Eat that Frog!
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Title: Eat that Frog!
Author: Brian Tracy
First Publication: 2001
One-Sentence Summary: 21 tips on how to stop procrastinating.
Procrastination and time management are serious problems—today more than ever—because of the avalanche of information and unbelievable speed at which it flies across our desks, computer screens, and latest unbelievable communication gadgets.
Brian Tracy is a millionaire, but he certainly didn’t start out that way. He dropped out of high school and worked as a laborer for eight years all over the world. When he could no longer find a laboring job, he began knocking on doors as a door-to-door salesman, working for straight commission. He wasn’t great at it until he had an “aha” moment. He asked himself, “Why is it that other people are doing better than I am?” That wasn’t the “aha” moment. The “aha” moment was when he decided to go up to successful salespeople and ask them what they were doing. And, they told him. He did what they advised him to do. And, his sales went up.
He became so successful that he was promoted to sales manager. In that new position, he used the same strategy of finding out what successful managers did and started doing that. This simple and obvious process of learning from only the most successful people and then copying those same proven, successful methods changed his life. “Just find out what successful people do and do the same things until you get the same results.” Why does this work? Some people are really good at knowing what to ignore and what to focus on to get more out of the same amount of overall effort. In other words, they use their time “far, far better than the average person.” Tracy had this to say about his transformation:
“Coming from an unsuccessful background, I had developed deep feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. I had fallen into the mental trap of assuming that people who were doing better than me were actually better than me. What I learned was that this was not necessarily true. They were just doing things differently, and what they had learned to do, within reason, I could learn as well. [¶] This was a revelation to me. I was both amazed and excited with this discovery. I still am. I realized that I could change my life and achieve almost any goal I could set for myself if I just found out what others were doing in that area and then did it myself until I got the same results they were getting.”
In less than one year, he was a top salesman. A year later, he was manager and vice-president of sales in charge of 95 salespeople in six countries, and he was only 25-years-old! Since then, he worked in 22 different jobs and started and grew several companies. He also went back to school to get a business degree from a major university. He learned French, German, and Spanish and has been a speaker, trainer, and consultant to more than 500 companies. He presents speeches and seminars to more than 300,000 people annually, sometimes to groups of 20,000!
“Throughout my career, I have found a simple truth. The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life. … [¶] Each of these twenty-one methods and techniques is complete in itself; all are necessary. One strategy might be effective in one situation and another might apply to another task. All together, these twenty-one ideas represent a smorgasbord of personal effectiveness techniques that you can use at any time, in any order or sequence that makes sense to you at the moment.” [¶] The key to success is action. These principles work to bring about fast, predictable improvements in performance and results. The faster you learn and apply them, the faster you will move ahead in your career—guaranteed.”
CORE CONCEPTS OF “EAT THAT FROG!”
Tracy explains the title of his book: “[Y]our ability to select your most important task at each moment, and then to start on that task and get it done both quickly and well, will probably have more of an impact on your success than any other quality or skill you can develop. [¶] … It has been said for many years that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. [¶] Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it now. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment. [¶] It has also been said, ‘If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.’ [¶] This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first. Discipline yourself to begin immediately and then to persist until the task is complete before you go on to something else.”
“Think of it as a ‘test.’ Treat it like a personal challenge. Resist the temptation to start with the easier task. Continually remind yourself that one of the most important decisions you make each day is your choice of what you will do immediately and what you will do later, if you do it at all. [¶] Here is one final observation: ‘If you have to eat a live frog, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.’ [¶] The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is for you to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first think each morning. You must develop the routine of ‘eating your frog’ before you do anything else and without taking too much time to think about it.”
“In study after study of men and women who get paid more and promoted faster, the quality of ‘action orientation’ stands out as the most observable and consistent behavior they demonstrate in everything they do. Successful, effective people are those who launch directly into their major tasks and then discipline themselves to work steadily and single-mindedly until those tasks are complete.”
“In other words, and especially in our business world, you are paid and promoted for getting specific, measurable results. You are paid for making a valuable contribution and, especially, for making the contribution that is expected of you. [¶] ‘Failure to execute’ is one of the biggest problems in organizations today. Many people confuse activity with accomplishment. They talk continually, hold endless meetings, and make wonderful plans, but in the final analysis, no one does the job and gets the results required.”
