Greatness lies in the power of one. One goal. One mission. One dream. On destination. One obsession. One pursuit.
It's what writer Jason Pargin said,
Your heroes aren't gods, they're just regular people who got good at one thing by neglecting everything.
Greatness doesn't dabble. One foot here, another foot over there, only to move again to the sink on the other side. Instead, you find the one thing you want to do for the rest of your life and you spend as much time as you can doing that thing.
When LeBron James was in elementary school, his teacher passed out a blank note card at the beginning of the year and instructed the students to write down three things they wanted to be when they grew up, LeBron wrote,
NBA Player
NBA Player
NBA Player
The teacher explained that LeBron had misunderstood the assignment. He didn't. There was only one thing LeBron wanted to be, an NBA player.
When you focus on one thing, instead of dabbling in many things, you can give it your everything. When you can give it your everything, it might just become something special.
When Howard Schultz returned as CEO of Starbucks in 2008, the company was struggling. Since he left, the strategy changed from quality to quantity--focusing more on how many stores they could open and how fast,
We thought in terms of millions of customers, and thousands of stores instead of one customer, one partner, and one cup of coffee at a time…We forgot that 'ones' add up.
The only number that matters is “One.” One cup. One customer. One partner. One experience at a time. We had to get back to what matters most.
Starbucks had one goal, get back to what made them great. Quality coffee. Quality customer service. Quality experiences. Once you have that one goal, focus on the one thing--the only thing you can focus on--the action, moment, and task at hand.
The problem with chasing one thing for the entirety of your existence is you have to get comfortable missing out on other things. As Steve Jobs explained,
Whenever you do any one thing intensely over a period of time, you have to give up other lives you could be living. You have to have a real single-minded kind of tunnel vision if you want to get anything significant accomplished.
But when you're willing to miss out on other great things, to chase one thing, you experience things no one else will. It's a thrill of a ride that brings you all of life's emotions. Heartache and heartbreak. Excitement blended with terror. Love mixed with sadness. And that's what life is all about, not just feeling the best emotions, but all the emotions.
If you're willing to take the ride of following one thing, with obsession, forever, the ride will bring you everything you ever needed.
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