— personal-development — 23 min read
Another gem of a book from Brian Tracy.
This book was introduced to me by my wife and as i am not an avid reader. I had to find an audiobook in youtube and listen to it. This book had so many good points, later i had to listen to the audiobook and follow the book to make the below notes.
Each time I came across a good idea, I tried it out in my own work and personal life. If it worked, I incorporated it into my talks and seminars and taught it to others.
I began looking around me and asking, “Why is it that other people are doing better than I am?”
Then I did something that changed my life. I began to ask successful people what they were doing that enabled them to be more productive and earn more money than me. And they told me. I did what they advised me to do, and my sales went up.
I asked successful managers what they did to achieve such great results, and when they told me, I did it myself. In no time at all, I began to get the same results they did.
Just find out what other successful people do and do the same things until you get the same results. Learn from the experts.
Simply put, some people are doing better than others because they do things differently and they do the right things right. Especially, successful, happy, prosperous people use their time far, far better than the average person.
A Simple Truth
The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status, and happiness in life. This key insight is the heart and soul of this book.
The key to success is action.
These principles work to bring about fast, predictable improvements in performance and results. The faster you learn and apply them, the faster you will move ahead in your career—guaranteed!
The Need to Be Selective
Your ability to select your most important task at each moment, and then to get started on that task and to get it done both quickly and well, will probably have more of an impact on your success than any other quality or skill you can develop.
The Truth about Frogs
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.
The first rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first. Discipline yourself to begin immediately and then to persist until the task is complete before you go on to something else.
Continually remind yourself that one of the most important decisions you make each day is what you will do immediately and what you will do later, if you do it at all.
The second rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.
The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first thing each morning. You must develop the routine of “eating your frog” before you do anything else and without taking too much time to think about it.
Take Action Immediately
Successful, effective people are those who launch directly into their major tasks and then discipline themselves to work steadily and single-mindedly until those tasks are complete.
The habit of setting priorities, overcoming procrastination, and getting on with your most important task is a mental and physical skill. As such, this habit is learnable through practice and repetition, over and over again, until it locks into your subconscious mind and becomes a permanent part of your behavior. Once it becomes a habit, it becomes both automatic and easy to do.
“Practice, man, practice.” Practice is the key to mastering any skill. Fortunately, your mind is like a muscle. It grows stronger and more capable with use. With practice, you can learn any behavior or develop any habit that you consider either desirable or necessary.
The Three Ds of New Habit Formation
You need three key qualities to develop the habits of focus and concentration, which are all learnable. They are decision, discipline, and determination.
First, make a decision to develop the habit of task completion. Second, discipline yourself to practice the principles you are about to learn over and over until they become automatic. And third, back everything you do with determination until the habit is locked in and becomes a permanent part of your personality.
Visualize Yourself as You Want to Be
Visualize yourself as the person you in–tend to be in the future. Your selfimage, the way you see yourself on the inside, largely determines your performance on the outside. All improvements in your outer life begin with improvements on the inside, in your mental pictures.
Clarity is perhaps the most important concept in personal productivity
Here is a great rule for success: Think on paper.
It consists of seven simple steps.
Step one: Decide exactly what you want. Stephen Covey says, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
Step two: Write it down. Think on paper. When you write down a goal, you crystallize it and give it tangible form. Unwritten goals lead to confusion, vagueness, misdirection, and numerous mistakes.
Step three: Set a deadline on your goal; set subdeadlines if necessary. A goal or decision without a deadline has no urgency, so you will naturally procrastinate and get very little done.
Step four: Make a list of everything you can think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal. As you think of new activities, add them to your list. Keep building your list until it is complete.
Step five: Organize the list into a plan. Organize your list by priority and sequence. List all tasks in the order they need to be done. Take a few minutes to decide what you need to do first and what you can do later. Decide what has to be done before something else and what needs to be done afterward.
Step six: Take action on your plan immediately. Do something. Do anything. An average plan vigorously executed is far better than a brilliant plan on which nothing is done. For you to achieve any kind of success, execution is everything.
