Saying Yes to No
EPISODE 037: SAYING YES TO NO
Most of us learned to say No when we were babies. Some of us spent months saying No to everything. No we can hardly coax it out of our mouths when we need to, and this inability to say No is sabotaging our big Yes. We can’t do it all, and only knowing your Big Yes and defending it with an army of No is going to help you get your most important work done. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In the 2008 comedy film, Yes Man, Jim Carrey plays a divorced bank-loan officer spiralling the drain emotionally. Taken by a friend to a motivational seminar and publicly shamed into making a covenant to say yes to everything, the audience is then treated to the standard Jim Carrey fare of physical comedy, a face that on its own could be accused of over-acting if it weren’t so mesmerizing, and the odd moment of heart as he finds liberation in saying yes to everything before it all inevitably unravels on him with the kind of pathos only Jim Carrey is capable of flirting with and never achieving. I remember watching this movie and thinking, as I left, how liberating that would be, to say yes to everything. It felt bold and courageous. But as the movie not so subtly tries to remind us, it takes an equal amount of courage to say no.
I’m David duChemin and this is Episode 037 of A Beautiful Anarchy, Saying Yes to No. While it’s easy to see the appeal of saying yes, and being the kind of person who always says yes, it’s saying No that gets the work done and allows us the kind of space we need to say yes to the best things and the opportunities that will make the biggest difference in our creative lives. Let’s talk about it.
Intro/music
In the story I tell myself about myself, I’m a man who does what he pleases, a spontaneous free spirit who goes off on wild adventures, or used to, at the drop of a hat. In that story, I’m like the confused love child of Ernest Hemingway, Anthony Bourdain, and Tony Robbins, and if you ask me if I want to go diving with sharks my answer is “Hell, yes!” Yes is a positive response. Hell, Yes is both positive and enthusiastic and I like to think I’m both. And I don’t think this desire to be relentlessly positive and enthusiastic is a bad thing, so long as it’s emotionally honest and doesn’t stop me from being melancholy once in a while when the mood hits. But is it realistic? And more to the point, perhaps, is Yes all it is cracked up to be?
It’s like in the movie of life Yes has become the overly confident superhero and No has become the villain. Yes is good. No is bad. And we know what side we’re on, don’t we? But the hero always has his weakness, his one fatal flaw, and the problem with saying yes equally to all things is that all things are not equally important. It’s arguably more important to most of us that we get that book written, than that we check Facebook every 12 minutes, or reply, right now, to every unsolicited email. It’s usually more important that we get to the gym than it is that we eat cake all day. And, yes, those are more extreme examples, and decisions are not always so polarized, I think it’s important we’re on the same page with this principle: not all things are equally important, and saying yes equally to all of them is impossible.
That means this: if we can not possibly say yes to all things then saying yes to one thing is often saying no to another. And the obverse is equally true: saying No to something can mean saying yes to another. Yes and no are neither intrinsically positive or negative, they are different sides of a coin that needs to be spent carefully on the things you most want in life. Every day. Yes and No are only positive or negative relative to what we say yes or no to.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffet is creative with money the way some of us are creative with words or music or images and is quoted as saying that "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” Echoing that, the late Steve Jobs said "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
I don’t want to put words into Steve’s mouth but I think he’s saying that in order to say yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on you MUST say no to the others. The two are causally linked. Without No there is no Yes.
Saying Yes, by default, is not necessarily generous. We’ve all been in the position of waiting for a friend who promised to meet as at noon, only to have them stroll in an hour late because someone asked them to do something for them and they didn’t want to seem unhelpful and “just couldn’t say no” Wanna bet? You said No to me. You said no to not being where you said you’d be and when.
The one that really gets me is that driver in front of you who stops all the people behind him in order to wave someone in to traffic, someone that should really just wait their turn. And I know that makes me sound like a jerk and you might make a different decision, but saying yes to that one hapless driver that can’t merge is saying no to everyone else. And I know they’ll say they were just trying to be nice, but the question begs answering: nice to whom? Because every yes to one thing is a no to another and if you’re that person that’s always thinking, “well I just couldn’t say no”, and using it as an excuse for constantly neglecting your best creative work, then perhaps re-framing it might help.
