Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy

Mark Twain once said that :

   " If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog,  you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that this is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long."

 There will be no limit to what you can accomplish when you learn how to Eat That Frog! 

The first rule of frog eating is this:

"If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. "

The second rule of frog-eating :

 "If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long."

Discipline yourself to begin immediately and then to persist until the task is complete before you go on to do something else.

Note : - 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.

Important task completion triggers the release of endorphins in your brain. These endorphins give you a natural “high.” The endorphin rush that follows successful completion of any task makes you feel more positive, personable, creative and confident.

Formula for setting and achieving goals 

Step One: Decide exactly what you want.

Step Two: Write it down.

Step Three: Set a deadline on your goal. Set sub-deadlines if necessary.

Step Four: Make a list of everything that you can think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal.

Step Five: Organize the list into a plan.

Step Six: Take action on your plan immediately.

Step Seven: Resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your major goal. Track your progress.

Remember there are no shortcuts to Success. Your success in life and work will be determined by the kinds of habits that you develop over time. The habit of setting priorities, starting and finishing important jobs, overcoming procrastination and getting on with your most important task is a mental and physical skill. Always work from a list. When something new comes up, add it to the list before you do it. You can increase your productivity and output by 25% or more, by about two hours, from the first day that you begin working consistently from a list.

The Three Ds of New Habit Formation

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 the person you intend to be in the future. 

Your self-image, 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.

"There is one quality that one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants and a burning desire to achieve it."

~Na p o l e o n  h i l l

Plan Every Day In Advance

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now.” ~ Alan Lakein

Every minute spent in planning saves as many as ten minutes in execution. It only takes about ten to twelve minutes for you to plan out your day, but this small investment of time will save you at least two hours (100-120 minutes) in wasted time and diffused effort throughout the day. 

To get the highest possible return on your investment of mental, emotional and physical energy, One may adopt a 6Ps formula given below: 

6Ps formula : “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.”

The greater clarity you have regarding what you want and the steps you will have to take to achieve it, the easier it will be for you to overcome procrastination, eat your frog, and complete the task before you. A major reason for procrastination and lack of motivation is vagueness or confusion  about what it is you are trying to do, and in what order and for what reason. You must avoid this common condition with all your strength by striving for ever greater clarity in your major goals and tasks. Here is a great rule for success: "Think on paper."

Taking action without thinking things through is a prime source of problems.  As Alex Mackenzie wrote, "Action without planning is the cause of every failure." One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all.

“Before you begin scrambling up the ladder of success, make sure that it is leaning against the right building.” ~ Stephen Covey

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.

Resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your major goal.

1. You may learn a certain number of new words in a foreign language.

Whatever it is, you must never miss a day. Begin today to plan every day, week, and month in advance. Take a notepad or sheet of paper (or use your phone) and make a list of everything you have to do in the next twenty-four hours. Add to your list as new items come up. Make a list of all your projects, and the big multitask jobs that are important to your future.

2. Resolve today that you are going to spend more and more of your time working in those few areas that can really make a difference in your life and career and less and less time on lower-value activities.

3. Your attitude toward time, your “time horizon,” has an enormous impact on your behavior and your choices.

4. Practice “zero-based thinking” in every part of your life. Ask yourself continually, “If I were not doing this already, knowing what I now know, would I start doing it again today?” If it is something you would not start again today, knowing what you now know, it is a prime candidate for abandonment or creative procrastination.

5. Examine each of your personal and work activities and evaluate it based on your current situation. Select at least one activity to abandon immediately or at least deliberately put off until your more important goals have been achieved.

"The mark of the superior thinker is his or her ability to accurately predict the consequences of doing or not doing something."

The Art of Enduring Pain

  

It’s easy to work when  we feel like doing something but our success in life is determined by the days when we don’t feel like doing anything. We all possess unique talents but many of us lack the discipline to nurture and groom it. Everyday we have to make a choice between the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. What we choose defines our life. Accepting pain and delaying the instant pleasure is the most difficult task in life but if practiced it leads to success, long-term satisfaction and happiness. But we all want to avoid pain in our lives therefore, we often indulge in instant pleasures which eventually leads to pain, the very thing we wanted to avoid. To be successful in life, we must learn to endure the pain needed to change our life. For enduring pain, we need vision, perseverance and a change of interpretation of situation. 

