Eat That Frog: A Framework For Rapid Goal Achievement.
I’m a massive fan of the personal development classics. Tony Robbins, Bob Proctor, Zig Ziglar, Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale—these are all authors who have had a huge impact on my life. Recently I was exploring an author I’d read a little less than the others: Brian Tracy. I’ve been reading his titular classic: Eat That Frog! which is simplified approach to productivity that a lot of my coaches have referenced over the years.
The idea goes like this: once you get crystal clear on your goals, you will realize that there is one task that requires your attention more than any other—this is very similar to Gary Keller’s “The ONE Thing” framework which is also an absolutely life-changing read.
But, being flawed humans, once we identify that core key activity we procrastinate. We do pretty much everything in our life except that core activity that would actually put points on the board and move us forward.
In a corporate setting that might look like a company that spends most of its days in meetings. Or in the small business world, a solopreneur who works on their offer non-stop, never bringing it to market to actually test it and see if it needs improving. Sound familiar?
The “cure” that Tracy came up with is very simple, first he names this task your “frog”—the most important, most difficult, hardest thing you need to do for the day. His advice is extremely simple: Eat That Frog! Do it as soon as possible, and get it out of the way.
If you were going to eat a frog, would you spend time staring at it and going over in your mind how little you wanted to eat it? No! That would be torture! The most effective and most efficient way to get this off your plate is to suck it up and eat it.
What follows is almost magical: you will feel so accomplished, so proud, and so motivated by doing the difficult thing, that—paradoxically—you will be able to do more, with less effort.
The vast majority of organizations and solopreneurs that I work with know exactly what needs to be done. Life is really just a battle to sit down and do those things. One other key point worth mentioning is addiction by subtraction. Simplifying your day by removing all the unimportant items that aren’t really moving the needle—the endless busywork that feels like progress but doesn’t get you closer to the goal.
Perhaps the biggest example of this in 2025—especially for solopreneurs—is building a personal brand and posting content. The promise of building a huge content machine is that you will end up getting endless inbound leads but more often than not what happens is that users of social media platforms end up, at best, generating a fraction of the sales volume they could generate if they embraced Direct Marketing, and at worst (and this is arguably the most common outcome) end up making the social platform rich by attracting eyeballs but not really making any sales.
This is perhaps most evident on a platform like LinkedIn, where 99% of the people you see on your LinkedIn feed are earning south of $250K per year despite spending 5-10+ hours per day posting content and interacting with other people who are doing the same thing.
Obviously I’m biased, but to that group of people in particular I would say that the “frog” you need to eat is embracing direct marketing and actually getting in front of your dream clientele rather than waiting for them to come to you—but I digress.
In summary: get crystal clear on the outcome you want, then identify the most important, high-value action you can take and make sure you get that done first. Turn this into a relentless practice and there is very little, if anything, that can stand in your way.
