Why do we feel more resistance for the most important task than for the others?

You might have heard this idea (sometimes called swallowing the frog) of doing the most undesirable task first in your day, so you feel a sense of accomplishment and everything after it is easier.

What’s curious is that that task is inevitably also the most important one.

Why do we have more resistance for the important one than the others?

A minor reason might be that if we have any kind of happiness anxiety / fear of success, we feel resistance to the task that’ll benefit us the most because more success = more fear.

But the major reason is: if a task was important but tolerable, we would’ve already done it!

The important one is the intolerable one because you did all the important-but-tolerable ones already!

We’re seeing this play out in every episode of the What’s Stopping You podcast. The guest will be stuck on task X in their business. And there’s always some emotional blocker to working on it… because if there weren’t, they would’ve done it already.