“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”
―
This is a great habit to get into. Twains’s quote is a lot more interesting and has more rhetorical flourish than the quote I heard growing up from my mom, “eat your vegetables first.” But, the sentiment and the wisdom behind it are the same.
As a kid I might have preferred eating a live frog to eating the mushy canned peas I had to endure. I don’t know what canned peas in 2019 taste like, and I never will, because I refuse to buy them or eat them; I can tell you with certainty that canned peas in the 70’s were awful, especially to a kid in possession of all his taste buds. Now, after decades of use and who knows how many scaldings from near boiling coffee, dousings from jalapeno, habenero and peperocini peppers, and injuries from hastily munched lava filled microwaved burritos later, my taste buds are no where near as keen as when I was 5,6, 7 of 8 years old. Back in the day, they were bright and shiny and new, which meant those big old mushy metallic peas made me gag! But, I had to eat them anyway, or there was no leaving the table to watch Wild Kingdom. Star Trek or Jacques Cousteau on TV. If I was gonna get to watch Marlin Perkins scan the Serengeti through binoculars, or Jim wrassle a giant anaconda, or Jacques scuba with sharks and jellyfish, or Captain Kirk phaser a Horta then I had to gt those damned peas down my gullet. So, to avoid gagging, I learned to swallow a mouthful of mushy old canned peas whole.
It’s funny, the ability to swallow a mouthful of peas without chewing meant I never had issues with swallowing pills as a kid. I was not that kid whose parent had to cut up a tiny pill, or dissolve it in water in order to get it down. I looked down on those pathetic kids! Learning how to eat nasty canned peas meant that I could even take a handful of multi-vitamin pills later in life no problemo.
What’s the point of all this nostalgia? Well, the point is Eating a Live Frog is the rule for prioritizing your daily 365 list. Look that list over and determine which item is your “Frog”. It’s the slimy unappealing task you would rather avoid, and decide to “eat’ that one first, do the thing on your list that is least desirable first. There are so many benefits to this!
First of all, you get things done that you might otherwise be tempted to put off or procrastinate on. Second, early in the day you have a full tank of gas mentally, physically and emotionally – you can handle the tough tasks better early in the day. Putting difficult tasks off until late in the day or evening means the difficulty will be compounded by your diminished capacity, which often means it gets done poorly or not at all. Third, eating that frog first thing becomes a habit that minimizes pain, similar to removing a band-aid quickly vs slowly painfully peeling it off. The consequences and extra agony that will result from avoiding a given tough task are completely avoided. Tackling tough tasks first, eating that frog first thing, is a great habit to develop, a character builder and ethic to live by.
Alright, time to eat some frogs!
Ben Wagner (136)
Member The 365 Commitment
