Darren Hardy, publisher of Success Magazine, tells the story of Paul O’Neill and what he did as the incoming CEO of Alcoa. It was 1987 and O’Neill was being introduced to investors and analysts for the first time. To everyone’s chagrin, O’Neill didn’t talk about growing market share, lowering expenses, or expanding markets. He didn’t talk about anything directly related to increasing the company’s profits. Instead, he turned everyone’s attention to the subject of safety.
It wasn’t that safety was such a big issue or that there was a direct correlation between improving it and increasing profits. O’Neill later said he wanted to disrupt everyone’s habitual thinking and get them all focused on one thing. Hardy calls this “one thing” a “Keystone habit,” “a pattern of behavior that has the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as it moves throughout the organization.”
To everyone’s surprise, it worked. Focusing on improving safety led the company to record growth and record profits during O’Neill’s tenure.
In explaining how focusing on one habit can create seemingly unrelated results in other areas, Hardy cites another example, a dieting study. The participants in the study were told to concentrate on writing down everything they ate at least one day per week. Nothing more. It turns out that this one habit led to other habits, which in turn led this group to lose twice as much weight as everyone else.
Even more surprising was how many of the participants
. . .reported big improvements in other areas of their lives… areas they weren’t even focused on, but awareness and improvement in one area, with noticeable results, bolstered their self-confidence and informed them about other areas of their life, which also improved. It had a rippling effect throughout most every other area of their lives.
Hardy notes that if you want to transform some aspect of your life, trying to adopt too many new habits is unsustainable. He challenges his readers to choose one new habit and track it, and I am challenging you to do the same.
Pick something and commit to it. Make a change and watch how other things change.
Could something like going for a twenty minute walk three days a week actually lead to an increase in your income? Will writing a weekly blog post for your practice improve your marriage?
I don’t know. But I do know that you’ll be healthier and get more clients.
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