The One-Area Focus Question
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
A single forcing question Eric Partaker uses to cut through the overwhelm of having eighteen possible improvements at once: assume everything in the business stays exactly as it is — still improving at its normal background rate — and ask where one change would have the greatest impact. The question deliberately holds every other variable constant so the mind stops optimising in parallel and commits to one lever. Partaker roots it in direction: you first name the goal, the number, and the current position, then run the question against that specific A-to-B journey, which prevents the answer being a pet project rather than the true bottleneck. He then applies the same question personally — health, relationships, personal productivity — and pairs it with an 80/20 posture: twenty percent of the effort for eighty percent of the result.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Name the goal and the number
Before asking anything about focus, state the primary goal explicitly and attach a number and a deadline to it. In the session this was durable recurring revenue of $10 million by end of next year.
Pro tip Say the goal out loud as a sentence, not a category — 'recurring revenue that doesn't rely on me' is a different lever than 'revenue'.
- 2
State where you are now
Establish the current position against that number so the gap is concrete. Ali's answer was 'five and a bit million dollars last year', turning the question into a specific 5-to-10 journey.
Watch out Skipping this step lets the focus question drift into general improvement rather than gap-closing.
- 3
Freeze everything else at 'good enough'
Assume every other part of the business stays as it is — still improving at a background rate of a few percent, but with no new initiatives. This is the constraint that makes the question work.
Pro tip Ask 'where are things good enough for now?' first — it gives permission to leave working systems alone.
- 4
Ask the question
With that A-to-B journey in mind, ask: if everything were to stay as it is, where is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?
- 5
Challenge the first answer
Stress-test the answer by proposing an alternative lever. Partaker pushed back with 'why wouldn't it be changing price points or something with the YouTube side?' — forcing Ali to articulate the lead-gen bottleneck behind his choice.
Pro tip The rebuttal should name a plausible competing lever, not a strawman.
- 6
Go all in on that one area
Commit the change to that single area and let the rest continue at its current rate. A company of this size can absorb one major move at a time.
Watch out Attempting two major overhauls at once is what produces the frantic team energy the question is meant to eliminate.
- 7
Repeat personally
Run the identical question over your personal life — health, relationships, personal productivity — and apply the same all-in commitment to the single area that surfaces.
In the wild
Ali named the goal — $10 million in durable recurring revenue by end of next year — against a current position of just over five million. Running the question, his answer was the unlaunched productivity lab, because it would take a product line from zero to one. Partaker challenged him: why not raise prices or change the offer on the YouTube side? Ali worked through it out loud and concluded that conversion and pricing improvements would quickly hit a lead-gen ceiling, and the only ways past that ceiling were heavy ad spend or making many more videos about growing on YouTube, which he did not want to do.
→ The single major move for the period was fixed on productivity lab, with the YouTube accelerator explicitly left as-is rather than simultaneously revamped.
Two team members were spending most of their time rebuilding the accelerator's back end and migrating the CRM to HubSpot for a relaunch. Applying the freeze-everything-else constraint, Ali saw that the accelerator was already producing results, good reviews and very few refund requests — it was good enough for now. The team time going into making it better was redirected toward the one area where change would have the greatest impact.
→ The accelerator improvement work was paused and the resource moved to the launch it was competing with, removing a source of team overwhelm.
Common mistakes
Improving everything at once
Coming back from an event or mastermind with eighteen pages of notes and treating all eighteen areas as action points. Partaker described the pattern as formulaic and predictable: the founder gets excited, the second-in-command gets pulled into everything, and within days the team is stressed because too many things are running at once. The question exists specifically to collapse that list to one.
Asking without naming the destination
Run in a vacuum, the question returns whatever feels most interesting rather than what closes the gap. Partaker insisted the question be 'rooted in direction' — goal, number, current position — before it is asked at all.
Confusing focus with patience
Ali's takeaway was that he should become more patient. Partaker rejected this: the impatience is a useful source of energy and drive for the company. The fix is a channel for the ideas, not a dampened founder.
From the transcript
“where's the one area so if everything were to stay as it is where's the one area where change would have the greatest impact”
“a company can especially well a company of this size right you can you can do one major move at a time”
“it isn't so the team feeling overwhelmed will be probably well there's many reasons for this but one could be it feels like we're doing…”
From the episode
A Brutally Honest Conversation With My CEO Coach - Eric Partaker
Eric Partaker