Having a clear vision of what you want and how it will influence your life gives you the needed strength and motivation to act but without determination and perseverance it will soon fade away. Determination literally means "The action of not stopping" . It is a positive emotional feeling that involves persevering towards a difficult goal in spite of obstacles. Determination occurs prior to goal attainment and serves to motivate behavior that will help achieve one's goal. When one is determined further reflection and distraction is excluded from within and you follow one path with conviction. Determination sets limits internally but not yet externally. It does not regard what is outside of the limits that are established but only inside. But perseverance doesn't care about external limits. Perseverance isn't afraid to go sideways or backwards. It picks a path and tries it until it's obvious that path isn't going to work, at which point it will try another. It continues to try until you get through the situation. It is like searching for a missing or lost item. 

When we fail to achieve the desired result, we become disheartened and lose motivation to take another goal. Marcus Aurelius quotes, “Change your interpretation of the situation in the positive light and you will get stronger. Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” Your reality is made by your opinions about yourself and others. Reality is often different than we usually perceive. Even when we don’t have any serious problems our mind has the tendency to create some. Many of our problems can be solved just by having a different perspective i.e. changing our interpretation of the situation. For instance, change of interpretation is required in understanding texts or art, solving mathematical problems, parking a car, learning a new skill, designing a creative product etc. When we want to reconcile with someone or make peace with ourselves, we need to see the situation in a positive light which requires changing our interpretation of events which were earlier a source of conflict, stress and anxiety.  By having discussions with people who have different opinions than us, helps in gaining new perspectives which we can use in analyzing our situation. People who suffer from depression and avoid conversations with others generally have more suicidal tendency. Coping with depression requires rejecting your old beliefs and forming a new value system to view the world. Our value system determines our perception of the events around us. If we could change some of our old beliefs and values we could change our reality and thus, we can learn the art of enduring pain to cope with failure and depression.

Artwork Credits : Kashish Panjvani 

  

Flow - The Philosophy of being in the moment

“Rhythm is a fundamental fact of life, the key, indeed, to the universe.” ~Anna Pavlova

 

Have you ever experienced that you lost the sense of time being engaged in an activity? For ballerinas the time slows down when they are dancing and for a musician time passes away quickly when they are performing or practicing. This state of being where you lose sense of time and the actions become effortless is called flow or rhythm or Wu Wei. This idea of flow is very ancient and has been in practice of Taoists since ages. We all have experienced this state of flow but this happens for many of us unconsciously.  So, what can we achieve by entering this state of flow consciously?     

 The answer is Happiness, which is generally perceived as fleeting and momentary. Anna Pavlova quotes, “When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.” So, can we find a way to make this butterfly of happiness stay longer?

The author of the book Flow – The Psychology of optimal experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explores the most ancient question, when do people feel most happy? He answers, when people enter the state of flow consciously or unconsciously, they feel most happy and have optimal experiences. Optimal experiences are the occasions where we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment, which we cherish for long and that becomes a landmark in our lives. These moments are often not passive, receptive relaxing times. They tend to occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something that is difficult or worthwhile.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi quotes, “A person can make himself happy or miserable, regardless of what is happening outside, just by changing the contents of consciousness.” 

Everything we experience – joy or pain, interest or boredom—is represented in the mind as information. If we are able to control this information, we can determine what our lives will be like. Optimal states result when there is order in consciousness. This happens when we are focused on realistic goals with our skills matching the opportunities for action. Goals allow people to concentrate attention on the task at hand, forgetting other things temporarily. Thus, it is an end in itself i.e. is autotelic (Auto means self and telos means goal), without thought of growth or reward. And yet, they create the perfect conditions for both growth and reward. An autotelic experience lifts life to a different level. Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control, and psychic energy works to reinforce the sense of self, instead of being lost in the service of external goals. When experience is intrinsically rewarding life is justified in the present, instead of being held hostage to a hypothetical future gain.

