Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy | with guest CJ Bilangino

Welcome to Business Book Club, the show where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books. I'm your host Sam Brown and today we're diving into Eat That Frog by Brown Tracy. Stop confusing being busy with being productive. Today you'll learn the prioritization system that guarantees your most profitable work actually gets done. Listen to this quote that absolutely epitomizes this book. The ability to concentrate single-mindedly on your most important task to do it well and to finish it completely is the key to success, respect, status and happiness in life. But how do you do that? Well, Eat That Frog, written by the prolific author, Brown Tracy, contains 21 methods and techniques designed to increase your productivity, your value and your output. But my guest today has whittled those 21 down to his most impactful three. CJ Belangina is the CEO of Gorilla Commerce. He's led the finance and operations teams at multiple high-growth startups and he uses the frameworks in this book to manage his energy, prioritize his tasks and lead his teams every single day. Let's dive in. CJ, welcome. Why did you choose this as the most impactful book that you've read? When you think about business books, it has a more unique name. It's not the more fundamental names or standard names you may hear from other great business books that have been written. How I came about it was actually it was a gift from my mother-in-law. She wasn't my mother-in-law at the time. I was dating my wife and she gave me this book, Eat That Frog. I wasn't sure exactly what it meant. I started reading it and I thought maybe it was I was procrastinating on proposing to my wife. As we talked to her, you'll understand how today. But I've really come to love the book. It's a short read, which is nice, it's very concise. Brian Tracy did a great job of putting it together. Over the last 15 years, I've actually given it to everyone that I've worked with. To put it really quickly, the name Eat That Frog, it derives from Mark Tain's quote, "If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first." Brian is very great. He's laying out a very practical advice and it's a thing the way that you could apply on day one and not just in a business format, but also your personal life as well. So I found it very practical, easy to apply and I think others have as well. Let's dive into the lesson number one that you've brought. What is it? First chapter, it's entitled, "Tackle Your Biggest Task First." It's essentially Eat That Frog. What Brian's really trying to talk about is what is a frog and what does that mean? And your frog is really your biggest, most important task, right? The one you're most likely to procrastinate if you don't do something about it. What he's really trying to take away is get the hardest task that you have to do first. And the hardest task isn't always the longest task, right? It's not the one that's going to take you hours of due. It's the most important thing that you have going on. Get it done first thing in the morning. Don't procrastinate. Don't wait. All right. Because what happens sometimes is you don't get your first thing done and then the day-to-day administration or operations can stop you and limit you from getting that thing completed. When you don't get something done, you're still using that mental capacity or head thinking about it, right? It's still going on in there and sometimes you're losing energy from not being able to take care of that. You're still going on in the back. So, might as well just get it done first thing in the morning. The part that's highlighted in the book is the ideas of procrastination and momentum. How important do you think those are? Really important. I think that's in a both a business and a personal setting. So, just to turn it to personal, for instance, is I try to work out first thing in the morning. You get a accomplishment out of the day. It's harder for me as a day goes on, right? Because there are things that come up. I have three small kids. So, that time in the morning is my time to get my hardest tasks done or film momentum to your point of getting my most important task completed. You think about procrastination. One thing that I really learned in the morning is I used to wake up and check email. That was the first thing that I did. And I wake up pretty early. I'm normally up around 4.35. I'm an early riser. And most people are not up at that hour. So, that's my free time. So, what I've come to do is instead, I'll work on my number one project that I have going on. It could be a new strategy. It could be we have a product launch going on. It could be reviewing some terms that we have going through. If that worked on and at 45 minutes later, that's when I'll start going and taking a look at emails, which is still pretty early in the morning. But when I'm fresh and the morning is when I'm using to complete the most important tasks, that's happening. Is there something that you've always done like tackle the biggest most important thing first or has this been a revelation since picking up that book? It's probably more a revelation. I typically would handle more administrative tasks of going in, checking my email, right? Or seeing the news, right? To see what's going on or any industry periodicals. Those are important, right? It's important to see what happened from the night before updates that are going on. But I found that in the morning, I have zero distractions, right? I don't know necessarily what's taking place. And by focusing on my most