“Fully ninety-five percent of your success in life and work will be determined by the kinds of habits that you develop over time. The habit of setting priorities, overcoming procrastination, and getting on with your most important task is a mental and physical skill. As such, this habit is learnable through practice and repetition, over and over again, until it locks into your subconscious mind and becomes a permanent part of your behavior. Once it becomes a habit, it becomes both automatic and easy to do.”
“You are designed mentally and emotionally in such a way that task completion gives you a positive feeling. It makes you happy. It makes you feel like a winner. [¶] Whenever you complete a task of any size or importance, you feel a surge of energy, enthusiasm, and self-esteem. The more important the completed task, the happier, more confident, and more powerful you feel about yourself and your world. [¶] The completion of an important task triggers the release of endorphins in your brain. These endorphins give you a natural ‘high.’ The endorphin rush that follows successful completion of any task makes you feel more creative and confident. [¶] Here is one of the most important of the so-called secrets of success. It is that you can actually develop a ‘positive addiction’ to endorphins and to the feeling of enhanced clarity, confidence, and competence that they trigger. When you develop this ‘addiction,’ almost without thinking you begin to organize your life in such a way that you are continually starting and completing even more important tasks and projects. You actually become addicted, in a very positive sense, to success and contribution.”
“One of the keys to your living a wonderful life, having a successful career, and feeling terrific about yourself is for you to develop the habit of starting and finishing important jobs. At that point, this behavior will take on a power of its own and you’ll find it easier to complete important tasks than not to complete them.”
“Practice is the key to mastering any skill. Fortunately, your mind is like a muscle. It grows stronger and more capable with use. With practice, you can learn any behavior or develop any habit that you consider either desirable or necessary. [¶] You need three key qualities to develop the habits of focus and concentration, which are learnable. They are decision, discipline, and determination. [¶] First, make a decision to develop the habit of task completion. Second, discipline yourself to practice the principles you are about to learn over and over until you master them. And, finally, back everything you do with determination until the habit is locked in and becomes a permanent part of your personality.”
“There is a special way that you can accelerate your progress toward becoming the highly productive, effective, efficient person that you want to be. It consists of your thinking continually about the rewards and beliefs of being an action-oriented, fast-moving, focused person. See yourself as the kind of person who gets important jobs done quickly and well on a consistent basis. [¶] Your mental picture of yourself has a powerful effect on your behavior. Visualize yourself as the person you intend to be in the future. Your self-image, the way you see yourself on the inside, largely determines your performance on the outside. As professional speaker Jim Cathcart says, ‘The person you see is the person you will be.’”
21 TIPS TO STOP PROCRASTINATING
Tracy explains how to use these tips in an amazingly clear and convincing style (as you can see from the portions quoted above). I highly recommend his entire book.
1. Get Crystal Clear about Your Goals. Decide what you want to accomplish in each area of your life. Get absolutely clear about your goals so you don’t deviate from them. Figure out what you are supposed to do, in what order, and for what reason. Strive for greater clarity in everything you do. Tracy offer this 7-Step Method for Setting and Achieving Goals: (1) Decide exactly what you want. (2) Write it down. (3) Set a deadline on your goal. (4) Make a list of everything that you can think of that you are going to do to achieve your goal. (5) Organize the list into a plan. (6) Take action on your plan immediately. (7) Resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your major goal.
2. Plan Every Day in Advance. 10 minutes of daily pre-planning can save you as much as two hours of wasted time and energy every single day. If it helps, remember the Six “P” Formula: “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.” At the end of each work day, make a list of everything you have to do the following day. If you do this habitually, your subconscious mind will work on those things for you while you sleep so that often you will wake up with great ideas for how to do them quicker and better. Have a master list with all of your goals, a list for next month, and a list for next week. Taking two hours at the end of each week to plan the following week will increase your productivity dramatically.
3. Ruthlessly Follow the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle says that if you have 10 thing on your “to do” list, only 2 will give you lots of bang for your time and effort while the other 8 will give you very little. But, that same 2 are usually our most dreaded tasks, so we procrastinate on those and focus on the other 8 instead. If we want to make the most of our time and effort, we have to stop doing this. Efficiency is about getting the most important stuff done first, and doing the less important stuff later, if at all. Those 2 dreaded tasks are your two frogs, and the most dreaded task is your ugliest frog. Eat that one first!
