You are listening to the business and barbecue podcast hosted by Tim Herriage. Tim Herriage is an active entrepreneur who built and sold six companies but the age of 40 and enjoys sharing the ups and downs of business and entrepreneur life as for the barbecue, that’s just something he has a passion for and likes to share as well. Here’s your host, Tim Herriage.
This is the transcript for Episode 5. The show notes and summary are available here.
All right, Alright what’s cooking? Everybody. Tim Herriage here and welcome back to the business and barbecue podcast. Today we’re going to talk about procrastination. Now, I personally have been putting off doing this episode. I was in church yesterday and I was thinking about the things wrong in my business and I was thinking about some of the things I could do better and it brought me back to a familiar topic and that topic is procrastination. Procrastination is something I’ve always struggled with. Procrastination is one of those things I believe most entrepreneurs struggle procrastination is not laziness. Many times entrepreneurs procrastinate because they have so many things in their mind that it’s hard to make sense of it all. Many entrepreneurs procrastinate because they have so many good ideas and so many things that come to their mind. It’s hard to know where to start.
As I was sitting in Church yesterday, I was reminded of a book I first read back in the early two thousands called Eat that Frog. Eat That Frog is a book that was published in 2001 by an author named Brian Tracy. It’s one of those books that if you go to enough seminars or your you attend enough masterminds or meetings, you will hear of the book. So this morning I hopped in my audible app on my phone, downloaded the book, and today I listened to it again. Now if you’re like me on audible, I listen to books at about one and a quarter to one and a half times speed. This book is short enough that you can actually get through it in less than two hours. There are a lot of golden nuggets in the book and I just thought I would go through them. Talk a little bit about some personal experiences, talk about the struggles I have.
Talk about some of the struggles I’ve seen other entrepreneurs have and see if together we can’t go down a road that will help us avoid procrastination, help us focus on what’s important and help us get the most out of our time. And at the end of the day, for me personally, since I like to spend most of my time with my wife and children or eating barbecue, but it takes a lot of money to do the things that we like to do when I work, I need to make my work really work and make the most out of my time. So today we’re going to talk about Eat That Frog, what Eat That Frog is what it means to me and how I think that you and I can get the most out of the valuable lessons in the book and apply it to our businesses to make more money with less time.
And just like last time, I’m going to talk a lot about audible again. I’m one of those people that’s always on the move. Audible has been a big help for me, not only learning new things and listening to new books, but more often than not going back and reviewing books that have been important to me or been impactful to my life. So a quick word about audible and then we’ll be back to dive into eating frogs.
Today’s show is brought to you by audible. Audible is offering our listeners a free audio book with a 30 day trial membership. Just go to audibletrial.com/th and browse the unmatched selection of audio programs. Download a free title and start listening. It’s that easy. Go to audibletrial.com/th to get started today. Why audible? Audible content includes an unmatched selection of audio books, audio original shows, news, comedy, and more from the leading audio book publishers, broadcasters, and entertainers.
Books in my library include thinking, grow rich, richest man in Babylon and rich dad poor dad. Go to audibletrial.com/th today. Get started with your free trial and claim your one free audio book. One of the fun things about doing these podcasts is it really forces me to go out and research ideas and topics as something comes to my mind and I think it would be a good topic or or some content for the podcast. In order to fill the time I need to go out and do research and make sure I’m not just operating from my gut and I’m more operating from factual conversations. So I went out today, I listened to the book on audible. Then I started doing research and I read all the web documentation and just kind of pulled away some nuggets and I wanted to go into those nuggets and just talk about what I read, what I saw, what I see.
So first Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you were to do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the rest of the day with the satisfaction of knowing that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day. Your frog is your biggest and most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on. If you don’t do something about it, and I don’t know about you, but for me that just rings very, very true. So I listened to the book and get today pulled away some nuggets. I’m going to talk about a little bit of it. Obviously I can’t cover two hours worth of Brian Tracy’s content and 30 minutes, but I pulled away kind of the, I would say three different areas and some of the more impactful things that were said in the book to me that I wanted to share with you.
But again, I highly recommend you hop on over to Amazon or hop on over to audible, grab a copy of the book, go to Brian Tracy’s website, check it out for yourself and see what you pull out of the book. So I think it all really starts with the six P’s. Now in the Marine Corps we said this a little differently, but the non explicit version is proper prior planning prevents poor performance. And that rings very true in a most all areas of your life and your business, your life and your business that the way they work together. So when you look at the seven steps that are recommended in the book, I think it really kind of sets it all out. So step one, they say to avoiding procrastination and being ready to Eat That Frog so to speak, is decide exactly what you want. I think that’s really important because as we’ll talk about later, setting priorities, many times we take on many more things than we really plan to.