important thing, even if it's a half an hour, that deep work, time period, I can be 100% focused on that task. Versus, if I check email first and then go to that item, I may be thinking about what I saw in email and how to respond to it. This also works with potential interactions. There may be a conversation that you have to have with a partner or an employee. This also goes into something may not be going well and you have to have a conversation. With the manufacturing partner, it could be with a supply partner, it could be with a marketing partner that we're working with. And I think at times, or in human nature, is you don't always go and have that conversation. And then it could eat away at you. But then we actually have the conversation and talk through it. It's better. Kind of handle those things right away and don't procrastinate because you're going to use that mental energy in the back of your mind. And so think about it. If you have those problems, it's not always the growth strategy, right? And the building momentum, it's also addressing some of those core problems or blockers for you and just better to have those harder conversations earlier on. And most time they're positive, right? It's a misunderstanding, solvable. But at times, people will fill out with assumptions, right? So it's better to have those conversations early on. Let's move on to lesson number two. What have you got for us here? So prioritize ruthlessly and really apply the 80/20 rule. 20% of your activities will counter 80% of your results. So always concentrate your efforts on the top 20%. Because time is limited, right? It's probably the most valuable resource in the world. You can't necessarily get it back. How you spend your time is really, really important on a day-to-day basis, especially as you're looking to build a company, grow your company. You only have so many hours in a day and you really have to prioritize what are those actions, what are those decisions that are going to bring the most value, make your new startup or your existing business successful. In this day and age, we're all over achievers and we want to do everything. But in a day, you have to pick and choose what you do and what you don't. It's incredible how many fields this pops up in. Obviously, it's not an exact science, but it seems to be there wherever you look when you first hear about it. Do you have the system of measuring what is having the impact on which activities that you do don't really have much impact? We have to think about what's the most important to you. If you think about it on a business level, what are you trying to accomplish through your business, either from a growth or startup and write out your goals? Then think about all the options you have in front of you where you can allocate your time. But where do those items roll up into your goals? What are the ones that are going to add the highest value? I get you where you need to go. Think about if you're initially starting a business, you're creating products for a consumer. You have options in this day and age to sell your products in many different forms and marketplaces and channels. It's hard to be great in any of them. Pick the channel or the marketplace early on. Focus on it. Have discipline. Grow it be successful. Then think about where expansion is. I see a lot of times folks can chase revenue and spread themselves thin. They're not excellent in any one of those channels versus how they've been more focused and disciplined. They could have been highly successful in the channel and then grown from there. It's not just about what you say yes to. A lot of times it's saying no and having that discipline and prioritizing is equally more important. That's an awesome little framework that you've got there. So first thing you need to do is figure out what is the most important thing because if you don't know what you want, you'll never get that. Then build it to become excellent at it. Keep digging in and only after that then you expand. Exactly. And what we'll do from our company at Gorilla Commerce is we'll come up with our three of the five goals for the year. The leadership team will go in and meet with all the functional team leads and they'll come up with how their goals that they're going support the business. Now as time goes on, right, you do those on an annual basis, but you're reviewing them during the year, you'll go and determine, have things changed. And if they have them, you may make modifications, but if new ideas or opportunities come up, maybe they're not now. Let's say there's a new product opportunity that we can go and create or there's a new channel, right, that we can go start selling or a new retailer. If it doesn't fit in for the goals that we set for the year, we have to be disciplined and saying no, right, because if not, it could be distraction and limit us from those goals that we had set out. So it's really important, especially early on, to be disciplined because you have limited time and you have limited resources to be successful. I think the key word here is ruthless. When you have five good opportunities, saying no to any of them is very difficult. If we have three different opportunities to go for, but we know that it's going to spread ourselves to thin, we should just pick the one that we can dig in on to do the best job at. Do you go about being ruthless and getting rid of those hypothetical two other great options? It's a little bit of process of elimination. Think about winning a championship as you go across, right? And what are the least amount of moves that you can make to win a