4. Make Daily Decisions Based on Your Long-Term Goals. First, you need to be crystal clear on your long-term goals, then you need to accurately assess whether what you are doing is taking you closer or farther away from those goals. If it’s taking you closer, do more of it. If it’s taking you further away, do less of it or just stop doing it. This will help you set your priorities so you know which of your tasks is the ugliest frog to eat first thing in the morning each day.
5. Do High, Medium, and Low Priority Tasks in that Order.
6. Focus on Your Key Weak Points Holding You Back. Ask yourself, “What one skill, if I developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my career?” Keep asking yourself this question, and improving your performance in the answer, throughout your career.
7. Always Be Doing the Most Important Thing.
8. Have Everything You Need at Hand Before You Begin. Then, don’t stop till you finish. Keep a clean, organized work area. Sit up straight in your chair with both feet on the floor. Pick up the first task and say, “Let’s get this done!”
9. Never Stop Developing Your Key Skills.
10. Pursue Work that Rewards Your Special Talents. Your special talents are tied to the things you love to do. Gravitate toward work that lets you do more of what you love to do and your procrastination problem will become a faint memory.
11. Blast Open the Biggest Bottleneck to Your Success.
12. Tackle All Goals—Especially the Big Ones—One Task at a Time.
13. Supervisor, Manage, and Lead Yourself. Tracy writes: “Only about 2% of people can work entirely without supervision. We call these people ‘leaders.’ This is the kind of person you are meant to be. [¶] Successful people continually put the pressure on themselves to perform at high levels. Unsuccessful people have to be instructed and supervised and pressured by others. [¶] One of the great ways for you to overcome procrastination is by working as though you had only one day to get all your most important jobs done before you left for a month or went on a vacation. By putting the pressure on yourself, you accomplish more and better tasks, faster than ever before. You become a high-performance, high-achieving personality. You feel terrific about yourself, and bit by bit, you build up the habit of rapid task completion that then goes on to serve you all the days of your life.”
14. Keep Your Mind and Body in Top Condition. Get enough sleep each night. Take a day off a week from anything that taxes your brain (no catching up on any work, mail, or reading). Go to a movie, go for a walk, spend time with the family, or indulge in a hobby. Eat the right foods to keep your body energized and your brain alert and creative. Start the day with a high-protein, low-fat, and low-carb breakfast. For lunch, opt for salads with fish or chicken. Limit sugar, salt, and high-carbs. Desserts, sodas, candy bars, and pastries all hurt your productivity.
15. Use Positive Self Talk to Eliminate Negative Self Talk. Whether you realize it or not, you talk to yourself all day long about everything that happens to you or occurs to you in your thoughts. The bad news is that most of what we tell ourselves is negative stuff, either about ourselves or about others. Critical observations or judgments. Worries or regrets. Just a lot of bad energy. Unless you take control of your negative self talk and replace it with positive self talk, your own subconscious mind is working against your conscious attempts to get your work done. And, guess what? Your subconscious mind is a lot stronger. But, the good news is you can make your subconscious mind work for you.
Replace all your negative self talk with the exact opposite positive message. If you can’t go that far at first, start by at least lessening the intensity of your negative message. If you keep hearing, “I’ll never get this done!” Replace it with, “Of course, I’ll get this done.” And, if you must soften it, you can say, “I can at least try my best to get it done.” Become an insufferable optimist, if only to yourself. Believe you can do it however impossible it seems. Or, tell yourself everything will work out for the best if you keep working at it. No matter how bad you feel when you have to get a task done, tell yourself you feel great and that you’ll feel even better as soon as you’re finished. If people ask you how you’re doing or how you feel, always say, “I feel great!” Tracy writes that 80% don’t care about your problems and 20% are actually glad to hear you have them! Don’t give them the satisfaction.
Optimists share three important habits: (1) They look for the good in every situation and, not surprisingly, find it. (2) They look for the valuable lessons to be learned from every setback or difficulty. (3) They focus on the solutions to the problem instead of blaming or complaining. They think and talk about the future and where they are going instead of their past and where they have been.
16. Practice Selective Procrastination. Outsource, delegate, eliminate, or postpone all low-value activities, so you can work on the big, ugly tasks that only you can do. As Tracy writes, “Get rid of the tadpoles and focus on the frogs.” You can’t get out from under the avalanche of things to do unless you get rid of or postpone all the little things that don’t deserve your full attention right now, if ever. Mastering the art of saying “no” to tadpole activities is an important secret to success. Review your life constantly, both in and out of the office, to see if there isn’t something that takes up a lot of your time that you could give up in order to save and use that time for a better investment in your future.
