Book 203 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: Don’t Eat the Frog…Eat the Cake!

Book – Eat That Frog: 21 Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy

Book Description:

It’s time to stop procrastinating and get more of the important things done! After all, successful people don’t try to do everything. They focus on their most important tasks and get those done. They eat their frogs.

There’s an old saying that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re done with the worst thing you’ll have to do all day. For Tracy, eating a frog is a metaphor for tackling your most challenging task—but also the one that can have the greatest positive impact on your life.

Eat That Frog! shows you how to organize each day so you can zero in on these critical tasks and accomplish them efficiently and effectively. The core of what is vital to effective time management is: decision, discipline, and determination. And in this fully revised and updated edition, Tracy adds two new chapters. The first explains how you can use technology to remind yourself of what is most important and protect yourself from what is least important. The second offers advice for maintaining focus in our era of constant distractions, electronic and otherwise.

Reflection:

I agree with everything that Brian Tracy said in this book, except 1 gigantic difference.

I agree that we should center our lives and actions around our most important priorities each and every day we are blessed enough to have a chance to wake up to a new day. That meaningful work should always get done first thing in the day before you open the door to the rest of the world and let the chaos begin.

The major difference arises in how we go about structuring our mindsets to accomplish this objective. For Brian, his answer is to deploy the philosophy of eating a live frog first thing in the morning. The theory is that if you eat that live frog first thing in morning, you’ll have checked the box on the worst thing you’ll have to do that day. After that, the rest of the day is downhill from there.

Here’s the problem, I don’t like to eat live frogs!

Eating a live frog sounds disgusting, and not something I’d like to build my day around for the rest of my life. That would require an insane amount of willpower and determination to do this each day until I leave this Earth. As we’ve learned before on this journey, willpower is a depleting resource. You only have so much willpower to deploy in your life to get stuff done, and once you use it, it is gone. If you give all of your willpower away first thing in the morning to eat a frog, you will have tapped yourself for the entire day and set yourself up for walking through life exhausted.

When I hear “Eat the Frog”, I hear a philosophy equating meaningful work to a disgusting activity that nobody wants to do. If the most important activity you must do each day feels like eating a frog, you are doing something wrong.

That isn’t how meaningful work is supposed to feel.

Meaningful work is beautiful. Meaningful work is addictive. Meaningful work is a blessing and not a burden. Meaningful work is energizing. Meaningful work is alignment around what matters most to you and the activities you preform each day.

Meaningful work is supposed to be the highlight of your day, not the lowlight.

That is why I choose to think of meaningful work as eating your favorite piece of cake first thing in the morning versus a live frog.

We all love a good cake! When you think about your favorite cake, what comes to mind? I think about my Mom’s gluten free carrot cake she makes. It is so freaking delicious. It is so light, moist, and the homemade cream cheese is literally the best thing ever. I could eat that carrot cake all day every day. It makes my mouth water just visualizing it in my mind.

This is exactly what meaningful work should feel like in my opinion.

We all know we shouldn’t eat cake first thing every morning because it would really bad for your health. But…what if you could and without any consequences? Well, I’m here to tell you that it is possible, safe, and incredibly healthy. All you must do is align what your most important activities you do each day with what you value most in this world. If you can do that, you can eat cake every day for the rest of your life.

Question: Does your meaningful work feel like eating a frog or a piece of cake?

---

Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - Eat That Frog: 21 Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy