, while the other ones visualized what they’re going to do to get those good scores, they visualized the process. The ones that visualize the process as opposed to just the result did better. So get really clear on what steps you’ll need to take to get to that big dream of yours.

1. Next step, ask yourself the focus question every day. What is the one thing that I can do right now that will make everything else easier or unnecessary? And remember go from the macro level to the micro level. The big dream and the small steps to get there.

2. The last one; learn to trust your big ideas learn to trust that you are doing the right tasks to get you to the right goals and all of the other distractions are taking you away from where you want to be. Those are the distractions; those tasks will figure themselves out or they will get easier the more you focus on your main goals. Learn to delegate things to other people, learn to prioritize what you need to get done and have faith in the process, don’t get distracted.

Going through the vocabulary from this episode; in the beginning of the episode at around 22 seconds, I’m talking about the authors of the book “The One Thing”, they are realtors. They are in real estate. Real like the word real fake, opposite of fake is real and they are in real estate, they sell property. They sell houses, they sell land, they are realtors.

A phrasal verb that you’ll hear a lot to this episode is, figure out.

To figure out is to find the answer to something. I figured it out and at 150, I see I like my beer to be a little crispier. Crispy is usually not used with beer. It’s just used with food, fried things are usually crispy, but a beer with a lot of carbonation refreshing, I’d call that crispy.

At two minutes I say getting “sidetracked”. To get sidetracked is to lose the focus of what you’re talking about and start talking about something else. So I was talking about a car bomb shot that something you do with Guinness. Have you ever heard of that? You drop a shot of whiskey and Baileys into a Guinness cup. The full can of Guinness and you drink the whole thing, don’t do that.

A brewery; Brewery is where they make beer, brewery B-R-EW-E-R-Y.

At three minutes 37 seconds I talk about the overwhelming. It’s from the Mark Twain quote “overwhelming”. You’ve heard this in other episodes. To be overwhelmed means you have to many things to do. You feel like things are out of control, you’re stressed out, overwhelmed and stressed are very similar. And at seven minutes and 11 seconds, I say something about life gets in the way. To get in the way, to stop you from moving forward. A car can get in your way. That’s like the literal meaning, but figuratively, life gets in the way means you’re trying to do something, but then other things that you don’t expect get in the way of what you’re trying to do.

Great book, this book is going to help me a lot, I hope it helps you a lot. If you want to know more about the book go to www.feelgoodenglish.com.

Transcripts to this episode are available for members.

And your joke for the day; There’s two fish in a tank, and one fish says to the other fish, hey! How do you drive this thing?

Bye! Bye!