championship, right? What's the least amount of games, right? If you're playing a best of seven series, right, or best of five, or you know, you have to score X amount of points, what's the least amount of moves or games you can do it in to get there? So then think about all the opportunities in front of you as to what are the ones that are going to get you there in the least amount of moves or the least amount of effort in prior to the game. high-sides and do them as excellent as you can and focus on that. That's essentially your roadmap for the year. Things do change on a macro level. Things change in the world, but you have to make adjustments to. You can't always be hard and then fast on what you set out, especially if you're doing an annual plan. You need to be nimble, but at the same time, you need to ensure your discipline is spending the time up front to really plan and then execute on what you're going for and make sure that you don't have distractions. I think a term I've heard is like shiny objects syndrome right there, the things that they look really good, they are great opportunities, but they can become a distraction and take you off course from being successful. You can do many things, but maybe you're only doing at the B level. You need to do a couple things at the A level to be successful. You speak about this book serving you in both business and personal life. Do you have anything for this lesson of privatized ruthlessly that you want to pull from personal life? I think you talk about it in there is making decisions that when you're setting no to can be really tough, business wise or typically using logic to make decisions, but sometimes I can a social setting. It can be even tougher as you go through and think about between family friends yourself as it comes through. So examples is 10 years ago, friends asked me to go out to a social event to go to a game or go meet them out for a drink or something like that. Yes, easier to do, right? But nowadays with kids, I have other priorities. I can carry them spending time with my kids is really important to me. So when you do get invited, it's kind of awkward because you do want to go and socialize your friends, but you know your priority is to spend time with your kids. So for me, it's a simple choice, but it is hard sometimes communicating and saying no to these events because you feel like you're letting your friends or others down when you can't do it. So I really try to define ways. And the good thing is a lot of my friends do have kids these days. So we'll kind of get together and find other ways to define ways to get your friends and social and personal life together. But sometimes you do have to decline the invite because your priorities, at least from my perspective, my priority is to spend time with my kids and help out around the house. But it's hard. It's hard to say no. It's hard to say no to get out for a little bit and spend time with them. Certainly is. I think this is something that just is in constant flux. At certain stages of your business, you need to say no to both family and friends a little bit just to make sure that things get off the ground. But usually as you kind of mature and become a little bit more stable and saying yes, becomes a little bit easier. You can have a little bit more time and freedom away from business, personal experience, anyway. What is your key final lesson for us? Plan every day in advance. Probably my favorite one and one that I actually thought was counterproductive when I first read it and thought about it. But Brian Tracy, what he was saying in the book is, "The most valuable time you spend is in planning your activities carefully before you begin." And what he talks about in the book is creating a roadmap for productivity and that eliminate stress of indecision and enables you to work intentionally, stay focused and better manage your time. And he says, "Every minute spent in planning serves as many as ten minutes execution." And he talks about different ways in which you can do this and people have different ways of organizing themselves. But I took from it was every night writing down and going through my to-do list, right? The items that are my biggest responsibilities or items I want to take care of. I continue that of going through and the next day I would cross things on my list, sometimes add new things that would come on. And then that night I would do the same thing again as go through it. And at first when I went through this process and thought about it, I go, "You know what, I'm spending a lot of time writing this down and going back through my list." Like, this is actually the most productive. And what I've come to find out is that Brian Tracy was right. It saves you a lot of time because it allows you to be focused. And if you don't do this, what happens is you then have to make decisions and be reactive. But when you actually plan your to-do list, what we talked about earlier is you're prioritizing what you view as the most important things, right? So that list is broken down into your must-habs in order. Like, here's my number one, eat that frog that I have to do in the morning. And then here's my priorities I'm going to do after. And then there's your wish list, right? If everything goes smoothly and there's no fire drills going on, the kids go to bed on time, right? Here's where I can allocate some time to take care of these. And then you go through your list and then as the week goes on, new things pop up. And then when you review it that night, you can reprioritize as you go on and give it an opportunity. So I didn't really understand