Many times we take on all of these initiatives and ideas that don’t really have a lot to do with our real desires in life and in business. Many times we find ourselves working on things because it’s busy work or someone else thinks it’s important and it’s not exactly what we want. So step one in the book and I definitely highly recommend it. Sit down, go through what do you want? Some of the things it says is think on paper, shut off your phones, turn off your notifications. Don’t be in front of a computer. I know a lot of us like to use all these fancy technology tools to plan, but think on paper, just grab a yellow legal pad or a sheet of paper out of the printer and just write down number one, what do I really want? And that step two, write it down.
It becomes a goal. It becomes something that is a focus. It becomes what’s important because once it’s written down, you really do need to step three to set a deadline. Go Out, set a deadline. So number one, this is what I want. Number two, it’s written down. Number three, I’m going to have it by this date stuff for make a list of everything required to complete your goal. If what you write down and step one is I want $10 million, right? And say you’re an audacious human being and you write down that you want it by December. Well there’s going to be a lot of things that are required for you to have $10 million by December and you really do need to on a sheet of paper, just start writing a list of the things that are going to be required to complete the goal. Those things can range from quitting your job to paying off debt, to potentially securing new debt, to increasing advertising, to refining your sales process, hiring an accountant.
There’s a lot of different steps that are required to achieve one’s goals and all too often we set a goal, but we spend a lot of time thinking about the goal and dreaming about the goal, but we actually don’t go through the process of figuring out what the steps are that are required to complete the goal. And once you’ve done all that, you move on to step five and you organize your list into a plant. By organizing your list into a plan, which you have to do is you have to start figuring out what needs to happen first. You have to start figuring out are there additional barriers to completing the goals? There could be in your list and stuff forward and your list of required items to complete your goal. There could be items that are dependent upon each other, right? For instance, if you’re talking about setting up a new website, you’re going to need a hosting provider before you have a template installed.
You’re going to need your template installed before you start designing the architecture of the site. You’re going to need the architecture of the site design before you start working on menu structure. There’s all these things that you have to do and many times one item on your list is going to be dependent on another and so it’s really good to organize your list into a plant. Number six is probably the thing that I personally am best that it’s take action immediately. It’s not, okay, here’s my plan now I’m going to think about it more. Take action immediately. In the book, one of the quotes I wrote down was an average plan. Vigorously execute is far better than a brilliant plan on which nothing is done. In my primary occupation is a real estate investor. This is what I’ve seen time and time again. I’ve seen aspiring entrepreneurs and investors come to monthly investor club meetings for years and years and years and they attend every meeting and they’d take every note and they sign up for the training and they’re always planning and thinking and planning and thinking and planning and thinking, but they’re never doing.
And I’m just here to tell you that nothing will happen without it being done. You’ve got to start taking action. You have to start pushing the log up the hill. You know the paralysis by analysis. Impact can happen a lot when entrepreneurs are planning something. So just to recap, step one, decide exactly what you want. Step two, write it down. Step three, set a deadline. Step four, make a list of required items to complete your goal. Step five, organize your list into a plan. Step six, take action immediately. And finally, step seven is resolve to do something every day. This is most likely why the old saying it’s a marathon, not a sprint is used in business. So often in business, very little things of consequence happen immediately. Most things that are important take time. They take action and reaction. You’re going to get things wrong.
There’s something you’re going to do one day that you may have to redo the next day, but by taking action and being resolved that everyday you’re going to do something to move the progress needle forward. You’ll just be surprised at how much you actually do get done. You know, some of the words I hear people say is, well, when this happens, then I can write. Then I can. I wrote a blog years ago about my youngest son. We started telling him that he wasn’t allowed to say I can’t. Right? So it’s funny. We as adults, we go around telling our children, you can do anything you want as long as you try. You can do anything you want as long as you try. But then as adults, we tell ourselves, oh, I can’t do that. I can’t quit my job. I have to pay for my kid’s private school.
I can’t quit my job. My wife’s a stay at home mom. I can’t start a business. I have bad credit. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. And the saying is that we always, you’ve heard forever can’t never could. And so we taught my son when he was very young was instead of saying I can’t, was to say I’m having trouble. And then when he said I’m trouble to say I need help. And so for me, one of the things I want to share with you is as an adult, as an entrepreneur, as a business person, learn to say you’re having trouble learning to ask for help. You know, put your pride aside and call for backup. Many times I find entrepreneurs I talk to, their wives are highly educated and highly capable, but their ego won’t let them ask their spouse for help. I’m one of them.
