2025-11-22 - book review - eat that frog

Easing back in with a book about doing the hard things.

Eat That Frog is a productivity book focused on doing the hard thing first. This review is specifically of the 2016 edition, as it was half the price of the revised 2025 edition.

We have a love/hate relationship with this book. It is a rare combination of practical, useful advice that we could recommend to anyone - punctuated by frustrations.

Frustrations that our brain doesn't work the way that it should.

Frustrations that our personality isn't right for the Type A/high D in the DISC profile this is clearly aimed at.

Frustrations that some of the advice is.... kind of tone deaf in today's world, for the majority of people.

i feel terrific

For example, take chapter 14.
This begins with useful advice about your reaction to situations often being more important than the situation itself and how keeping a positive attitude to situations can lead to more opportunities. This feels broadly in line with our knowledge about happiness and stoicism, and might be something to use as a jumping off point were more sources provided by the author. ^[1]

However, what some of those other books recommend against is falling into a toxic positivity trap, and the author falls into that with gusto.

Say "I like myself! I like myself!" over and over until you begin to believe it and behave like a person with a high performance personality.
...
When people ask how you are, always tell them "I feel terrific!"

In 2016, this kind of statement might have been hyperbolic; a desperate attempt to convince that might have caused a firm "settle down" or "steady on" from coworkers.

But in 2025... a lot of people are struggling in one way or another. I know quite a few friends who might have gone without food if I hadn't helped them out - and I'm glad that we ere able to help but I hate that we had to do so; that mutual aid was the only option, the only safety net.

The only people we could even conceive of saying "I feel terrific!" are the people responsible for causing so much harm to the world at large, and maybe celebrities isolated from problems.

And again, I'm judging a 2016 book by the standards of 2025. Maybe it's toned down in the revised edition. But a lot of the book feels kind of like that.

more mixed advice

There's advice on getting away from your phone and computers where you can, good, particularly 9 years on. Similarly, trying to stick to physical notes in meetings.

But it also recommends not checking your work email until 11am. At the time, I don't think Slack and Teams had the prominence they do now, but I'm pretty sure if I didn't check them until 11am then we'd be fired, because our priorities can be set first thing in a morning - again, maybe an issue because of our line of work but that isn't acknowledged.

There is some advice in here which might make you more productive, but miserable. Stuff like doing several hours of (presumably unpaid) work from home before heading out on your commute. On our pre-pandemic commute, this would have meant starting work at 4 or 5am.

There is some advice about skill acquisition or improvement that takes the wrong approach before correcting course later; the main bulk of the chapter recommends reading about the skill and listening to podcasts as primary ways of learning the skill, before the end of chapter exercise actually encourages getting the reps in. I could listen to any number of podcasts about SQL I like, but it wouldn't help actually knowing SQL (particularly because SQL statements tend to make for poor audio).

closing thoughts

We paid around £3 for this. We have certainly got more value out of it than £3, and you probably will find something good for you in here for not much money or time invested - it's very short and to the point, almost too much so. It could be a good starting point - but you absolutely need to go in with the mindset of only taking what's useful, and if you want to zoom in on any of the points (to read more about flow state, as an example), you'll have to go do your own research for where to go next.

And now I get to tick writing this review off today's task list.

footnotes

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1. I am not providing sources here because I'd like to reread them first. ↩︎