this early on. And I was as sure as counterproductive, this been all this time on planning. But it's actually saved me a lot and allowed me to be more focused and disciplined and more productive overall. You know, before you was talking about, if your brain's thinking about something in the background, you can kind of drain your energy, I feel like it's a little bit different if you do something at night. There's something incredible that happens when you focus your mind on understanding what the key problems are that you've got to solve for the key task that you're going to commit yourself to the following day. Your brain is thinking about them a little bit for you while you're sleeping. It's some kind of hack that you wake up with the answers sometimes. Since reading this book, I've done two new things and one of them was, I have like a shutdown routine that I've been meaning to do for ages. But since reading this book, it kind of prompted me to give it a go. And that's one of the outcomes that I found from it. The other thing that I've started doing is my list is now prioritized. Remember, is A, B, C, D, E, system? Essentially what it is is the A things are your frogs. They're the things that you need to eat first thing in the morning. If you've got multiple age, you can have A, One, A, Two. You know, B things are things that you can get done as soon as your A things are finished. C things are probably not all that important. Do you think should be delegated? And if anything's on your list and it's an E, it should just be removed. It's such a simple system. And I've just found it much more helpful in focusing exactly on what I need to do for the day. And Sam, just to go on to that, I think one thing you point out there is the E-illimony. I mean, how many times do we have things on our list? And we think it's important. But if you just have it in general, you'll prioritize it and you focus on it. But I know there are things that have been on my list and it's been towards the bottom and it may stay on there for a month. And then I realized, you know, it actually wasn't that important. I didn't need to do it. And then you eliminated as it goes across, but had you not spent the time to go and prioritize it and focus on those frogs and those priorities. Right? You wouldn't have seen it stay on that list and then eventually go away. And you may have put in the effort to do it, which would have not been the most valuable adding time, because if you're ultimately eliminating it, you didn't need to do it. So that's a good call out on the ABCDE method. You talked about the thing that you do to help you prioritize at the end of the day. Do you have a weekly, monthly, yearly, how far out do you look? It's a little bit hybrid. So I have a digital app. So I use to-do-ist. So that has all of my weekly, monthly, quarterly annual tasks. Right? I know I need to do this once a year and it helps me to part of this. So I really love the app. It's very simple. I've used Asana, Money.com, which are more complex and more process-driven, great applications as well, but for personal to-do-ist, I've found to be very good on the personal. I really also have the business side too, but it's very simple. It's not as complex because I don't need that necessarily for personal. So I use that for like annual planning, monthly, quarterly. So it keeps my routine tasks in there because it will pop up once a year or once a month or once a quarter. But I also keep on pen and paper a little old fashioned right in this digital age, but I actually write it down and go into the process of writing it down. I use one piece of paper. I go through and I have my tasks on and then I move them over to a new list. What that does is a couple things for me. One, there's a feeling of crossing something out when it's done. I do it on Sundays, I create the first list. As my week is went on, when I thought I was going to complete for the week, that Sunday I put everything I want to do for the week on there and then I get to Monday night and I move the list back to over and then I go to Tuesday. It shows me at the end what I've actually accomplished for the week and what I didn't get to. And then I also think about what the blockers were, right? If something came up and maybe what I could do differently during the week or maybe I didn't allocate time the way I should have. So it's not just for prioritizing going forward. It's maybe how I could have done better for the week on being more ruthless than my prioritization, right? So if my list that I had in there, if I didn't knock out my four priorities, like why didn't I do that, right? Because I was my contract I made with myself and no one else and really helping of what could I have done better in there. And again, I found when I was electronic, I would just delete it and would go away. I'm going to never see it again. But having that on paper, it makes me more accountable to myself. I wanted to ask how flexible you are when things come up and how do you look at your weekly schedule and how much does it move and how much do you just ignore things and focus? It's a really a question. And at times there are non-negotiables that happen. But those are few and far between that may go on, right? Particularly if there's a really important thing in the event, those are non-negotiables for me, right? I need to stay true to that. And there's sometimes non-negotiables as well for meetings that we're having, right? Or customer meetings or work meetings or shareholder meetings that we're having on there, which are just non-negotiable. It really has to be something catastrophic