My Daily Poison

No one likes to do unpleasant tasks. What constitutes an unpleasant task may vary from person to person, but we all encounter disagreeable items on our to do list. It’s tempting to try to avoid these unlikable jobs, but the more we delay, often the worse they get. One good strategy I’ve read about is to “eat the frog” first thing in your day. That is to say, do the most difficult task early on and the rest of the day will be easy by comparison.

So I have embarked on this frog-eating plan and will advise how it turns out. So far, most of the unpleasant tasks have not been so bad after all, and in any case they are done. Also, dealing with the difficult actually makes subsequent difficult tasks easier. Sort of like King Mithridates, who sampled a little bit of poison each day, so as to build up an immunity to concoctions that might be slipped into his meals by his enemies. His plan worked, and was immortalized in A.E. Housman's 1896 Book of Poems, A Shropshire Lad:

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.