There are many gurus out there who say “eat the frog” first thing in your day, especially in sales, getting the hardest thing or the thing you dread out of the way to ensure it gets done. I’ve taught this for years. I’ve tried it myself. It works, in the sense that the hard thing gets done. But I still dread it every single time. There’s no joy in eating that ugly frog. It’s necessary, kind of like working out. After the fact, I’m glad I did it. But the lead-up creates nothing but angst.
So I started wondering: what if we’ve had the order backwards? Maybe we’ve been treating this as a productivity problem when it’s really an energy sequencing problem.
What if joy comes before discipline instead of after it?
What I Mean By Dessert
Before I go further, let me define what I mean by “dessert,” because I’m about to use it a lot. I don’t mean avoiding work or starting your day with something indulgent instead of productive. I mean intentionally starting your day with something that generates positive emotion. Gratitude, laughter, music, a playful conversation, a walk outside, an improv game. Anything that fills your mental tank before you ask it to perform.
Dessert first. Then the meal (aka frog).
I was at a business event luncheon once where dessert was already sitting on the table before lunch was even served. The woman next to me picked up her fork, started in on her cheesecake, and said, “I eat dessert first just in case there’s a fire and we’re forced to evacuate.”
I laughed at the time. I didn’t think much of it beyond that. Looking back, she was onto something.
Here’s why I think that order might actually hold up.
All The Research Points to the Same Thesis
“Eat the frog” isn’t bad advice. It’s incomplete advice. Brian Tracy popularized the phrase, borrowing it from a line attributed to Mark Twain: eat a live frog first thing and nothing worse will happen to you all day. There’s real psychology behind it. Researcher Roy Baumeister found that our willpower is a limited resource, usually fullest early in the day before decisions and stress wear it down. Front-loading the hard stuff makes sense on paper.
But here’s what the frog-eating gurus tend to leave out. Baumeister’s own research also found that positive emotions like gratitude, connection, and humor replenish the same tank willpower draws from. Joy isn’t the opposite of discipline. It’s fuel for it.
That’s the thread that ties everything else together.
Researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough found that people who wrote about what they were grateful for reported higher well-being and more optimism than people who focused on daily hassles. Martin Seligman’s “three good things” exercise (writing down three things that went well during the day) produced benefits that lasted up to six months, from just one week of practice. Gratitude appears to shift our brain chemistry, pulling us away from scanning for threats and toward noticing what’s good.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has a theory for why this matters beyond just feeling nice in the moment. She calls it “broaden and build.” Positive emotions widen how flexibly we think, and that flexibility compounds into real, lasting resources: resilience, creativity, better relationships. Workplace research backs this up too. Positive affect predicts stronger task performance, more willingness to help colleagues, and higher confidence in our own ability. If you’re in sales or leadership, that’s not a soft, nice-to-have benefit. That’s your edge.
Then there’s decision fatigue, which should give every leader pause. In a well-known study of Israeli parole judges, favorable rulings dropped from around 65% down to nearly zero as each session dragged on, especially closer to lunchtime, then reset right after a break. If we’re spending our freshest energy white-knuckling through the thing we dread first, we’re leaving less in the tank for the decisions and creativity the rest of our day actually needs from us.
And our kid selves weren’t wrong to want the ice cream before the chores. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, spent decades studying play and calls it a biological drive as integral to our health as sleep or nutrition, tied directly to resilience, creativity, and stress recovery in adults, not just kids. Somewhere along the way we got taught to save joy for after the hard thing, as the reward. The research suggests we’d be better served using it as the primer instead.
Every one of these studies points to the same thing: joy fuels discipline.
The New Choice Effect
In the improv game “New Choice,” performers are acting out a scene when the director suddenly calls out “New choice!” mid-line. The performer has to immediately swap what they just said for something different, on the spot. The director keeps calling it out, again and again, until the easy, obvious answers run out and the performer is forced to find something genuinely new. It’s the whole premise behind my own book, The New Choice Effect. Your first choice is never actually your best choice. It’s just the one closest to the surface, the one that takes the least energy to reach for.
That’s exactly what a depleted brain does. When the tank is empty, we stop reaching for the fifth or ninth choice and default to the first one, and we call it instinct or experience when really it’s just depletion talking. An energized brain has more range. It can actually find the new choice instead of running the same old scene on autopilot.
Which means this was never really about productivity. It’s about energy sequencing. How we sequence our emotional energy affects the quality of our thinking, our resilience, and the choices we’re capable of making when it counts.
Try This Tomorrow Morning
If you want to put this into practice, here’s where I’d start.
- Get specific with gratitude. Skip the vague “I’m grateful for my health.” Research from Sonja Lyubomirsky found that concrete, sensory gratitude, like “I’m grateful I laughed so hard at dinner last night,” produces bigger benefits than broad statements. Before you open your laptop, take 90 seconds to name one specific joyful moment and actually relive how it felt.
- Warm up with play before diving into your to-do list. Give yourself three to five minutes of something purely playful before you touch your hardest task. An improv game, a voice memo with a friend, a silly doodle. Stuart Brown’s research frames this kind of low-stakes play as a driver of creativity and stress resilience, not a distraction from real work.
- Sequence joy as fuel, not a separate box to check. Don’t treat gratitude and frog-eating as two disconnected morning tasks. Baumeister’s findings suggest positive affect can genuinely replenish your self-regulatory capacity, so let the first one feed the second instead of competing with it.
Dessert first. Then the frog. Then notice what changes.
I’d love to hear what your dessert looks like tomorrow morning. Send me a message and tell me how it went once you’ve tried it.
And if this idea of sequencing our choices and our energy resonates, it’s the same thinking behind The New Choice Effect. You can grab a copy on Amazon.