that happens to move that in those priorities. I think in this day and age, really in any business, in an early stage company or four to five hundred company, you need to have flexibility. You always go in and take a look at, here's something new that I think may be a priority. Is it a priority or is it urgent or is it something that could be done after this? And by always having that list handy, you can then measure it against the priorities that you have on there and see where it falls in. So it's not a no. I'm not going to do this. It's maybe this new issue that came up or new opportunity. It's not always an issue, right? But a new opportunity came up. I take a look at my current list and is that ranked now? Number two, and everything falls down to the list. But having that preset going back to having your goals, having those moves that you need to make, right? That you're aligned on, those objectives and initiatives that you've aligned on that get your goals are. It's easier than to know where this new opportunity or issue fits in on that side. But you have to have that framework. You have to have that list out in front of you. When you have this list out in front of you, do you also have written in your, but do you have your priorities there just to reference in the same place? Is that one of your little hacks? 100%. I think that's important. I view my priorities every single day with my team. We. always review our priorities, review them all meetings, review our goals for the year, review our goals during the quarter, review them at every single meeting, 'cause I think it's important to always reference that. We have a lot of strong swimmers, right? And especially as you grow the business, you're gonna have new people coming in, and it's important that there's alignment on your priorities. And a plan you may set, things may take time to checking in and reinforcing that, things do change, right? Things change in the world, things change in the environment, consumer preferences may change, where are consumer proud of companies? So it's important to not always be so rigid, you have to flexibility, but you need to make sure you're of alignment and organization if you are going to make a change, right? 'Cause people have already started swimming in a direction, or they started to put things in motion on that side. So we always take a look at our priorities on an annual basis, and also the week's parties, right? So we look longer term, a year to two years out of where we're going, and then what is the current priorities to get us there, right? Those moves to get us to the championship that we're looking at those goals, right? That we have in there. It's really important to always look at that. So our annual goals aren't set at once and never take a look. It's really important to continue to look at them. - Yeah, that's super important to be reviewing those goals all the time. I've really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for recommending the book. It was awesome reading it. It's been really fun speaking to you. So thank you so much for coming on. - This was great. I hope you're listening, guys, find this helpful. And if it was a foreign mother-in-law, I would have never picked it up. So thanks for her. It was a great catchy name, and it makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you to CJ's mother-in-law. Please pass that on. All right, let's land this plane. If you take nothing else away from CJ today, remember these three things. Eat that frog first. Stop hiding in your inbox first thing in the morning. Your hardest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on, that needs to happen immediately when your mental energy is fully charged and distractions are low. Number two, prioritize ruthlessly. Apply the 80/20 rule to absolutely everything. So 20% of your actions drive 80% of your outcomes and also your revenue. Make sure you're prioritizing that 20% and you're deprioritizing the 80% that drive no meaningful results. How do you do this? Use Tracy's ABCDE method. If a task is on a D delegate or E eliminate, get it off your plate immediately. Prioritize those A's. Make sure you do those first thing in the morning. And as a founder, you cannot afford waste time and energy on those sea level tasks. Number three, plan tomorrow, tonight. Don't wake up and try to figure out what to do. Here's the tip. Don't put your brain into a physical piece of paper the night before. This kills shiny object syndrome and you wake up with extreme, undeniable clarity on what matters most. As a bonus, your brain's been working on it overnight. So oftentimes you can wake up with answers with no extra mental stress. So there are three big takeaways. If you enjoyed this episode, it pairs very well with a couple of my other absolute favorite books. I highly recommend reading Deep Work by Cal Newport to help you really protect that morning frog eating time or atomic habits by James Clear to help make planning your day an automatic frictionless routine. If you want to start tackling your biggest tasks, you can grab a copy of Eat That Frog using a link in the episode description. And hang it, if you've got some value after today's episode, please hit that follow button on your podcast player. It takes just a second to do, but it is the number one way to help me grow the show so I can keep bringing you these incredible founders. Thank you so much for listening to Business Book Club. It's the community of founders who are learning to build better systems, win back their time in scale and business one chapter at a time. I'll see you on the next one.