So this week, we're going to do a little time travel. We're going to go back in time,

14 years to the year before we published the One Thing book. And there's a book that you

never really got a chance to read. And that was the one thing when it was over 400 pages long.

It was so big, y'all. But in those last few months before we had to send it to the publisher,

we ended up using the ideas in the book to make a lot of

difficult decisions. And we cut a lot of way to get it to where it is today, that book that has

traveled around the globe in 40 plus languages and sold almost 4 million copies. So this week,

I'm going to walk you through what were the big things that we took out of the book? Why did we do that? And today,

13 years after the publication with all the stuff that we've learned, what would be the things

that I absolutely would add back in if I got the chance?

I'm Jay Papazan, and this is the one thing. Your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results. So let me fill in some of the blanks before I dive into the stuff that we

cut and why. So we worked with a guy named Ray Bard.

He's the bard behind the Bard Press, which if a look on the spine of the book,

that's who our publisher was in the United States. Ray had a very simple principle. He was a

one thing kind of guy. He would only publish one book a year. I actually courted him for about

two and a half years before we actually got to sit down

talk and we got to pitch him the idea for the one thing. So he puts more energy than any publisher

I've ever known in my 30 years into the industry into making every single book great. So Gary and I

are working on the manuscript. We're going back and forth meeting regularly with him,

and we sent him kind of the manuscript in the summer of 2012. We have a hard deadline at the end of the

summer that we have to have the book 99% right because it's going to copy editing, to proofreading,

like we're going into production now because the book had to come

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