After more than 20 years of following Brian Tracy’s productivity principles and sharing them with clients and colleagues, I had the exciting opportunity to interview the master himself about the recently released 4th edition of his book, Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. Meeting one of my business heroes reinforced why his methods remain as powerful today as ever.
The book’s title comes from a saying often attributed to Mark Twain: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”
You may be wondering… frog? Brian explains, “Your ‘frog’ is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment.”
Successful people fundamentally do one thing differently: they get more and better results. The key lies in identifying and completing your most important task. “If you do that first thing in the morning, you’ll transform your life,” Brian told me with the conviction of someone who has witnessed this principle work thousands of times.
In fact, Brian emphasized that task completion is “really the key to great success.” By way of example, he shared a sobering statistic: 65% of doctoral candidates never complete their dissertations. After years of investment, they reach the final step and lose motivation. “All they need to do is complete the dissertation,” Brian explained. “They get right to the end and then get distracted.” This pattern appears everywhere—people take projects 90-95% of the way to the end and abandon them, missing the full benefits that come only with seeing the effort through to completion.
According to Brian, it takes approximately 32-33 repetitions before a behavior becomes automatic. “All human beings are basically made up of habits,” he noted. “Successful people have good habits.”
The challenge? Old habits never completely disappears. Instead, “…an old habit goes underground to the basement, waiting for an opportunity to send you back,” Brian warned. You must actively fight to maintain productive habits. He went on to say, “there’s nothing in life worthwhile that is easy. It’s hard. You have to discipline yourself.”
This means disciplining yourself to “do the worst first.” So, you must eat your frog before anything else can derail your day. (And, by the way, Brian says that if you have two frogs on any given day… eat the ugliest one first!)
This all may sound easy enough in theory, but you may be wondering how to actually put these principles into practice. The #1 rule: Protect your frog time! Each evening, list out (on paper!) everything you need to do tomorrow. Identify the one task with the greatest positive impact if completed before being called away for a month. Circle it. Start there the next morning – before you do anything else. Work only on that task until it’s complete.
The beauty of “Eat That Frog” lies in its simplicity. Every morning, you choose to tackle your most important, challenging task first, or let distractions pull you away from what truly matters. As such, when you get to your desk tomorrow morning, you’ll notice there is a live frog sitting there. The question isn’t whether you can eat it. It’s whether you will.
With appreciation to Brian Tracy for generously sharing his time and expertise… Happy Networking!