A few months ago I went on a guy’s weekend at a friend’s place on the Black Warrior river. It’s a great place with a huge fire pit that 20 guys can easily sit around. (Hmm, hey Brian can I borrow the cabin this weekend? Just kidding). Anyway, one of the main events of the weekend was everybody brought some sort of unusual game to eat, the weekend was called The Beast Feast. We had venison, duck, and something I had never eaten before, frog legs.
Now to say that I’m a picky eater would be an understatement. I’m strictly a meat and potatoes kind of guy. Right now friends of mine are falling in the floor laughing just thinking about my eating habits. So I was not really too excited about the idea of eating frog legs. I thought I was I going to avoid having to try them because I was leaving before they were supposed to be ready. But just as I was going to the car, the guy cooking yelled to me that the first batch was ready. Dang it! Now I would have to try them. I found the ketchup and knew the best way to do it was just go for it. The longer I waited the worse the anticipation was going to be. So I just chomped down on one expecting the worst. I’m telling myself “don’t throw up, don’t hurl” just before taking a bite. The big surprise was I actually didn’t find the frog leg completely revolting, in fact it was kind of good. Just goes to show you that a shoelace would taste good if you deep-fried it. But my point is that I had dreaded the frog legs but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I had expected.
There’s a really good lesson here: eat the biggest, worst looking frog first. OR develop the habit of identifying the worst thing on your to-do list everyday and tackle it first. You’ll be amazed at how this will improve your productivity and outlook on life. I can tell you from firsthand experience there is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment on the days when I do eat the frog verses the days that I don’t. There’s an old saying that goes “If the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long!”
There’s another part to this that says “if you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first”. Or if you have two important tasks, start with the hardest one.” Develop the discipline to attack the biggest , ugliest frog first and then refuse to quit until you finish.
My preference though is to choose the easy stuff first. The stuff that I can knock out quickly, with minimum hassle. The problem is the frog never goes away. He just sits there, staring at you saying “I ain’t going nowhere”. This just adds more stress than if I’ll just attack the frog first.
Maybe the thing to do is come up with a way to highlight your frog. Maybe you circle the frog or put it first in your list or maybe you draw a frog next to the item or maybe you put a big “F” beside it. Whatever you do just make sure you always know what your frog is and attack it first.
Real men eat the frog.
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Proverbs is probably my favorite book of the bible for lots of reasons. One of them being it’s intensely practical, even 3,000 years after it was written. Like this verse:
