Becoming The Muse

Eat That Frog is a productivity hack for accomplishing difficult or challenging tasks. Basically, it’s a metaphor for when faced with a task you dread, such as eating a frog, complete it as soon as possible.

I first became familiar with this concept when @ValentineWrites tweeted: “Tomorrow morning, I 🍽️🐸”. Which I wondered if it were code for something or a culinary experience similar to mine with the Homu YaTatani. While mine was a more literal translation of eating frogs, it is a metaphoric life hack.

Apparently it originates from a Mark Twain quote:

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”
-Mark Twain

Once you do the task you dread the most and get it out of the way you, you have more time and focus to do other things without having the dread or guilt weighing on your conscience throughout the day, than lets say you were to leave the challenging task for later or last on your list.

It can be summarised by the Shona saying, “Basa mangwanani” meaning do what needs to be done in the morning. Its a concept I am somewhat familiar with and imagine its what my father would have told me on managing time, when I became a man.

“Son, a gentleman must always know what time it is, you do what needs to be done, on time, and then after, you can do what you want with all the time you have left…”

My Father's Watch 🖤💟https://t.co/9uXLux855R

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) February 23, 2019

“There will never be enough time to do everything you have to do.”

How To Eat A Frog

Its basically a three step process:

1. Identify the frog
2. Eat the frog… don’t procrastinate.
3. Repeat

“If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.”

In short, if you have tasks to do, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task and be done with it…

“If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.”

This method can boost your productivity and improve your mental attitude to dealing with challenges.

However, for others who are wired differently, the facing your challenges head-on mentality, can result in nothing getting completed because one gets stuck at the impossible task… One might need to build upto to it, starting with less impossible activities while building up the necessary momentum to tackle the main challenge.

"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my axe." - Abraham Lincoln

A difficult task can be likened to climbing a mountain, you go up round and round, kukwira gomo hupoterera as the Shona would say.

My expert experience, as someone who has eaten an actual frog, is that frogs don’t taste horrible at all, they taste just like chicken. You only imagine they are nasty because they do kinda look gross and slimy, jumping here, there and everywhere…. The idea of eating a frog is more dreadful than actually eating a frog… maybe the task you dread is all about the perception of how you tackle it…

How do you handle difficult or demanding tasks?

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Eat That Frog: Brian Tracy Explains The Truth About Frogs