I am a big quote guy. Not sure why but I absolutely love collecting quotes. They give me a snapshot into someone’s mind and I appreciate that quite a lot. At times though, the reason I like quotes is because they perfectly summarize how I feel about something. So much so that I couldn’t possibly word it any better. Mark Twain gets credit for this one – If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it fir dst thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.
At a foundational level, this has been transformative for me, for the business, and for every client we have reached by extension. That said, this is quite the opposite of what we see in the world around us. In the course of everyday life, we see people procrastinating, rescheduling, or outright avoiding doing the really, really hard thing they have to do. Why? It isn’t going away. Ignoring this won’t magically make this suckfest suddenly vanish will it? So why not eat that frog right away?
Simply put, it is hard. Period. We could add color by saying it is unpleasant, it is undesirable, but at its core, it is just play hard and we don’t love hard things. One of the anthropological benefits of living when we do is that a lot of folks have done the bulk of the truly difficult things in the past so we don’t have to repeat those. We don’t have to build our computers every morning as an example to read this post. We have abdicated so much of this bandwidth actually that doing almost anything hard feels incorrect. But when you flip this around, the benefits have been bountiful.
Here are a few reasons I have found to remind myself of regularly…
Doing the hard stuff first means doing it while the morning coffee is still doing its thing. This means I am faster and more on it than say, 3pm.
Doing the hard stuff first also means it is before the rest of the unknown unknowns start popping onto the radar. These are daily persistent reminders that I should have done X when I had the chance earlier.
Doing the hard stuff first also allows the opportunity to do this without conflation of other tasks. This means I can focus my attention on this, and only this, either to completion or to a more meaningful plateau than would otherwise have been attained.
It also means that I can send progress to stakeholders early enough if the day/week such to prompt meaningful reflection on a project we are working on. Early delivery all but guarantees at least reflection. Sending it at 5:59pm all but guarantees this message gets filed in the “when I get to it” bucket. I prefer the former personally.
It sucks. We are all avoiding it. But I have found more consistently than not just rolling up your sleeves and getting it done is almost always worth its weight in whatever thing you think is worth a lot. And if you have to eat two frogs then perhaps a career change is a more pressing question in your life.
