There’s a question doing the rounds lately that makes my eye twitch every time I hear it:
“What’s the one thing I can do to [insert life-changing goal here]?”
Write a book. Start a business. Become a better leader. Fix your marriage. Master the parallel bars. Apparently, there’s always one thing—a single magic bullet—that’ll make it all click.
Newsflash: there isn’t.
This “one thing” obsession is lazy, ridiculous, and borderline insulting. It suggests that decades of craft, trial and error, discipline, heartbreak, and growth can be neatly packaged into a single pithy line. If that were true, we’d all be bestselling authors with six-packs and perfect hair, and nobody would ever post inspirational memes on LinkedIn again. (Actually, that last one might not be so bad.)
The reality? Anything worth doing requires many things. Not just once, not just occasionally, but consistently, over years. Writing a book, for example, is not about one thing. It’s about sitting your arse in the chair day after day, through doubt, fatigue, distractions, and the persistent voice whispering “this is rubbish.” It’s about editing, deleting, rewriting, researching, structuring, marketing, publishing, and about fifty other verbs nobody ever asks you about at dinner parties.
And yet the “one thing” crowd insists there must be a shortcut. Just give them the secret hack, the golden nugget, the cheat code. They don’t want advice—they want absolution. They want you to say: “Oh yes, if you only buy this leather-bound notebook / join this mastermind group / eat kale on alternate Thursdays—you’ll be sorted!”
But that’s not how progress works. Growth is messy, nonlinear, and inconvenient. It’s cumulative, not singular. You don’t become strong by lifting one weight, you don’t build trust with one compliment, and you sure as hell don’t write a novel with one “inspiring” coffee shop session.
So here’s my radical answer to the dreaded question:
The one thing you can do to achieve your dream is stop looking for one thing.
Stop outsourcing the responsibility. Stop pretending there’s a shortcut. Stop treating your goal like a lottery ticket waiting for the winning number. Instead, accept that it’s going to take a thousand small things—habits, failures, corrections, experiments, and yes, boring bloody consistency.
It won’t look sexy on Instagram, but it will actually work.
Because while the “one thing” brigade are still Googling for hacks, the rest of us are busy doing the work.