EAT THAT FROG!
PREFACE Thank you for picking up this book. I hope these ideas help you as much as have helped me and thousands of others. In fact, I hope that this book changes your life forever. There is never enough time to do everything you have to do. You are literally swamped with work and personal responsibilities, projects, stacks of magazines to read and piles of books you intend to get to one of these days as soon as you get caught up. But the fact is that you are never going to get caught up. You will never get on top of your tasks. You will never get far enough ahead to be able to get to all those books, magazines and leisure time activities that you dream of doing.
And forget about solving your time management problems by becoming more productive. No matter how many personal productivity techniques you master, there will always be more to do than you can ever accomplish in the time you have available to you, no matter how much it is. You can only get control of your time and your life by changing the way you think, work and deal with the never ending river of responsibilities that flows over you each day. You can only get control of your tasks and activities to the degree that you stop doing some things and start spending more time on the few things that can really make a difference in your life.
I have studied time management for more than thirty years. I have immersed myself in the works of Peter Drucker, Alex Mackenzie, Alan Lakein, Stephen Covey and many, many others. I have read hundreds of books and thousands of articles on personal efficiency and effectiveness. This book is the result. Each time I came across a good idea, I tried it out in my own work and personal life. If it worked, I incorporated it into my talks and seminars and taught it to others. Galileo once wrote, “You cannot teach a person something he does not already know; you can only bring what he does know to his awareness.” Depending upon your level of knowledge and experience, these ideas will sound familiar. This book will bring them to a higher level of awareness. When you learn and apply these methods and techniques over and over until they become habits, you will alter the course of your life in a very positive way.
Let me tell you something about myself and the origins of this little book. I started off in life with few advantages, aside from a curious mind. I did poorly in school and left without graduating. I worked at laboring jobs for several years. My future did not appear promising. As a young man, I got a job on a tramp freighter and went off to see the world. For eight years, I traveled and worked, and then traveled some more, eventually visiting more than eighty countries on five continents. When I could no longer find a laboring job, I got into sales, knocking on doors, working on straight commission.
I struggled from sale to sale until I began looking around me and asking, “Why is it that other people are doing better than I am?” Then I did something that changed my life. I began to ask successful people what they were doing that enable them to be more productive and earn more money than me. And they told me. And I did what they advised me to do, and my sales went up. Eventually, I became so successful that they made me a sales manager. As a sales manager, I used the same strategy. I asked successful managers what they did to achieve such great results, and when they told me, I went out and did the same things. In no time at all, I began to get the same results they did.
Over the years, I have worked in twenty-two different jobs, started and built several companies, earned a business degree from a major university, learned to speak French, German and Spanish and been a speaker, trainer or consultant for more than 1000 companies. I currently give talks and seminars to more than 250,000 people each year, with audiences as large as 20,000 people. A Simple Truth Throughout my career, I have discovered and rediscovered a simple truth. It is this: the ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task, to do it well and to finish it completely, is the key to great success, achievement, respect, status and happiness in life. This key insight is the heart and soul of this book. This book is written to show you how to get ahead more rapidly in your career and to simultaneously enrich your personal life. These pages contain the twenty-one most powerful principles on personal effectiveness I have ever discovered.