The founder’s problem is that ideas flood him all day and only about 10% ever become real action. Joe’s answer is to find the first domino — the one thing that, if done, makes everything else easier or irrelevant. He deliberately resists going to two or three things, because the discipline is in finding the single highest-leverage move.
“What’s the one thing I can do? Everything else becomes easier or irrelevant.”
In a startup, growing revenue 5x can render a hundred other problems forgettable — and once that’s working, you have the ATM machine that makes everything else cheaper to fix. The same logic operates at every level: on a sales project, the one thing is probably “talk to 30 customers and iterate on the story,” not designing pretty marketing. In life, it might be settling into a new home so there’s the stability to do everything else.
Crucially, identifying the first domino is often the leader’s job, but executing it isn’t. The moment it’s clear what needs to happen, the work shifts to the team — and trying to also dictate how it gets done is where leaders go wrong.
Related Concepts
- Delegate the solution criteria, not the solution
- Principles make decisions for you
- Address root blockers not symptoms
- Alignment always beats effort