I’ll tell anyone that Jennifer smarter than me because she is, but oftentimes I don’t want to ask for her help on something because I want to be the savior. I want to be the person that is making the money. I want to be the person that came up with a great idea. I want to be the person who can say, look at what I’ve done for my family and I’m just here to tell you that if to be the hero isn’t what you wrote. And step one, stop trying to be the hero and just ask for help. So decide what you want. Write it down, set a deadline, make a list, organize your list, take action and be resolved to do something every day. And another thing that Mr Tracy talked about in his book that gets in the way of many successful people, it’s the inability to say the most powerful word on earth.
And that is no. And literally I’ve had to go to personal counseling about being able to say no. I say yes to anyone and everyone, I don’t want to upset anyone. I want to make people happy. I want to win friends and influence. I want to be the smartest guy in the room. I also want to make people happy by helping them. I really do enjoy helping people. So I say yes and I say yes and I say yes and I say yes. And almost all the time it works out that all my yeses add up to a very important no and that no is it to someone else. The No is to me the no is to something I want. The no is to me going hunting. The no is to me going fishing. The no is to me taking my wife on a trip that I want to go on right.
Many times all the yeses add up to a no to what you really won’t. And I’m here to tell you, you may be listening right now and all the yeses and your vocabulary may be leading to you saying no to what you actually write down in step one of this process. And it’s for real. So go through the steps. Think about what you want the most. That’s really the whole thing behind the business and barbecue podcast. It’s what I hope to do for you and with you. So work on that. Think about that. Do it. Now we’re gonna take a quick break and then we’re gonna come back and talk about setting priorities.
Start collecting more leads in minutes. Not only do I use hubspot’s free CRM, but I also use their free marketing tools. Start turning visitors into leads today. Sign up for free at hubspot.com/th with hubspot marketing free. You’ll have everything you need to convert more visitors into leads. Sign up for free today and it’s free forever. Sets up in seconds and works with any website. With hubspot marketing you can capture every qualified lead, see who leads are and what they’re doing and analyze and improve your conversions. Get hubspot marketing free for forms, analytics, popups and integration for your site. No contract or credit card required. It’s a risk free way to see what inbound marketing can do for you. Start turning visitors into leads today. Sign up for free at hubspot.com/th one of the things I have to work on is setting priorities. So in the book they talk about setting priorities and what Brian Tracy refers to as the A B C D E method.
This method is very important. I believe it should be used often. Personally. I am very guilty of not prioritizing my work and then over committing and many times the busy work gets the best of me. And then the important stuff never gets done. If you own or manage a company that’s in outside sales, I can tell you this is where salespeople struggle the most. And so conversely, it’s where you can help your sales people generate more revenue the most. So let’s talk about setting priorities. Now I said it’s the ABCDE method. I’m going to actually start in reverse. Most people cover this in, in, you know, from a to e and I’m going to go from eat a and I think it helps a little bit better. So e eliminate, go through and figure out the things that you are doing that you do not need to do anymore.
And you’ve heard me talk about this on the other shows. Part of the entrepreneurial trap is doing things because you’ve always done them not doing things because they need to be done. So sit down and think about your day to day. Think about your day yesterday. Think about your days last week and try to identify three or four things that just don’t need to be done. Write them down and find a way to get them out of your life. D stands for delegate or outsource. One of the things I recently delegated was editing this podcast. I started out with a copy of Adobe audition and a microphone and I would record it and I would really flow and I felt good about it and then I would spend three, four, five, six hours working on editing, cutting out the ums and the Ahs, trying to learn how to master the sound, listening to it over and over again to see if it was perfect, wondering if I left a part off, if I could just edit it down.
If I, is it too long, is it not long enough? Did I miss something? I better listen to it again. What I found out is I better stop doing that. I need to stop editing podcasts so I stopped as I record this one right now, it’s the first one that I am sending off unedited and I know the editors listening to that right now thinking, oh gosh, there’s some pressure, but there’s not because good enough is good enough and you don’t have to be perfect. One of the things I recently eliminated is the first couple episodes of this podcast. I videotaped it as I recorded it and then I spend all this time matching up the audio with the video and changing the camera angles and then I just thought about, I said, that just doesn’t need to be done, so I stopped doing it and it makes recording this a whole lot easier.