Step seven: Resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your major goal. Build this activity into your daily schedule.
Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement. The bigger your goals and the clearer they are, the more excited you become about achieving them. The more you think about your goals, the greater becomes your inner drive and your desire to accomplish them.
Think about your goals and review them daily. Every morning when you begin, take action on the most important task you can accomplish to achieve your most important goal at the moment.
Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.
--- ALAN LAKEIN
You have heard the old question, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is “One bite at a time!”
How do you eat your biggest, ugliest frog? The same way: you break it down into specific step-by-step activities and then you start on the first one.
Your ability to make good plans before you act is a measure of your overall competence. The better the plan you have, the easier it is for you to overcome procrastination, to get started, to eat your frog, and then to keep going.
Six-P Formula. It says, “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.”
Two Extra Hours per Day
Always work from a list. When something new comes up, add it to the list before you do it.
Different Lists for Different Purposes
You need different lists for different purposes. First, you should create a master list on which you write down everything you can think of that you want to do sometime in the future. This is the place where you capture every idea and every new task or responsibility that comes up. You can sort out the items later.
Second, you should have a monthly list that you make at the end of the month for the month ahead. This may contain items transferred from your master list.
Third, you should have a weekly list where you plan your entire week in advance. This is a list that is under construction as you go through the current week. This discipline of systematic time planning can be very helpful to you.
Planning a Project
When you have a project of any kind, begin by making a list of every step that you will have to complete to finish the project from beginning to end. Organize the steps by priority, what is most important, and sequence, which tasks you must complete in order. Lay out the project in front of you on paper or on a computer-based project planner so that you can see every step and task. Then go to work on one task at a time.
One of the most important rules of personal effectiveness is the 10/90 Rule. This rule says that the first 10 percent of time that you spend planning and organizing your work before you begin will save you as much as 90 percent of the time in getting the job done once you get started. You only have to try this rule once to prove it to yourself.
When you plan each day in advance, you will find it much easier to get going and to keep going. The work will go faster and smoother than ever before. You will feel more powerful and competent. You will get more done faster than you thought possible. Eventually, you will become unstoppable.
It is also called the “Pareto Principle” after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.
This principle says that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results, 20 percent of your customers will account for 80 percent of your sales, 20 percent of your products or services will account for 80 percent of your profits, 20 percent of your tasks will account for 80 percent of the value of what you do, and so on. This means that if you have a list of ten items to do, two of those items will turn out to be worth much more than the other eight items put together.
Number of Tasks versus Importance of Tasks
Often, a single task can be worth more than all the other nine items put together. This task is invariably the frog that you should eat first.
The sad fact is that most people procrastinate on the top 10 or 20 percent of items that are the most valuable and important, the “vital few.” They busy themselves instead with the least important 80 percent, the “trivial many” that contribute very little to results.
The most valuable tasks you can do each day are often the hardest and most complex. But the payoff and rewards for completing these tasks efficiently can be tremendous. For this reason, you must adamantly refuse to work on tasks in the bottom 80 percent while you still have tasks in the top 20 percent left to be done.
Before you begin work, always ask yourself, “Is this task in the top 20 percent of my activities or in the bottom 80 percent?”
Rule: Resist the temptation to clear up small things first.
Time management is taking control over what you do next. And you are always free to choose the task that you will do next. Your ability to choose between the important and the unimportant is the key determinant of your success in life and work.
The mark of the superior thinker is his or her ability to accurately predict the consequences of doing or not doing something. The potential consequences of any task or activity are the key determinants of how important a task really is to you and to your company. This way of evaluating the significance of a task is how you determine what your next frog really is.
A long time perspective turns out to be more important than family background, education, race, intelligence, connections, or virtually any other single factor in determining your success in life and at work.
Your attitude toward time, your “time horizon,” has an enormous impact on your behavior and your choices. People who take a long-term view of their lives and careers always seem to make much better decisions about their time and activities than people who give very little thought to the future.
Rule: Long-term thinking improves short-term decision making.
