Find Your “One Thing” with these Three Questions
Knowing this can help sort out the essential from the chaff.
What is your one thing?
What is the most important part of your life?
Most days find us scrambling over dozens of tasks, running from one to the next. In the midst of all this, we can miss the signal amid the noise. Our body and mind are constantly giving us feedback on our choices. Do you tend to feel stressed, resentful, frustrated? Or do you feel fulfilled, purposeful, and content?
Knowing your one thing can make it easier to sort out the non-essential. And if you can identify the non-essential, you can say “no” politely and without guilt. And if you can say no, you can guide your life to more meaningful outcomes.
But finding your “one thing” in work and life is difficult. It can be frightening, if we discover that our one thing is not, in fact, what we are actually organizing our live around. It takes courage to ask the question, reflect honestly, and put that information into play.
The problem is that most of us, myself included, are usually too busy rushing round to fulfill professional and personal obligations. we find it difficult to make time to really reflect on this.
Even if you do know your one thing, reflecting on it can help to make better choices in the moment, today, tomorrow, next week. Incidentally, this is where a daily habit of prayer or meditation and journaling can become valuable—and just good in itself.
How can you find your one thing? There’s really no shortcut, no hack, no magic fix. It requires reflection, experience, iteration, trial and error. But it starts with stopping—at least for a moment—and thinking. These three questions can help you dial in on your “one thing” in life and work.
Question One: What is most valuable to you?
Everything, as any economist will tell you, has an opportunity cost.
The opportunity cost of something, very roughly put, is what you are all of the other things you are giving up when you choose this particular decision or make this particular transaction.
If I spend twenty dollars on a book, I give up money I could spend on coffee.
If I spend four years in graduate school, I give up years of working in a career.
If I spend this month in Italy, I give up the option of spending it in Thailand.
We can measure the relative value of our desires, partially, in terms of opportunity cost. If I am acting rationally, then the book I buy should at least be worth four expensive lattes to me. The future earnings or meaningful work that results from a professional degree is (hopefully) worth more than the accumulated salary of those years in a paying profession. A month in Italy should be at least as good, from your perspective, as the same month spent in Thailand.
With that in mind, what would you be willing to sacrifice? Would you sacrifice your family over your work? Would you sacrifice your friends over your work? Would you sacrifice your health over your work?
If the answer is “no” to any of these questions, work is not your one thing. Yes: work is necessary, but it is not of ultimate importance in a head-on comparison.
What about health and pleasure? Include in this category the adventures of traveling across the world, checking off your bucket list: hot air balloon rides in Morocco, snorkeling in coral reefs off the coast of Australia, dining at new Michelin star restaurants, seeing the northern lights in the Icelandic winter. All good things. But would you sacrifice your friends or family for these pleasures? If the answer is no, then experience, travel, pleasure would not be your one thing.
You can run the same experiment for other candidates for happiness in your life: influence and ambition, the relative size of your bank account, the attractiveness of your physique, familiarity on social media, prestige or honor in your sector of the industry.
Still, you might say, isn’t it possible to have a bucket of all good things? Is it really necessary to sacrifice your friends or family to work and pleasure? Why can’t we have it all? The point is not to say that you can’t have more than one of these things. The point is to show that one is ultimately more important than another. And at some point, these competing goods will come into conflict. And then: What will you decide is more important?
The odd thing is that we make these sacrifices all the time, in little ways. We vote with our actions. If we say family is more important, but we spend time writing productivity articles instead of attending to our children, we have a problem (guilty). Reflecting on our one thing can help us align our deeper beliefs with our behavior.
Question Two: What will you think about on your deathbed?
Death is coming for all of us. Do we remember that? It puts things in perspective. If we put aside fear, it can bring clarity, focus, and even peace to our life.
Every major religion and philosophy must respond to the fact of death. A spiritual practice that many adopt considers imagining yourself on your deathbed. The purpose of this is not morbid fascination or curiosity but an exercise to consider what is most important in life.
Will you be thinking about that great promotion at work? Or will you be thinking about family and friends you overlooked? Will you be thinking about the social media following you gained? Or will you regret not taking the risk to do what was on your heart?
At least my thoughts in this exercise would tend to focus on people, creativity, authenticity, purpose, and responsibility. My thoughts also tend to emphasize whether or not I made the most of the gift of life. How much time did I throw away on distractions: scrolling through internet platforms, wading through emails, reading the news.… When you compare these activities to our heroes who changed the world for good, the comparison can be pretty embarrassing.
Each day of our life is like a ticket. We get a finite number of these tickets.
If you live to be 79, you have 28,835 total days or tickets to spend on what you will.
But how many have you already spent? How many do you have left?
If you’re 20, you might have 21,549 days
If you’re 40, you might have 14,244 days
If you’re 60, you might have 6,939 days
The point here is not to create anxiety or cling to what is impossible to prolong forever. The finitude of our lives can instead generate a gratitude for what was never really ours. Life is a gift. Our days are limited. Our tickets are running out.
How are you spending yours?
Question 3: What are you best at doing?
Comparative advantage is another foundational principle from economics that can be useful when it comes to thinking about how to spend our time. The point here is not so much to maximize our income, though that is a factor in choosing a profession. The point, rather, is to get at what jives with you, what resonates with you, what naturally moves you to act.
What is easier for you than others to do?
What is faster for you than others to do?
What is less painful for you than others to do?
What is more enjoyable for you than others to do?
The thing that makes you come alive is probably the thing that is going to make you happier.
It is good to strengthen weaknesses, but if you spend your life focusing on strengthening your weaknesses, as Dan Sullivan says, you will end up with a bunch of strong weaknesses.
Address your weaknesses so that they do not slow you down.
But make your profession about cultivating your natural strengths.
Find Your One Thing—Find Your Ikigai
What is your one thing? From another angle: What is your ikigai?
Ikigai roughly translates as: a reason for being, a unique mode of living, a long and happy life.
Héctor García and Francesc Miralles reflect on the concept in their bestselling book of that title.
Héctor García dedicates this book to his brother “who’s said to me more often than anyone else: I don’t know what to do with my life.” Who of us has not been there at some point in life?
Ikigai, in its popular rendering, stands at the intersection of four circles:
Circle one: What do you love?
Circle two: What you are good at?
Circle three: What you can be paid for?
Circle four: What does the world need?
All of these can point to our one “professional” thing, but it leaves an open question. What is your ikigai in a wider, non-professional sense? This is about more than work. I think that comes down to a simpler formula with one circle:
What do you love the most? That is really the “one thing” question.
What would you give up for anything? For most people, I think the most authentic answer will involve persons and integrity (ultimately: how we treat persons, beginning with ourselves, and moving out to others). If you are a theist, this would include, above all, our relationship with God. If you are an atheist, you can obviously still have a humanistic approach to altruism.
So: What do you love the most? What do you want the most?
I think that, properly understood, is the ultimate reason for your existence.
Organize your life around the one thing, and you’ll have a better shot at happiness.