I ran across this piece I wrote back in 2018. It's a great way to look at those tasks on our list that we just don't want to do. I still put things off from time to time, and every once in a while, to this day, you'll see three words written in my book. Eat the frog!
From 2018: My daughter looked over my shoulder the other night and asked me why I'd drawn so many pictures of little green frogs in my bullet journal over the last few days. I gave her this Mark Twain quote. I ran across it earlier in the week, and I'd forgotten the wisdom of it. She looked at me very puzzled after I recited it to her.
"You know how I've asked you three times this week to clean up your room," I said to her.
"Yeah," she said.
"You still haven't done it. You've been putting it off."
"Yes."
"That task is your frog," I told her. "You work harder and spend more time avoiding it, than it would take you to actually do it. It's not going to go away, so why not get it out of the way first thing in the morning and be free of it. It's always best to start your day by doing first what you want to do the least."
And she got it. She cleaned her room. We now refer to things we don't want to do as frogs, but we do them.
Mark Twain, for all his folksy humor and charm was a very practical and very intelligent man. There's another part of this quote I left off. The second line is, "And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it is best to eat the biggest one first."
~Todd E. Creason
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