PNTV: Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy (#246)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today, another great book missing the dust cover, but Eat that Frog. Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy Green. Cover must represent the frog is my guess. Subtitled 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. If you haven't studied much, Brian Tracy yet, you're in for a treat with this book. His books are packed with wisdom, great journal exercises and questions to help you get more clarity on your big visions and dreams and practical ideas on how you can implement them. I joke in the note that the introduction to this book had enough big ideas for me to write this entire six page philosopher's note. I didn't do that, but I could have. He's just packed with quotable goodness. Let's take a look at five of my favorite ideas. We'll start with frogs. Eat a frog. What are you talking about? Brian Tracy? Yeah, we want to eat a frog. So there's a story that if you need to eat a frog first thing in the morning, that's kind of a good thing because that's the worst thing you're likely to do all day long. And the rest of the day is going to be pretty easy. So the idea is identify the most important thing you can do in a given day and do that first. And the rest of your day is easy. Eat that frog. So the question for you is, what's the most important thing you can do today? If it's the end of the day that you can do tomorrow and you want to start your day with that question every day, what's the number one thing that if you did it, completed it would have the most positive impact in your life. Create the most value in your life. What is that? Brian says get in the habit. Build the discipline. You're not going to be perfect at it in the beginning, but get in the habit of eating that frog first thing every morning and you will create incredible momentum in your life. And anything other than that thing is a distraction. We've talked about that before. Rory Vaden. Procrastinate on purpose. He says throughout the day, ask yourself, what's the number one most significant thing I can do right now? Do that. Anything else is a distraction right now. What's the number one most important thing you could be doing right now? Or when you finish this video, do that. Anything else is a distraction. It's a huge idea. Eat that frog over and over and over again. So there you go, Frogs. Yummy. Second idea here. Thank you. Frogs is to Identify your goals if you want to have more momentum in your life. And reduce procrastination. In our last session on the procrastination equation, Piers Steele, one of the leading scientific researchers on procrastination, told us that the number one way to deal with your procrastination is to set goals. We had that equation right? Expectancy times value over impulsiveness times delay. You got to get your expectancy up, and you need to have a clear sense of a goal that you're excited about. And Brian's really good at helping us identify what goals matter to us. And then he has one of his great journal questions. This one helps us identify the number one goal that's most important to us. But it goes like this. Imagine take out a blank sheet of paper, right? Number it, one, two, all the way to 10. And I've done so many journal exercises based on Brian's stuff to just awesome. But I want you to think about your top 10 goals of what you want to achieve this in the next year. So say the next 12 or 16 months. When I did this exercise, it's now recording this in August 2015. So I was thinking about what I wanted to achieve by the end of 2016. What do I want to achieve? What 10 things? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. What are they? Think about it. Take the time. Press pause right now if you want to and actually do that exercise. Or do it afterwards. But do it. Prime your brain to think about what are the 10 things that I'd like to get done by the end of next year. It's a huge way to build your motivation and to reduce procrastination. So when you get that list of the top 10 things that you want to achieve, that would fire you up. Identify the number one goal. What's the number one goal? That if you achieve that goal, we would have the most positive impact in your life. What is it over the next year? If you did one thing, if you achieved one thing, what would it be? For me, it's a certain number of notes. And the specific number is getting to 500 notes. I have 285 or something like that done now. So setting the goal of 500 notes by the end of 2016. Today, end of 2016, if I get to that point, that's amazing. That drives a ton of things for me. I continue to create these videos. I do the micro classes. I do a bunch of stuff. I march toward my goal of getting to a thousand philosopher's notes in the next five and A half years. It's exciting for me, really fires me up. And it also gets me really clear on what my next frog is. I know what I need to do. I need to read, I need to create PDFs, I need to create my MP3s. These episodes in the micro classes. Repeat, do it again. My clarity comes because I know what my number one goal is. So the question for you is, what's your number one goal? What's the thing that's going to drive the most value in your life? Know what that is, and that's going to help you identify what frogs support you in the process of getting there. Third, big idea, 8020 principle is tied to what we just did. But let's just look at this list again. Let's say that you, at the beginning of the day, you write down 10 things that you could do, right? 10 different things you can do. The 8020 principle. For those of you who aren't familiar with it and those of you who are, a little recap. 8020 principle, Vilfredo Pareto. It's also called the Pareto principle. 1895. Vilfredo discovered that 20% of the individuals in his, I think it was either in Italy or in England when he did this research, owned 80% of the land. And he did the math and he saw that this accounted for a ton of different distributions. 20% of his pea pods accounted for 80% of the yield. 20% of what you do in a given day accounts for 80% of the value created in your life. The 8020 principle would hold. There's other crazy things, like you walk on 20% of your carpet 80% of the time. 20% of criminals commit 80% of crime. 