Gobble up your Frogs: Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy Reviewed
Some of you may have already guessed it but those of you who are still oblivious about what I am talking about, kindly allow me to present to you the book — “Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time” by Brian Tracy. In this article, I am going to tell you why this book is a need of the hour and also give my insights and reflections on it.
Well, honestly speaking, I am not much of a non-fiction person, in fact, I don’t have much affinity towards the subgenre of self-help more so because I don’t give in to the hype. But here, “ Eat That Frog “ is an exception in two senses — a) It is self-help b) It is highly hyped and recommended by many. As per records over 4,50,000 copies have been sold and translated into about 23 languages! Now that’s something, isn’t it? So, what exactly is the philosophy and metaphor behind “Eat That Frog” and of course, why I feel it is worth the hype?
Well from the title of the book, one could easily make out that this book is on how to curb procrastination and boost productivity. Here “frogs” are metaphorically used to denote “tasks”, and when the author says “eat that frog”, he means to tackle your most important and difficult tasks first.
“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. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment”
In a literal sense, one wouldn’t possibly like to eat frogs but in case your life depended on it, you would probably gobble up frogs without giving it a second thought. Won’t you? Following on the same lines, Tracy deduces that we need to prioritize and plan our tasks. At the beginning itself, he bluntly mentions a fact that we all need to get it to our mind and that is “WE ARE NEVER GOING TO HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO DO EVERYTHING THAT WE WANT TO DO”. It is a logical argument because we live in such a world where tasks and desires are just going to pile up on top of the other, but rationally, we need to sort out them soon to get our lives completely under our control.
We need to invest our time and energy only in those tasks that will have the maximum impact on our lives. And if we truly observe the number of tasks that we need to do hardly about 20% of them can have a massive positive impact on our lives. But instead, often we are tempted to get embroiled in low-value, easy tasks which can be tasks of very low importance that can be put off without causing any harmful consequences. Or the golden act of procrastination — to kill our time by being on social media, straining our senses, and making us dreary without even doing some impactful work in the entire day. Everyone gets 24 hours in a day but what differs between a successful and an unsuccessful person is the way time is managed and utilized.
Here, the author has heavily drawn his inspirations and inferences from many well-known concepts like the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule. Also, the way he inspired me to prioritize and categorize my high value and low-value tasks is just splendid. There is a constant emphasis on making a routine, a practical plan to carve out your path for each day of your life. Here my personal experiences come into use. As a person, I am a master procrastinator, but being a college student, this lifestyle was taking a toll on me. Though, as I told you before, I wasn’t initially convinced whether I should give this a go or not, but I thought if I can waste my time by mindlessly scrolling my phone, I can set out some time for reading this book. And I diligently followed all the pieces of advice for 18 days especially, that of planning my day and disciplining myself in executing them. You may think, what is new in that? It is so obvious. Well, I know that but since I am a big-time procrastinator, I was always shrugged off in planning every day in advance. I didn’t feel like doing it because I did it in the wrong way.
As Tracy says here, you need to crystallize, give form to all your thoughts and plans on paper. So, what I did early was that even if on a couple of days I made plans beforehand, I was too lazy to note them down, and hence, the next day they used to vanish in thin air and aggravated my procrastination. Therefore, jotting it down somewhere kind of impressions the plans on your subconscious mind which makes the path to discipline a bit easy. Initially, I wasn’t able to complete all the important tasks that I had planned for each day but that didn’t dishearten me for a bit because I was growing content with myself that I was doing something fruitful and worthy, and not wasting my day away. Moreover, I feel a different rush when I check off the boxes from my to-do list. Perfectionists will agree with me that that is the best feeling ever! 😉
After reading all these you may think that probably nothing much is new here and you are correct. The author himself says that he has taken a lot of inspiration and lessons from many other sources and this book just combines the 21 prime points that helped him and he hopes that it helps his readers too. But the noteworthy feature of this book is that it is concise and very action-oriented. In other words, it is as straightforward, as any book can ever get. In case you are procrastinating and keeping off this book for later, then I request to not do that because it is hardly more than 100 pages and these few pages have the power to enlighten you, of course given the fact that you are committed to following all the advice given, after all, doesn’t it just take 21 days, a week less than a month to build a habit?
“Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement” — BRIAN TRACY
- Amisha Acharya
Originally published at https://www.bookishsanta.com on January 25, 2021.