Successful people have a clear future orientation. They think five, ten, and twenty years out into the future. They analyze their choices and behaviors in the present to make sure that what they are doing today is consistent with the long-term future that they desire.
Before starting on anything, you should always ask yourself, “What are the potential consequences of doing or not doing this task?”
Rule: Future intent influences and often determines present actions.
The clearer you are about your future intentions, the greater influence that clarity will have on what you do in the moment.
Keep yourself focused and forward moving by continually starting and completing those tasks that can make a major difference to your company and to your future.
The time is going to pass anyway. The only question is how you use it and where you are going to end up at the end of the weeks and months that pass. And where you end up is largely a matter of the amount of consideration you give to the likely consequences of your actions in the short term.
Thinking continually about the potential consequences of your choices, decisions, and behaviors is one of the very best ways to determine your true priorities in your work and personal life.
Obey the Law of Forced Efficiency
The Law of Forced Efficiency says, “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.” Put another way, you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.
Three Questions for Maximum Productivity
The first question is, “What are my highest-value activities?” Put another way, what are the biggest frogs that you have to eat to make the greatest contribution to your organization? To your family? To your life in general? You must be crystal clear about your highest-value activities before you begin work.
The second question you can ask continually is, “What can I and only I do, that if done well, will make a real difference?” This question came from the late Peter Drucker, the management guru. It is one of the most important of all questions for achieving personal effectiveness. What can you and only you do that if done well can make a real difference?
The third question you can ask is, “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?” In other words, “What is my biggest frog of all at this moment?”
Do first things first and second things not at all. As Goethe said, “The things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least.”
Deliberately and consciously procrastinate on small tasks. Put off eating smaller or less ugly frogs. Eat the biggest and ugliest frogs before anything else. Do the worst first!
Everyone procrastinates. The difference between high performers and low performers is largely determined by what they choose to procrastinate on.
Since you must procrastinate anyway, decide today to procrastinate on low-value activities. Decide to procrastinate on, outsource, delegate, and eliminate those activities that don’t make much of a contribution to your life in any case. Get rid of the tadpoles and focus on the frogs.
One of the most powerful of all words in time management is the word no! Say it politely. Say it clearly so that there are no misunderstandings. Say it regularly as a normal part of your time management vocabulary.
Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, was once asked his secret of success. He replied, “Simple. I just say no to everything that is not absolutely vital to me at the moment.”
Your job is to deliberately procrastinate on tasks that are of low value so that you have more time for tasks that can make a big difference in your life and work. Continually review your duties and responsibilities to identify time-consuming tasks and activities that you can abandon with no real loss. This is an ongoing responsibility for you that never ends.
The first law of success is concentration—to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor to the left.
---WILLIAM MATHEWS
An “A” item is defined as something that is very important, something that you must do. This is a task that will have serious positive or negative consequences if you do it or fail to do it
A “B” item is defined as a task that you should do. But it has only mild consequences. These are the tadpoles of your work life. This means that someone may be unhappy or inconvenienced if you don’t do one of these tasks
The rule is that you should never do a B task when an A task is left undone. You should never be distracted by a tadpole when a big frog is sitting there waiting to be eaten.
A “C” task is defined as something that would be nice to do but for which there are no consequences at all, whether you do it or not. C tasks include phoning a friend, having coffee or lunch with a coworker, and completing some personal business during work hours.
A “D” task is defined as something you can delegate to someone else. The rule is that you should delegate everything that someone else can do so you can free up more time for the A tasks that only you can do.
An “E” task is defined as something that you can eliminate altogether, and it won’t make any real difference. This may be a task that was important at one time but is no longer relevant to you or anyone else.
When every physical and mental resource is focused, one’s power to solve a problem multiplies tremendously.
---NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
The Big Seven in Management and Sales
The key result areas of management are planning, organizing, staffing, delegating, supervising, measuring, and reporting. These are the areas in which a manager must get results to be successful in his or her area of responsibility. A weakness in any one of these areas can lead to underachievement and failure as a manager.
