Author
Jay Papasan
The editor behind the ONE Thing, who turned a founder's method into a book people finish.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Jay Papasan is an American writer and editor. He worked as an editor at HarperCollins in New York before joining Keller Williams, where he has led the company's publishing arm and co-written its books with Gary Keller.
With Keller he wrote The Millionaire Real Estate Agent (2003) and the Millionaire series, and then The ONE Thing (2013), the book that took the focusing question to a general audience. Keller brought the method from running a company; Papasan, the former book editor, shaped it into the six lies, one question and short chapters that make the argument easy to act on.
He speaks and teaches on the book's method and has continued to publish with Keller.
The signature
Papasan's signature is clarity in service of one idea. Where the research on attention can be dense, the chapters he co-wrote are short, concrete and repetitive on purpose, so that a reader remembers the question and asks it the next morning.