The autotelic self transforms potentially entropic experience into flow. Developing an autotelic

self involves the following:

• Setting goals – monitoring feedback

• Becoming immersed in the activity

• Paying attention to what is happening

• Enjoying the immediate experience

 Understanding Flow

Flow is an optimal state of mind between boredom and anxiety, where you perform your best and feel your best. During flow, attention is freely invested to achieve a person’s goals because there is no disorder to strengthen out or no threat for the self to defend against. When a person can organize his or her consciousness so as to experience flow as often as possible, the quality of life starts to improve. In flow, we are in control of our psychic energy and everything we do adds order to consciousness. Following a flow experience, our self becomes more complex than that it had been before, due to two broad psychological processes – differentiation and integration. The self becomes differentiated as the person after a flow experience feels more capable and skilled. Flow leads to integration because thoughts, intentions, feelings and the senses are focused on the same goal. After a flow episode, one feels more together than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people and the world in general. Differentiation promotes individuality while integration facilitates connections and security. To improve the quality of life, we can try to make external conditions match our goals and also change how to experience or interpret external conditions. Both are needed. Each by itself is insufficient. The most important trait of people who find flow even during adversity is non self-conscious individualism, i.e. a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking. Because of their intrinsic motivation, they are not easily disturbed by external events.

Creating a Unified Flow Experience

Having achieved flow in one activity does not necessarily guarantee that it will be carried over into the rest of life. All life must be turned into a unified flow experience. It does not matter what the goal is. What is important is, it should be compelling enough to order a lifetime’s worth of psychic energy. If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow and if he or she invests all the energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony and the separate parts of life will fit together and each activity will make sense in the present, as well as in view of the past and the future.

1)            Building inner harmony

Our level of happiness ultimately depends on how our mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Happiness depends on inner harmony, not on our ability to exert control over the great forces of the universe. People must learn to find enjoyment and purpose, regardless of external circumstances. To become happy, we must strive to become independent of the social environment, i.e. become less sensitive to its rewards and punishments. We must learn to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself. This will ensure that the burden of social controls falls off from our shoulders.

 

 2)           Controlling the consciousness

Control over consciousness is not a cognitive skill. It cannot be memorized or routinely applied, but must be learnt by trial and error. The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening inside and outside the organization in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body. It is consciousness which enables us to daydream, write beautiful poems and scientific theories. Unfortunately, the nervous system has definite limits on how much information it can process at any given time. The information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important. It is what determines the content and quality of life.

3)           Finding balance between challenges and skills

Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one’s skills; when it becomes an end in itself, it ceases to be fun. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

 4)          Coping with Stress

Having the ability to consciously enter this state of trance helps us in coping with difficult times. While coping with stress, a person has three resources to draw from:

• External support, especially the network of social support

• Psychological support, intelligence, education, relevant personality factors

• Coping strategies

Coping strategy is what makes the big difference. People respond to stress in two main ways. The positive response is called a mature defense. The negative response is called neurotic defense or regressive coping. No trait is more useful, more essential for survival or more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge ie. responding positively to stress. The mature defense is like becoming a stoic i.e having the wisdom to tell the difference between what I can control and what I can't, not worrying  about the about things that you cannot control.  They are not focused on satisfying their needs. They are alert, constantly processing information from the surroundings. Instead of becoming internally focused, they stay in touch with what is going on. So new possibilities and new responses emerge. When an opportunity presents itself to them, they go for it and enjoy themselves. 

One can cope with new situations either by trying to remove the obstacles or by focusing on the entire situation and asking whether alternative goals may be more appropriate.The moment biological or social goals are frustrated, a person must formulate new goals and create a new flow activity. The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old but on building the new!. Art, Philosophy, communication, music, walking and having a hobby can really help you, when you are not feeling yourself.

References : Flow – The Psychology of optimal experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 

Artwork Credits : Kashish Panjvani