Interview excerpt with Brian Tracy on Time Management

AudioMotivation: Brian, can you tell me about the idea of eating the biggest frog first, what are you referring to and how does a person do this.

Brian Tracy: Well, when I started off as a young man, I didn't graduate from high school. I was laboring at jobs for many years, and then I finally got into sales and into business. And I began asking myself the question, why are some people more successful than others?

And the bottom line of it is that successful people do more important things and they do them more often and they get better and better at them.

So a couple of years ago, I was asked by a publisher to write about time management, and they wanted me to build it around a theme that was in my work, called Eat That Frog, and it says that the first thing that you do when you get up in the morning is eat a live frog and you will have the satisfaction of knowing that it is the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long, and you're still alive.

Frog is a metaphor for your biggest task. And what we have found is that the primary difference between success and failure comes down to very different things: successful people have the discipline to get out and get started on their most important task and stay with it until it is done.

An unsuccessful person doesn't have the discipline to do that. So therefore, they always have to be supervised and managed by the people who make them do it. And of course get paid that much less, because supervision costs money, whereas only about 2% of people in society who can plan their day pick their most important task, and works solely on that until it is finished.

And those people are the highest earners, the most successful, fastest promoted highest-paid. They are the ones that achieved everything they can possibly achieve. And there is where that comes from eating the biggest frog first.

If you can pick your biggest and most important task and do that until it is finished. So if you practice that over time you'll get better and better at it eventually, I would think.

Wolfgang Von Goethe once said everything is hard before it is easy. Good habits are very hard to develop but easy to live with and that bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with and so developing the habit of doing your most important task is hard to do initially because the law of least resistance is one of the greatest enemies of success.

Success can also be a help, because you have a natural tendency to do what is fun and easy first rather than what is hard and difficult. And if you take your 80/20 rule. For example, the 80/20 rule says that 80% of what you do accounts for 20% of your results.

Peter Drucker says it is often the 90/10 rule. That 90% of your results come from 10% of what you do, and so if you have a list of 10 things to do one of those items may be worth five or 10 times as much in terms of its value and significance to your life and career as all the others put together.

And if you think about it, it takes the same amount of time sometimes to do each of the different items on your list but it is worth five to 10 times as much as the others.

And that is how people really succeed is they say what are the things I can do that are the most significant, that have the greatest positive impact without the greatest consequences. And they work on those items, and they do only those items until those are done, before they turn to something else.
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Excerpted from the AudioMotivation interview with Brian Tracy -- visit Josh Hinds' membership site at http://www.AudioMotivation.com where you'll find loads of insightful interviews like the one you just read.