Clarity Is Essential
The starting point of high performance is for you to identify the key result areas of your work. Discuss them with your boss. Make a list of your most important output responsibilities, and make sure that the people above you, on the same level as you, and below you are in agreement with it.
Give Yourself a Grade
Once you have determined your key result areas, the second step is for you to grade yourself on a scale of one to ten (with one being the lowest and ten being the highest) in each of those areas. Where are you strong and where are you weak? Where are you getting excellent results and where are you underperforming?
Poor Performance Produces Procrastination
One of the major reasons for procrastination in the workplace is that people avoid jobs and activities in those areas where they have performed poorly in the past. Instead of setting a goal and making a plan to improve in a particular area, most people avoid that area altogether, which just makes the situation worse.
The reverse of this is that the better you become in a particular skill area, the more motivated you will be to perform that function, the less you will procrastinate, and the more determined you will be to get the job finished.
The Great Question
Here is one of the greatest questions you will ever ask and answer. “What one skill, if I developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my career?” You should use this question to guide your career for the rest of your life.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
--- THEODORE ROOSEVELT
One Thing All Day Long
She continued with her story. “Once I had made this list, you told me to ask this question: ‘If you could do only one thing on this list all day long, which one task would contribute the greatest value to your company?’ Once I had identified that task, which was quite easy, I put a circle around that number.
“You then asked, ‘If you could do only one more thing on your list of key tasks, which would be the second activity that contributes the most value to your company?’
“Once I had identified the second most important task, you asked me the same question with regard to the third most important task. “
You then said something that shocked me at the time. You said that fully 90 percent of the value that you contribute to your company is contained in those three tasks, whatever they are. Everything else you do is either a support task or a complementary task that could probably be delegated, downsized, outsourced, or eliminated.”
If you want to increase your rewards, you must focus on increasing the value of what you do.
The Quick List Method
When you force yourself to ask and answer each of these questions in thirty seconds or less, you will be amazed at the answers. Whatever your answers, they will usually be an accurate snapshot of your true situation in life at the moment. These answers will tell you what is really important to you.
The purpose of time management—of eating that frog—and getting more done in less time is to enable you to spend more “face time” with the people you care about, doing the things that give you the greatest amount of joy in life.
Rule: It is the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time at home that matters.
Balance Is Not Optional
Don't bring work to home. While in office, sit and do work.
No matter what the level of your ability, you have more potential than you can ever develop in a lifetime.
--- JAMES T. MCCAY
You just need one small mental push to get started on your highest-value tasks.
Gather all the things you require to finish that highest-value task on table and start working.
Launch toward Your Dreams
My personal rule is “Get it 80 percent right and then correct it later.”
Persons with comparatively moderate powers will accomplish much, if they apply themselves wholly and indefatigably to one thing at a time.
--- SAMUEL SMILES
There is an old saying that “by the yard it’s hard; but inch by inch, anything’s a cinch!”
The only certain means of success is to render more and better service than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be.
--- OG MANDINO
Upgrading your skills is one of the most important personal productivity principles of all. Learn what you need to learn so that you can do your work in an excellent fashion. The better you become at eating a particular type of frog, the more likely you are to just plunge in and get it done.
A major reason for procrastination is a feeling of inadequacy, a lack of confidence, or an inability in a key area of a task. Feeling weak or deficient in a single area is enough to discourage you from starting the job at all.
Continually upgrade your skills in your key result areas. Remember, however good you are today, your knowledge and skills are becoming obsolete at a rapid rate. As Pat Riley, the basketball coach, said, “Anytime you stop striving to get better, you’re bound to get worse.”
Rule: Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.
Refuse to allow a weakness or a lack of ability in any area to hold you back. Everything is learnable. And what others have learned, you can learn as well.
