book review: eat that frog!

“Eat That Frog” by Brian Tracey does not disappoint! The book is all about getting more done in less time, and throughout the book, Brian details into many methods that can be applied to your life to make it more efficient. As standard for Brian Tracy, he also goes into goal setting and the power of working from lists. 

The big takeaway from the book of course, comes from the title. Eat that frog basically stems from an analogy meaning to do the hardest thing first. If you’ve got something on your to do list that you’re just dreading and finding every which way to procrastinate against it; thats the thing you gotta do first. Once you get that out of the way, it’s smooth sailing. Work from hardest to easiest. As a society we often get stuck in the rut of just working on easy things that are often meaningless and never really get into doing what is most impactful and important in our lives. 

This brings me to the second biggest takeaway for me from this book and that is focusing your time and energy to activities that have high importance and impact. It is these activities that will make the greatest impact in your life if you can excel at them. It’s much like focusing on your strengths. For example, if you’re a freelance graphic designer, you should focus on your graphic design work and leave all the work with numbers to an accountant, because that is what they’re good at. 

Throughout the book, Brian Tracey also details into several chapters on how you can dramatically bring down your procrastination. I found this book to largely being about fine tuning your life. It’s not really a flip your life kind of book (though it can be!), but more of a lets work on the details kind of book. I highly recommend it!

book review: open

Open was one of the best books I’ve ever read and I’m not even a tennis fan. I wanted a good autobiography to read and Open came up as highly rated on Amazon so I decided to give it a try. I certainly knew of Andre Agassi but have never even really watched tennis before. Open turned out to be an extremely well written autobiography that had me glued to the pages and made it a challenge to put the book down.

One of the big standouts to me in the book was the fact that Andre was raised to be a tennis player. His father had decided that his son would be a professional tennis player before Andre was even born. One of the earliest things his father did to start Andre on his tennis journey was he had him hit dangling tennis balls with a ping pong paddle when he was just a baby lying in his crib! The most shocking thing of all however was that Andre hated tennis. It was never his choice to get into the sport, and he was pretty much abused into the elite levels of tennis by his father. When Andre became an adult, he really contemplated leaving the sport, however tennis was all he knew. It was not until Andre had a family and his own school that he started playing for a purpose greater than himself.

Andre was extremely candid throughout the book as it brought us throughout his life’s journey. We all knew of his high points, but he made no qualms about opening up on the lowest points of his personal and professional life. The book doesn’t read like a series of events, but more in the style of a book that should be turned into a movie. I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good read!

seawheeze half marathon

Rising before the sun isn’t something I do all too often, but when it’s for a shoot I am definitely game. I woke up at 4:30AM on the day of the SeaWheeze Half Marathon and made it to the sky train by 5:15AM only to find out the sky train doesn’t run until 7:30 on Saturdays. Luckily there was a cab across the street which took me to my starting location. 

From there I met up with my team and we hatched a plan for the day. We were assigned to the first hill of the race, and then we were to head to Cornwall Street to cover the cheer stations and the halfway point of the run. I have never shot anything quite like the SeaWheeze before! There was so much going on at one time, it was super easy to get overwhelmed. To put it into perspective, it was like shooting a wedding with two couples, two families, at one venue. I decided that I should focus on only the moments that I capture and not to worry about anything that I may have missed as I knew with the sheer volume of people there that another great moment would come up shortly. 

We had finished covering our locations early which gave us a chance to head back downtown to Coal Harbour and head towards the finish line. The emotions and atmosphere there was just amazing. The day was just full of fun, love, community and lots and lots of sweat! Would love to shoot it again next year.