Liver, then bacon.

The art of procrastination is one I learned at an early age. In kindergarten, my teacher informed my parents that I had the capability to do well in life, but that I was prone to procrastination, and I would probably always struggle with it.

Perhaps a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I'm not claiming that I understood what procrastination meant at the age of five, but it is a characteristic that I have always been conscious of.

I am in the process now, at the age of 37, of setting up a home office. One that I intend to be brilliantly useful, and charming, and witty, and debonair, and inspiring. Quite a bit to ask of an 8 x 10 basement room with a small window and a closet, but that is what I'm aiming for, all the same.

In pursuit of the inspiring aspect, I have been trying to decide which quotes to put up on the wall. Do I want quotes to make me feel better about myself as a person? To help me choose what I do for work? Trust me, there are a lot of different quotes I could turn into wall art.

Until today, my favorites have been by Dr. Seuss:

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

Why fit in when you were born to stand out?

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful not, nothing is going to get better. It's not.

And will you succeed? Yes you will indeed! (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)

... the list goes on. He wrote some great stuff. Inspiring for adults and children alike.

Today, I found the frog quotes:

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

"If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first."

Those have been attributed to Mark Twain, but some quick research indicated that was not in fact the case, but that they are both translations and modernizations of french author Nicolas Chamfort's  work published in the 1790's.

His quote went as follows, and was intended as a dig at society, in my opinion:

M. de Lassay, homme très-doux, mais qui avait une grande connaissance de la société, disait qu’il faudrait avaler un crapaud tous les matins, pour ne trouver plus rien de dégoûtant le reste de la journée, quand on devait la passer dans le monde.

Roughly translated, it says that M. de Lassay, a gentle man but with a great understanding of society, said that any day he had to spend in society (or "the world") he had to first swallow a toad, in order to avoid finding anything else he might encounter unpleasant.

I said roughly translated, right?

At any rate, this saying has been picked up by many authors and used in self-motivation books and other writings as a way to help people become successful by not avoiding the unpleasant things they have to do.

This ties in nicely with another blog post that I enjoyed recently: Listen To Your Grandma to Be an Effective Business Analyst, which discusses something called "Grandma's Law" - in essence

"Eat your veggies, and you can have dessert", 

or as my mother tried:

"Eat some liver, and you can have two pieces of bacon"

(Picture seven very obstinate children sitting around a huge table with a tiny piece of liver on our plates, and a platter FULL of bacon just out of our reach in the middle of the table. She really liked liver, but couldn't justify cooking it if we wouldn't eat it... needless to say, she only got to eat liver on those rare occasions when we ate out at restaurants.)

At any rate, I think at least one of the quotes that is going up on my wall will be a variation on the frog quote, grandma's law, and my mother's variation of grandma's law.