Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

Strangling your passions in exchange for an elite life is like being on the Titanic after the iceberg, water up to your chin, with everybody telling you that you’re so lucky to be on the greatest steamship of all time. And the Titanic is indeed so huge and wonderful that you can’t help but agree, but you’re also feeling a bit cold and wet at the mo... See more

I think we seek out and soak up productivity pablum because we’re ashamed of ourselves. We embarrassed that we can’t get our work done. We’re angry with ourselves for slacking off. Why can’t you just send those emails? And so we beg productivity gurus to make us better.

And third, using your “higher faculties” doesn't always leave you better off. As I wrote recently, smart people aren’t happier. That’s partly because people have all sorts of wrong theories about the things that make them happy, so all their smarty-pants scheming is in vain. In fact, sometimes thinking harder actually makes people worse at figuring... See more

if I wanted to maximize human misery, I would 100% try to convince people to spend more time doing things they hate

Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do, and sometimes we don’t know how to prioritize or organize. Getting help with that is good! But if that’s all we wanted, I don’t think motivational grifters could get rich telling us how lazy we are.

All of this has been a long way of saying: if you’re forcing yourself to eat frogs all day, maybe you need a vacation, or better pay, or some help organizing your life. But maybe you what you really need is to stop eating frogs.