17. Do the Most Difficult Task First. Tell yourself, “Just for today, I will plan, prepare, and start on my most difficult task before I do anything else.”
18. Eat the Salami One Slice at a Time. If you slice a big roll of salami and eat it one slice at a time, it will be gone before you know it. Big tasks are like that, too, because as soon as we finish one task, we want to start another. Why? Because our bodies crave closure or completion. The bigger the tasks we complete, the more endorphins our brain releases into our system making us feel as high as a kite!
19. Block Out Chunks of Time for Your Goals Daily. Make appointments with yourself to focus on each of your important goals daily, then keep them, and get to work. Don’t renegotiate the time or the work. Just do it. Also, take advantage of dead time, like traveling on an airplane, waiting in airports, or getting caught in traffic. Listen to audio books to improve your desired skill sets in cars. Review or type up reports on the airplane or in the airports. Every little bit counts.
20. Be Urgent. High-performance means immediate action. Once you get started, pushing yourself to go faster keeps you energized and, naturally, produces more in less time (assuming you did the necessary pre-work of planning and organizing your work before you got started). A simple yet powerful way to get started is to repeat the words: “Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!” And, once started, should you get distracted, repeat to yourself, “Back to work! Back to work! Back to work!”
21. Single-Task. “By concentrating single-mindedly on your most important task, you can reduce the time required to complete it by 50 percent or more.”
CONCLUSION
In many ways, this book is a shorter, easier-to-understand version of the classic self help book Think and Grow Rich. Though they were first published 65 years apart, they both advise the basic tried and true secrets to success of (1) visualizing your goals; committing your clear, specific goals to writing; and (3) taking immediate and continued action. I applied these principles to my life and went from struggling all the time to finally getting on top of my game. You can, too. Just take it one step and one day at a time. Be awesome! Be your own hero!
If you would like to buy a copy of Brian Tracy’s Eat that Frog!, click here
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August 6th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Thanksf for the excell review and article recap. I’m glad you didn’t “put off doing it!”
August 6th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Hi Semone! Thanks for your comment and feedback! Glad you enjoyed the post! : )
August 18th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Shanel: I’m a near-daily visitor to your site commenting for the first time. First, thank you for the review of Eat That Frog!. I have looked at it several times without ever picking it up in the store, because I couldn’t figure out if it was another book full of the exact same advice I’ve read in 20 other books, or if it provided the unique look at time management and procrastination-busting that the title suggests. Your review has pushed me off the fence and into the “I need to read this” category. Second, thanks for a great site. I’ve found a great deal in you and your site that I respect and admire, from your base levels of smarts and drive to your writing style (very clear, very practical, very “I get it”-able) to your approach to presenting your website (simple, clean design, content-focused, TONS of solid and high-quality material). I’m in the infant stages of preparing my own biz site (not yet launched) and making my biz vision a reality, and you provide a great deal of inspiration AND practical advice. Many kudos. Keep up the good work!
All the best,
Marissa
August 18th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Hi Marissa! Thanks for your comment and wonderful feedback! I’m genuinely touched every time someone takes the time to show their gratitude or share their stories with me. (Of course, all constructive criticism is welcome, too!) Wow! I’m so excited about you starting your new biz site! I hope you’ll let all of us know when you’ve got it launched so we can check it out. I’m actually starting a new series tomorrow called “For Bloggers Only” or “FBO” to answer basic questions that I keep getting from interested readers on that subject. I’m not sure if your new biz site is going to be a blog — but, if it is, you might want to check that out.
All new businesses are terrifically exciting for me! Why? Because even if they fail (and most do — I “failed” at my first two businesses) they are amazing powerhouses of experience. The more mistakes, the better! That’s why I don’t regret my “failures” for a second! If you don’t succeed — and I sincerely hope yours is outrageously successful! — but even if you don’t succeed, you will have taken many critical steps toward your ultimate goals that no one can truly achieve without taking. Feel free to ask me any questions, and I’ll do my best to offer any advice from my own experiences that might help. Best of luck! But, always remember: The winners make their own luck. Or, as I quoted from Stephen King on Twitter this morning: “Talent is as cheap as table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” ; )