Your “toad” is your greatest, most significant chore, the one you’re most likely to dilly-dally on if you don’t do something about it.
Synopsis
Samuel Langhorne Clemens once said that if the first thing you do every morning is to eat a live toad, you are able to go through the day with the gratification of knowing that that’s likely the worse thing that’s going to happen to you the rest of the day.
If you have to eat 2 toads, eat the most horrifying one first of all!
This is a different way of stating that if you have 2 crucial tasks in front of you, begin with the largest, most difficult, and most significant job first. Train yourself to start right away and then to hang in till the chore is complete before you progress to something else.
If you have to eat a live toad, it doesn’t help to sit and stare at it for any amount of time!
The key to accomplishing high levels of performance and productiveness is to formulate the lifelong habit of confronting your major task first thing each morning. You must formulate the routine of “eating your toad” before you do anything else and without taking too much time to consider it.
Successful, effective individuals are those who plunge directly into their major undertakings and then train themselves to work steadily and single-mindedly till those jobs are accomplished. Failure to execute” is among the greatest problems in organizations nowadays.
Many individuals confuse action with accomplishment. They talk continually, hold incessant meetings, and make fantastic plans, but in the final analysis, no one does the task and gets the results expected.
Formulate a positive dependency!
You are able to really formulate a “positive dependency” to endorphins and to the feeling of heightened clarity, confidence, and competency that they activate. When you formulate this dependency, you’ll, at an unconscious level, start to organize your life in such a way that you’re continually beginning and finishing ever more crucial tasks and projects. You’ll in reality become hooked, in a very positive sense, to success and contribution.
Practice is the key to dominating any skill. As luck would have it, your mind is like a muscle. It grows stronger and more adequate with use. With practice, you are able to learn any behaviour or formulate any habit that you consider either worthy or necessary.
What is your “toad?” What is the one undertaking that you despise doing every day? Once you’ve picked out your “toad” make it a habit to awaken every morning and do that job first of all.