Three Steps to Mastery
Concentrate all your thoughts on the task at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
--- ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
Identify the Limiting Factor
Every business has a limiting factor or choke point that determines how quickly and well the company achieves this purpose. The accurate identification of the limiting factor in any process and the focus on that factor can usually bring about more progress in a shorter period than any other single activity.
our key constraint can be something small and not particularly obvious. Sometimes you have to make a list of every step in a process and examine every activity to determine exactly what is holding you back. Sometimes a single negative perception or objection on the part of customers can be slowing down the entire sales process. Sometimes the absence of a single feature can be holding back the growth of sales of a product or service line.
Look into Yourself
Successful people always begin the analysis of constraints by asking the question, “What is it in me that is holding me back?” They accept complete responsibility for their lives and look to themselves for both the cause and cure of their problems.
The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.
--- THOMAS EDISON
Lead the Field
Make a game of starting a little earlier, working a little harder, and staying a little later. Always look for ways to go the extra mile, to do more than you are paid for.
Create Imaginary Deadlines
Set deadlines and subdeadlines on every task and activity. Create your own “forcing system.” Raise the bar on yourself and don’t let yourself off the hook. Once you’ve set yourself a deadline, stick to it and even try to beat it.
Successful people continually put the pressure on themselves to perform at high levels.
To keep yourself motivated, you must resolve to become a complete optimist. You must decide to respond positively to the words, actions, and reactions of the people and situations around you. You must refuse to let the unavoidable difficulties and setbacks of daily life affect your mood or emotions.
Control Your Inner Dialogue
Always tell them, “I feel terrific!”
As Viktor Frankl wrote in his bestselling book Man’s Search for Meaning, “The last of the human freedoms [is] to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Refuse to complain about your problems. Keep them to yourself.
Develop a Positive Mental Attitude
Optimism is the most important quality you can develop for personal and professional success and happiness. Optimistic people seem to be more effective in almost every area of life.
It turns out that optimists have four special behaviors, First, optimists look for the good in every situation. No matter what goes wrong, they always look for something good or beneficial. And not surprisingly, they always seem to find it. Second, optimists always seek the valuable lesson in every setback or difficulty. They believe that “difficulties come not to obstruct but to instruct.” They believe that each setback or obstacle contains a valuable lesson they can learn and grow from, and they are determined to find it. Third, optimists always look for the solution to every problem. Instead of blaming or complaining when things go wrong, they become action oriented. They ask questions like “What’s the solution? What can we do now? What’s the next step?” Fourth, optimists think and talk continually about their goals. They think about what they want and how to get it. They think and talk about the future and where they are going rather than the past and where they came from. They are always looking forward rather than backward.
All of life is the study of attention; where your attention goes, your life follows.
--- JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably, in thought and act.
--- ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all of your energies on a limited set of targets.
--- NIDO QUBEIN
Schedule Blocks of Time
The key to the success of this method of working in specific time segments is for you to plan your day in advance and schedule a fixed time period for a particular activity or task. Make work appointments with yourself and then discipline yourself to keep them. Set aside thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-minute time segments that you use to work on and complete important tasks.
Many highly productive people schedule specific activities in preplanned time slots all day long. These people build their work lives around accomplishing key tasks one at a time. As a result, they become more and more productive and eventually produce two times, three times, and five times as much as the average person.
Trigger High Performance in Yourself
One of the ways you can trigger this state of flow is by developing a sense of urgency. This is an inner drive and desire to get on with the job quickly and get it done fast. It is an impatience that motivates you to get going and to keep going. A sense of urgency feels very much like racing against yourself.
With this ingrained sense of urgency, you develop a “bias for action.” You take action rather than talking continually about what you are going to do. You focus on specific steps you can take immediately. You concentrate on the things you can do right now to get the results you want and achieve the goals you desire.
A fast tempo seems to go hand in hand with all great success. Developing this tempo requires that you start moving and keep moving at a steady rate. The faster you move, the more impelled you feel to do even more even faster. You enter “the zone.”
Build Up a Sense of Momentum
The good news is that the faster you move, the more energy you have. The faster you move, the more you get done and the more effective you feel. The faster you move, the more experience you get and the more you learn. The faster you move, the more competent and capable you become at your work.
Putting It All Together