10 Tough Things to Do First (The Secret of Success: )

Eat the ugly frog first. 

I enjoy tossing that line out when I give a speech, often accompanied on the big screen by a photograph of a large and exceedingly unattractive reptile. But it is based on the truth that if you eat an ugly frog for breakfast, the rest of the day will be much better.

What ugly frogs do you have in your cupboard? Here are 10 frogs you should swallow. 
This gets to the heart of procrastination and its counterpart — self-discipline. Procrastination is more than the art of keeping up with yesterday. It is the active avoidance of doing things that are dull, tedious, disinteresting, boring or stressful. Yet life and business have a lot of these elements. I ran a publicly traded semiconductor company for 37 years, and there were days I did not want to look at the latest financial numbers or help debug production facility equipment issue. But those were my ugly frogs, and I ate them with gusto.

Discipline overcomes procrastination because, and I note in my book Tough Things First, discipline is doing what you don’t like doing and doing it well.

If you have 10 things that need to be done, and you put off the one thing you dislike, it still needs doing eventually. Yet while you do the other nine tasks, the single unpleasant one weighs on your mind, drains your enthusiasm, zaps your motivation, saps your energy, and generally makes you miserable.

Ray Zinn is an inventor, entrepreneur, investor, angel, bestselling author and the longest serving CEO of a publicly traded company in Silicon Valley. Read full profile

Contrarily, if you do the tough things first, if you eat your ugly frog for breakfast, the other tasks fly by. You are liberated from delay, freed from anxiety, and joyful in all other pursuits. I have discovered that my personal productivity rises 20% when my disagreeable task is in my “out box”.

This is not just a business prescription. Life is loaded with ugly frogs. This is why New Year resolutions are always made (because the tough things have fallen by the wayside) and quickly abandoned (because they are still tough things). Yet each procrastination creates a drag on your body, health, mindset, willpower and spunk. Each ugly frog you avoid ingesting is the one you see on your breakfast table the next morning. They simply don’t go away, and they spawn newer and uglier frogs.

Soon enough, you cannot wade through your breakfast nook for the thicket of frogs you have allowed to accumulate.

Here is a personal case in point. My partner and co-founder Warren led a frog-free life. This included his health habits. He was not one to diet or exercise, and he smoked relentlessly. His life was not devoted to eating the ugly frogs necessary for good health. He died at age 69, while I’m still running strong at age 81 in what can only jokingly be called “retirement”. Truth be told, I’m working harder and enjoying it more than ever.