20% of beer drinkers drink 80% of beer. There's a ton of funny, whatever little connections to 8020 principle. But if you did this list with your goals, you wrote down 10 of them. Two of them would probably account for 80% of possible benefits. And same with tasks. If you wrote down 10 things you could do today, two of them would probably account for 80% of your benefit. In the note, I talk about the fact that you can drill down on that and identify your number one thing, which is what we talked about in the One Thing by Gary Keller. He talked about the exact same thing, Pareto principle. He said, you need to go extreme. You need to know your 8020 principle, that you keep on doing it and you get to the number one thing that you need to do right now. Guess what that is. That's your frog. We Want to continue to whittle away at the trivial many. Vilfredo Pareto said to find these significant few and then to find the most important one thing that needs to get done. That's our third big idea. The fourth one is oil barrels. So Brian tells a story about once he was traveling across the Sahara Desert. Here he is, and he says there was 500 miles of desert in front of him. All looked exactly the same. He said it was like a yellow flat, huge parking lot with nothing, not a blade of grass, not even a fly. No food, no water, nothing for 500 miles. And he crossed this, right? He said, well, how'd they do it? This was in Algeria. So what they did was they created these, the French created these oil barrels. 50 gallon or something like that. Oil barrels, black oil barrels here. And then every 5km they put these huge barrels. And so what would happen is you can go on this desolate land and you'd walk and at any given point you'd be able to see two barrels, the one that you came from, and this one five kilometers away, which happened to be basically horizon to a horizon. So once you got to this barrel, you'd then see another barrel way over here. Right. And you keep on doing that 500 miles at a time. And all he had to do was get to the next barrel, get to the next barrel. This is what we talk about all the time with dominoes. In the last episode, we talked about it as island hopping. The Polynesian explorers colonized all the different islands in the Pacific by doing the exact same thing. They were on an island, they didn't have oil barrels, but there they are on an island. And they saw another island way out here. They got to that one, then they saw another island. What we want to do is break our huge goals down into little increments. And then we want to hit it. And we got to know that the next goal is going to open up. You hit that, the next goal is going to open up. Incremental improvement is where it's at. We don't want to overwhelm ourselves thinking we need to get to the end of the desert in one big step. It's not going to happen if you think that you're going to procrastinate. But if you can break it down into tiny little steps and micro goals, you can do amazing things. So think oil barrels, island hopping, dominoes, etc. Fifth big idea is a practical time management idea that Brian comes back to in his books again and again and again. Single handling stuff. And we talked about this in the last episode on Procrastination as well. Piers Steele tells us that we waste a ton of time distracting ourselves. If you remember, in that episode we talked about impulsiveness, that impulsiveness is the greatest threat to our productivity, being distracted. And he said if you simply just take off your email notifications, you'd increase your productivity by 10%, which would boost your productivity in the course of a year. You basically add an additional month of productivity. That's crazy. 10% gain in productivity equals a month of more productivity productive time over the course of a year. What? Crazy, right? So we want to single handle things. When you start something, finish it. You start something. You finish it. You start something, you finish it. You. You don't start something, check your email or your social feed and then come back to it. That type of multitasking is a horrible waste of time. You're constantly getting your momentum back, figuring out where you left off, and it takes you way longer to do that than if you just single handled it. Start, finish, start, finish. Get in the habit of finishing things. Nick Saban, the great football coach, collegiate football coach, that's his whole thing. Their process is they finish, they finish a tackle, they finish a workout regimen, they finish a practice, they finish a play. In a game, they finish a game, they finish. And that leads to an extraordinary amount of success. So see, if you have a habit of allowing yourself to be distracted and discipline yourself to single handle things. Start, finish, start, finish. And notice your productivity. Go way up as you do that. Have your oil barrels, have your little incremental goals mapped out so you're not stressing yourself out and you're getting excited and focused. 80, 20 it. Know that a very small amount of your activities are leading to a huge amount of your results. Take the time to figure out what those things are and do them. Know what your number one goal is? This is a really cool exercise. I hope you do it. Top 10 goals for the next year. What are they and what's your number one? Create a plan for that. Start executing it. And Brian says, do something every day in pursuit of that goal. And you know that if you hit it, it's going to have a huge positive impact the rest of your life. And that brings us back to the frogs, which is today. What's the number one most important thing you could do that would have the most positive benefit in your life? Do that before you do anything else. Don't hop online and distract yourself. Your day will be over and you won't have done that, you're more likely to procrastinate. Discipline yourself before you get involved in everything else to do the most important thing. If that's all you did, you didn't change anything else in your life, but you did the number one most important thing. Day in and day out, you tell me what your life would look like in a matter of months, let alone in years, let alone in decades. It's an exciting opportunity. Hope you enjoyed this quick look at a fun book and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube, so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. 10 bucks a month Join the Optimal Living Membership Program. You get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes on some of the best Optimal Living books out there. Old school classics, Positive Psychology, Modern Stuff, Mindfulness, Peak Performance, purpose neuroscience, wealth, etc. And what you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episodes, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. Joseph Campbell, you want to figure out how to live your hero's journey? Well, this is a great place to start. I basically pull out my favorite big ideas, riff on them, connect them to other books and other ideas and help you apply this wisdom to your life today. That's what the PDF looks like again. We have 250 of these on all these different great books. And then I record those PDFs as an MP3 so you can listen to that MP3 while you're on a walk or working out or doing some errands or whatever that is. Philosopher's Notes. A lot going on there. And then in addition to Philosopher's Notes, you get access to Optimal Living classes. Optimal Living 101 idea here is that all those great teachers come back to the same big ideas again and again and again. I distill those ideas into classes. 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