Your One Word by Evan Carmichael: The Word That Changed How I Run BPI

Why I Picked This One Up

Evan Carmichael was one of my first YouTube subscribes, years before I had a real estate company or any reason to think about branding at all. The guy has put out content daily for over a decade, pulling in the best entrepreneurs and compiling their advice into something you can actually use. So when he announced a book, I didn't need convincing. I knew the bar he holds his content to, and I figured he'd hold the book to the same one.

The One Word Beats the One Question

Tony Robbins has this idea that the question you ask yourself daily shapes your life. Ask "why is this happening to me" and you'll always find an answer — bad weather, bad luck, somebody wronged you. Ask "how do I get better" and you'll find that answer too. Evan takes the same insight and simplifies it further: skip the question, pick one word. His is "believe."

I like Robbins' framing, but I like Evan's better. A question is a loop you run every day. A word is a filter. You run everything through it — take the deal or don't, have the hard conversation or don't, push through the workout or don't — and the word tells you what to do. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone else. It has to be positive, and it has to hold up every single day you use it.

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It Doesn't Have to Mean the Same Thing Twice

The part I wrestled with: does your word's definition change depending on the situation? I never got a clean answer from Evan himself — my interview with him fell apart over bad internet on my end, and this was the exact question I wanted to ask. But working through the book, I landed on my own answer: yes, it flexes. "Bold" pitching a business partner looks different than "bold" closing with a client. The word stays fixed. What it demands of you that day doesn't.

Evan backs this up with the mail he gets from readers who all picked "believe" and then poured completely different situations into it:

• Believe in your business
• Believe in your spouse or your kids
• Believe in the economy, or in something bigger than yourself

Same word, doing different jobs for different people. That's the whole point. It's not a slogan. It's supposed to be load-bearing.

The Steve Jobs Story I Didn't Know

Evan tells the Jobs-and-Gates rivalry story — I'd just watched the Netflix doc on it, so this landed hard — and the detail that stuck with me is that Microsoft actually invested in Apple when Jobs took back over, because Microsoft was sitting on a 96% market share at the time. Jobs' word was some version of "innovate," or "put a ding in the universe" if you want his actual phrasing. That's a guy building an entire comeback off one word while the competition owned basically the whole market. Good reminder that the word matters more when the odds don't favor you.

Three Parts, One I Actually Used

The book breaks into three sections: Core (the word and the why behind it, straight out of Simon Sinek), Campaign (how you build outward from the word), and Company (how it becomes culture). I used all three, but Company is where it actually changed something I run.

My company is Bones and Properties International — BPI. Real estate in New York looks glamorous on Million Dollar Listing and is a lot less glamorous when you're the one making the calls. I needed one thing that tied the business to health, money, relationships, and confidence, because real estate touches all of that whether you like it or not. That became "BPI Lifestyle." Separately, I'm rebuilding our website around "disruptor," because that's genuinely what I want the brand to be in this market.

Who Should Read It

If you run a company, lead a team, or just need a filter for decisions that doesn't require a therapy session every time you hit one, read this. It's short — you'll get through it in a sitting — and it'll bother you in a useful way until you land on your own word.