See is things that are nice to do, find the things that are nice to do but aren’t really required. You’ll find this as often things that you enjoy making videos, soundbites of the podcast, eating lunch with someone that hits you up on Facebook and says, hey man, let’s catch up. Allowing someone to pick your brain or networking. Many of these things are nice, but they may not lead to success. And to me the success, right? You got to go back to the previous chapter of this success is number one. It’s the thing that you exactly want that success reaching. That is success. Success is not being the person that everyone recommends for everything that’s popular. Success is having the thing that you won’t most. And that’s why earlier we talked about writing it down.
Category B of your priorities is should versus musts. So the things that you should do, those really kind of fall into category B and every business is different. There’s really no way for me to give you examples of what the shoots are. A must is file taxes. They should is attach a pdf of every receipt or a jpeg of every receipt to your online quickbooks transaction. Now a nice to do would be a detailed description of everything in the memo field, right? So on the should you just want to be clear, if it’s not a must, it’s a should. And if it should be done instead, it would be nice to do then. It’s not a C, it’s a B, but on the A’s, the very important serious consequences. These are your must. These are the things you must do. As Brian says, these are your frogs and these are those things that just, they’re not negotiable, right?
You have to file your taxes. If you don’t file your taxes, you have to file an extension on time, right? I mean, there’s all these things that you must do that fall into category A, and many times in all of these categories, you’ll have multiple, right? You may have five, six seven category a items, things that are very important. There are serious consequences if you don’t do them, and even if you’re an employee, right? If you don’t fill out your quarterly report, you could get fired, right? That is an a, but once you come up with several of them, you’ve got to then number them a A1, A2, A3, A4 and what happens is the a one is the biggest, ugliest slimy is nastiest bull frog you’ve ever seen and this book will teach you and what I believe is a fuel. Just Eat That Frog. The world gets a lot easier.
So that’s really all I have to say about this book. I highly recommend the book. I hope you go to audibletrial.com/th go ahead and get your free credit. Download the book. Like I said, it takes less than two hours to blow through it on one and a quarter, one and a half speed. It’s a really easy listen. It will enlighten you. There’s a lot of other time management tips and tricks in there. After you take a look at it, pop on over to TimHerriage.com find this episode in the podcast notes. Let me know what you thought. If you have any other good book recommendations, drop them below. So, hey Tim, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this book or that book. If you like this type of episodes where it’s kind of a book review, let me know. I’m more than happy to do more of them now.
If you have some time, hop on over to Briantracy.com. On his website you’ll find an article about eating frogs. There’s a free pdf download that you can get there. Like I said, listen to the book on audible. The book’s title is Eat That Frog. The author is Brian Tracy. It is a book that I highly recommend, so now I’m gonna talk a little bit about barbecue. If you don’t know that about me. Barbecue is something I really love. I haven’t really went outside of the Dallas Fort Worth area the last couple of weeks. We’ve been pretty busy with getting ready for Easter and my oldest son’s graduation this week. I’m hitting the pecan lodge on Thursday. I’m looking forward to getting back down to Austin in the month of May. There’s a couple spots down there I want to try.
I’m going to be venturing over into Fort Worth. There’s a new barbecue restaurant over there that I heard is a micro brewery and just serving up some really good cue, so we’re going to hop over there probably next week or the week after. If you’re not in the business and barbecue Facebook group, just go to Facebook and search business and barbecue. You can join the group. We had a little group networking launch last week. It’s really impromptu. We’re thinking about doing some more of those question that dominated a lot of the topic was hiring practices, how to screen out candidates, different ways to find the right person. There’s a man that I respect more than anyone in the field named Ken Channel. We’re going to try to get him on the show here soon. That’s really it.
As always, I really appreciate your time. Stop by TimHerriage.com you can find all the podcast episodes there. Check me out on youtube, youtube.com/timHerriage. You’ll find hundreds of videos there for me. Search Tim Herriage on Youtube. You’ll find some of my old real estate investing training videos that are free. Check us out on iTunes, stitcher, Google play, Spotify. Tune in and Iheartradio just turn to Alexa and say, Alexa, play the business and barbecue podcast. It would mean the world to me. If you would take a minute of your time to give this show a rating on all of these platforms, it will really help us broaden our reach and spread our message. That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Comment below. Let me know how we’re doing. Until next time, keep cooking.
Thanks for listening to the business and barbecue podcast. Make sure you check out our other episodes and stop by TimHerriage.com to say hi. We want to hear from you. Until next time, keep on cooking.