The Chamber 🏰 of Tech Secrets is open. Today, we turn our attention to the importance of saying “no”.
In my last post, I shared about the new possibilities that come from opening ourselves to saying yes, both personally and professionally.
There were some great thoughts in the comments or direct messages that I thought I’d share here before we turn to “No”.
“No is often driven by a lack of motivation, justification based on selfishness, lack of planning, and a fear of what you don't know”.
If these are the grounds for you “No”, saying “Yes” more will probably help you.
I know that for every "Yes", there has got to be at least 100 "No's", but even 1 extra "Yes" a week will present 52 opportunities to create an impact that otherwise would have stayed dormant, as well as 52 opportunities for 1-1000s of people each time to be impacted.
Even just a few “Yes” can open you up to a world of experiences and opportunities, but maybe even more important is the impact you can have on others.
Opening yourself to “Yes” will undoubtedly unlock new connections and experiences and change your life, but it also has disruptive potential, which is where we turn our focus next. If you’ve seen the movie “Yes Man”, you likely recall that Carl ultimately learns the lesson that his “covenant” to say “Yes” was just a way to get him out of his predisposition to saying “No” and open him up to new experiences.
No is critical too
Queue our common sense. Saying yes is important, but we must say “yes” to the right things. Saying “yes” to everything is clearly a losing proposition. “No” is a tool we must use often in a world that seeks to capture and often monetize our attention.
I never went so far as to say “yes” to every request—far from it—but still experienced some tensions over the last 9 months.
Saying yes can make you more visible, which means you get more inbound requests to say “yes” to, which can make you more visible, which…
Saying yes will fill up your calendar rapidly, and that can make focus a challenge. It is easy to engage in lots of activity and lose track of what is important.
Saying yes will fill up your inbox rapidly, and that can make focus a challenge.
I found a lot of internal tension in managing my time. Do I attend this conference or event and share some stories, network, connect with new people… or do I stay home and spend time with family, read, write, pursue hobbies?
Some days I got brain spaghetti. 🧠🍝 Context switching between many different topics internally, external meetings, emails and direct messages, and so forth can and does turn the brain to mush.
When you say “Yes” and likely become a little more visible, it is easy to fall into the “will people like this” trap. I try my best to not worry about how people will receive my writing, speaking, or LI posts but I would be a liar if I said I never think about it at all.
A Proposed Principled Approach to Yes and No
Having opened myself to the possibility of saying “Yes” instead of defaulting to “No”, I now need a system to evaluate opportunities consistently across time and to drive my decisions and behaviors. The most useful thing I can offer is to share my system for how I navigate Yes and No opportunities based on my first principles.
Put first things first: My key priorities are to be rich in relationships, be the healthiest me I can be, maximize freedom/travel/adventure, and do meaningful work. In that order. I use this to question opportunities and see where they fix in the priorities and weight them against the other competing options.
Own your attention: Activity is not impact. It is very easy to drift to “Yes” activity to distract from doing deep, difficult, thoughtful work. I try to own my attention and be strategic about each day’s priorities so that I can make sure to focus on the right things.
Get your house in order: This overlaps with “first things first” but is worth calling out. When we have a system (because we don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems) in place and are taking care of the important things in our life, we can open ourselves to saying “Yes” more. If you don’t have a system, it is probably best to focus on that first.
Turn every have to into a get to: I remember a time in my career when nobody asked for my time or attention. I recall a time where I went to conferences and saw nobody that I knew. I remember trying to “network” and having a hard time making real connections. The fact that people desire to connect with you, hear your thoughts, or share theirs is nothing short of a blessing. I don’t “have to” do anything, but I “get to”.
Don’t judge people, thoughts, ideas: This includes not judging myself when it’s quickly clear that someone is reaching out for something that does not make sense for me or my organization. It is okay to disregard things. At the same time, balance that with the openness to thinking critically about the opportunities that come your way — even if just for a few seconds — and assess them against your system (mentioned above).
The other reasons: When your house is in order, there are other reasons to say “Yes”. It sounds fun. You are curious or interested. You have the time available.
Open yourself to “Yes”, especially from unexpected places and ideas that push the boundaries of your competencies or worldview — this is where growth and innovation often happen. Your life and work will improve. But guard your time. Build a system. Make sure your house is in order. Have a principled approach to evaluating opportunities. To do this, you must wield the tool “No”. But don’t let it become a hammer 🔨 for every problem.
I've read in other places to "Make 'NO' the default answer to everything".
Knowing how to build a principles based foundation and a system to help quickly review things constructively to make a decision, reframes my buy-in to that methodology.
I think instead of saying "NO", I might just start saying "Yes Bucket Is Full".....because my desire is to be like you and give as many Yes's as I can. Knowing how many yes' I can give starts with knowing me more, which sounds like a really healthy concept.
Knowing my priorities, putting them first and using those to to balance Yes's, feels like a lot better of a system than just defaulting to No. As always, this one got my brain turning.
I love this!