Weekend Favs January 11th

John Jantsch (00:00.92)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jay, and my guest today is Jay Papasan. He’s a bestselling author and VP of strategic content for Keller Williams Realty International. He’s also the CEO of the One Thing Training Company, productive and co-owner of the Papasan Property Group in Austin, Texas. He’s co-authored several bestselling books, including one we’re going to talk a little bit about today, The One Thing.

Surprisingly simple truth about extraordinary results. So Jay, welcome to the show.

Jay Papasan (00:31.209)

Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

John Jantsch (00:33.61)

So I do want to ask about your title. What does a VP of strategic content do?

Jay Papasan (00:40.412)

It’s not what you think. I actually transitioned roles. was running three big departments and then got to focus again around the things I love. And when I was running our big marketing team here for about three years, if you’ve ever run a marketing team, you get lots of cold DMS on LinkedIn and everywhere else. So I was like, okay, I’m going to come up with something that is anti-marketing. So I like strategy. I love creating content. So I just made up a title.

John Jantsch (00:41.987)

You

Jay Papasan (01:09.332)

It doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t think there’s a lot of them out there. So I don’t get many cold DMs, so I consider it a success.

John Jantsch (01:16.654)

Yeah, well, I just assumed that it meant you made up all the content ideas and then told other people to do them.

Jay Papasan (01:24.172)

That is some of what I do. So I’m a part of five podcasts. I help create them. And I do some editorial direction, which is in my past, I was an editor. But I also put my fingers on the keyboards for our books and newsletters.

John Jantsch (01:25.486)

Hahaha

John Jantsch (01:41.067)

So the one thing, book, I read, did come out 11 years ago, 12 years ago? I read it when it came out.

Jay Papasan (01:47.468)

It came out April 1st, 2013, so 11 years ago.

John Jantsch (01:50.22)

Yeah, okay. Still sells year in, year out tons, has sold millions, translated into many languages. Is there anything that you would put your finger on? I mean, it’s one thing for a book to be really popular, but to remain that popular. Is there anything that you’ve identified that you think keeps it in selling year in, out?

Jay Papasan (02:10.412)

I’m a book nerd and my publisher is an engineer. So we probably overthink this to be honest. So Gary was very clear he wanted to write a timeless book. And I’ve had writing professors point out like you can’t use words like Kleenex and Frisbee because nobody will know what they mean in a hundred years. That’s a tissue. That’s a throwing disc. And strangely this guy who started an upstart real estate company thought the same way. So we did set out to write

a book that was more timeless than timely, which is counterintuitive in publishing. It’s very accessible. I ran the whole book through a program called the Hemingway app, and it’s written at a fifth grade reading level. And I had read research that the bestselling authors of all time write at a very surprisingly low grade level, like Hemingway fourth grade. And I’ve trained myself, if I’m honest, I don’t publish anything that’s higher than a sixth grade reading level.

John Jantsch (02:51.182)

Yes.

Jay Papasan (03:08.544)

because we want the widest possible audience to find it accessible and it’s not work to read. And then I do think that we got a little bit of timing. That would be the other big one. We showed up, our book showed up right when smartphones were really everywhere. Our kids had them, they had them in schools and we had so many opportunities to connect and also obligations to do. People didn’t know how to sort through their priorities. And here we are with the book called The One Thing.

John Jantsch (03:13.827)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:37.613)

Yes.

Jay Papasan (03:37.76)

which kind of promised we can kind of help you simplify and focus.

John Jantsch (03:41.654)

Yeah. So a movie that shows up in the book early on of Jack Parlin’s kind of the famous Curly character, say, what’s the secret of life? One thing. What, if any, that impact?

Jay Papasan (03:55.98)

And I think about him on stage at the Oscars, like at age 85 doing one-handed pushups too. Like that’s my memory of that guy. He was legit.

John Jantsch (04:01.11)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What if any role or impact did that have in your thinking?

Jay Papasan (04:11.08)

It was a sideways thing. Gary and I had come up with the idea of the book in 2008. We spent about four and a half years researching and writing it with the team. And we had never actually threw that in, in the mix. But when we were starting to get clued to the finish line and teach it and socialize it, everybody kept coming up and going, well, it’s this all came from city slickers, right? And we’re like, no. So we actually went back and very late in the process added it to the book because

John Jantsch (04:12.781)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:33.614)

Yeah

Jay Papasan (04:39.966)

It was just an expectation. If the book is called The One Thing, that movie was so big, everyone expected it to be connected, so we did. And it’s perfect. I I can’t believe that wasn’t the connection.

John Jantsch (04:41.816)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:48.418)

Yeah.

Yeah, so surely somebody has stopped you at some point and said, but Jay, what’s the one thing?

Jay Papasan (04:59.148)

All the time, right? And that’s honestly what we do in our training company. We do try to help people figure out what matters most. a friend of ours, Sean Blanc, he was sharing with me, like lot of times he works with busy entrepreneurs and he goes, they look up one day and realize that 93 % of their success comes down to two hours a week. It’s just hard to believe that that could be so important those two hours.

John Jantsch (05:02.006)

Yeah.

Jay Papasan (05:29.036)

Thank

John Jantsch (05:29.474)

Yeah. You know, I wonder, I’ve often, in fact, I wrote about this years ago, so more than one dude, I guess. If somebody just said, look, I’m just going to start working 20 hours a week. That’s just all the time I got. Cause I got this other thing, whatever it is. Would they be any less productive? I wonder.

Jay Papasan (05:47.936)

think if they’re committed to a big goal, they’d be more productive. So like, I don’t know, I’ve written about the power of constraints and my wife launched her career just as soon as our youngest child was being dropped off for daycare. And she said, I will only sell between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. because I’m going to be there for drop off and I’m going to be there for pickup. And she was rookie of the year and sold like 85 homes. And it’s not so much.

John Jantsch (05:51.095)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:12.344)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Papasan (06:16.18)

What she did, what she did is what all successful real estate salespeople do. It’s all the stuff that she chose not to do. She wasn’t hanging out at the water cooler. So I think of it like the day before vacation miracle, right? The day before vacation, you are a very productive individual and it’s not because of what you’re doing. You’re doing the right stuff. It’s you’re not doing any of the nonsense.

John Jantsch (06:23.192)

Yeah, right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:37.74)

Yeah, yeah. On April 14th, everybody has time to get their last minute tax preparation done, So what are some of the kind of common, especially in a book that is seemingly simple, it’s not a large book, 150 pages, something like that. What are some of the common misperceptions when people hear that this simple concept?

Jay Papasan (06:43.116)

Yeah, you got it.

Jay Papasan (07:03.444)

You know, when they hear the one thing, I think they think only one thing. And I think that really stops a lot of people in their tracks. I mean, maybe it sells a lot of books because they’re like, well, I want to know what that is. But the reality is we want people to understand it in a given moment, right? This week, this month, this hour, you should be clear about what your number one priority is. And so if you you pick up the US edition of the book, it’s white hardcover.

John Jantsch (07:05.698)

Yeah, right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:26.232)

Yeah.

Jay Papasan (07:31.946)

We never put testimonials on the back. We never did any of the traditional stuff. We always had a question because we were very clear that what was the one thing we wanted people to do when they put down this book? We wanted them ask, like, what’s my one thing? And we wa