Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
David writes a weekly newsletter about decluttering your home.
He started it for people whose closets, drawers, and garages quietly took over their lives.
He believes a calm, clear home is mostly about letting go, not buying more bins.
His readers know it well — a spare room they can't even walk into anymore.
⛳️ Problem:
David wants his side project to grow, so he says yes to everything.
A newsletter, an Instagram account, a podcast, and a course — all at the same time.
By Friday he's wiped out, with thirty browser tabs open and nothing finished. Yikes.
His struggle:
He's juggling so many projects at once that none of them actually move forward.
🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Focusing Question
Picture a line of dominoes.
The first one is tiny, but each domino can knock over the next one, even when it is about 50% bigger.
So a small first push, lined up right, topples a domino as tall as a building a few rows later. Wild, right?
That's what Gary Keller figured out.
He co-founded Keller Williams, the largest real estate company in the world by number of agents.
He also wrote The ONE Thing, a book that has sold over two million copies.
His big idea: stop trying to push every domino at once.
Most people chase twenty priorities, so they scatter their energy and topple nothing.
So he built one question to find the first domino, and he asks it every day:
"What's the ONE thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"
Answer that, do it first, and everything after it gets easier.
One focused push beats twenty half-hearted ones.
🚗 So David tried it his way.
Back to David and his newsletter about decluttering your home.
He was trying to do everything at once, so nothing moved.
So he stopped, and asked himself Keller's one question.
Before, his Monday list had thirty items, and he ended Friday having half-finished twenty.
Now he asked the real question: which ONE thing makes everything else easier or unnecessary?
The answer was obvious — grow the newsletter, because every other project needs readers first.
So he gave the newsletter his best two hours each morning, before touching anything else.
The podcast and the course could wait; without readers, neither would matter anyway.
Plot twist: he almost checked the podcast numbers by Wednesday.
And the thirty tabs he used to juggle? He didn't miss a single one. Done.
🧸 One focused push beats twenty half-tries. Find your first domino, and the rest fall easier.
The prompt below finds your ONE thing out of everything you're juggling.
You just tell it what's on your plate and the goal you actually care about.
🏄♀️ The prompt
Save this prompt as a Skill or add to Project in your favorite AI tool — build once, use often.
Update your input values in the prompt, or just run it as is. Your AI sidekick will use the example values and give you an output.
CONTEXT:
- (use what's available, fall back to the inline values)
- If my Voice Profile exists, write in that voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If my ICP / Audience doc exists, target that reader. Otherwise, use the audience below.
Inputs:
Everything I'm juggling right now (dump the whole list — projects, platforms, side things, half-started ideas):
{e.g. weekly newsletter, an Instagram account, a podcast I keep meaning to start, an online course, replying to every DM}
The one goal I actually care about most right now (the outcome that would matter more than the rest):
{e.g. grow my newsletter to my first 1,000 real readers}
How much focused time I really have each day (be honest):
{e.g. about 2 hours in the early morning before my day job}
For Audience: {e.g. people drowning in their own closets and garages who want a calm home}
For Outcome: {e.g. the single thing to focus on this month, and permission to pause the rest}
Outputs:
1. My ONE thing — the single activity that, done well, makes the most of everything else easier or unnecessary. One clear sentence, drawn from my goal.
2. Why it's the domino — a plain explanation of how doing this first makes the other things on my list easier, later, or pointless.
3. My daily first block — exactly what to do in my best focused hour, and what NOT to open until it's done.
4. The pause list — the things on my plate to deliberately put down for now, with a one-line, guilt-free reason for each.
Then name the ONE shiny project I'm using to avoid the harder, more important one.
That's it, my fellow contrarians!
Yours 'proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered' Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️