You don’t have a problem with saying No at all. You’re really good at it. You disguise it as Yes and you’re saying it to the wrong things.
No is a two-letter, one-syllable word that is mastered by infants whose only other area of mastery is drooling and pooping unselfconsciously while others are around. No is possibly the easiest word to say, and I’m guessing that’s true in any language. We don’t have a hard time saying no, we have a hard time making choices and taking responsibility for them and when we blame that on “finding it hard to say no” we’re painting a weakness to look like a strength and we’re not fooling anyone, except ourselves.
Meanwhile our most important work is sitting there waiting for us, looking impatiently at its watch and wondering what the hell was so important that we couldn’t be bothered to show up on time. And we arrive late, probably a little too late to get anything done and we mutter some kind of lame excuse about being late, and how we got distracted by something else, something to which, you know, we just couldn’t say no. Which is our way of saying “you weren’t important enough to say yes to”
I have never once heard someone blame a lack of getting shit done on an inability to say yes. Sorry I’m so late, I just couldn’t say yes to being on time. Sorry I didn’t finish that website, I just couldn’t say yes to making it a priority. We don’t say that because few of us are that unflinchingly honest about our choices. To do so would be to admit we sabotage our own efforts.
But wouldn’t it make it easier to make those important decisions if we didn’t allow ourselves the luxury of hiding behind Yes or blaming No? If we acknowledged that no decision is a yes or no choice but a yes AND no choice. That yes to one is always no to others.
When we make decisions it’s not Yes or No. It’s yes AND no. Yes to this means no the other competing desire and vice versa and if Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett are to be counted on for their wisdom, then it’s probably time we started saying Yes to No.
Saying No creates space and time for the right opportunities, the ones that fall in line with the things we most value and hope for, the possibilities that we need to get our best work done. If you’ve heard me talk about the Big Rocks First paradigm, this is the equivalent of saying No to some of the little rocks because you’ve said yes to the big ones. The big rocks are the important priorities. The little rocks are the smaller ones that seem so urgent but don’t actually move the needle on getting the important things done.
I read a book two years ago called The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan and the main take away for me was learning to ask this one question: What one thing can I do today that by doing that one thing makes all other things easier or unnecessary? You’re basically asking what, for today, is your big rock. In the context of this conversation the question becomes this: what is my big Yes.
No doesn’t have to be the opposite of Yes. It can be a necessary tool that supports Yes. Every big Yes needs to be defended zealously by an army of take-no-prisoners, show-no-mercy, No-Ninjas.
Like a lot of kids my age I was really into Ninjas when I was about 13. I had the black costume. I had the weapons, all of them made from whatever I could find at the hardware store. My buddy Scott and I would run around the neighbourhood after dark and do ninja things, which to a 13 year-old was lurking around other people’s backyards and working on our invisibility skills. Sometimes we’d climb trees and hide in them for hours, the hiding made much easier by the fact that no one was actually looking for us. It all came crashing down when the police came to my door and asked to see the stash of homemade weapons I’d collected, and didn’t leave before I promised to destroy these weapons, none of them particularly legal, under the watchful eye of my step-father. I was not a very good ninja. A number of things account for that, not the least of which was a total absence of training.
In an effort to show you how dedicated I am to this metaphor I went online and asked Google, “How long does it take to become a ninja?” One source told me at least 3 years to get to a basic level. Another suggested I needed to have started my training when I was 4 years old which I quickly dismissed as fake news, because I don’t like to be robbed of hope. The wiki-How site wouldn’t commit to a time frame but gave me 15 steps to become a Ninja easily. One search misunderstood my search terms and told me that Enter the Ninja, the 1981 movie, was 90 minutes long. Not helpful. But one thing is certain, though the training of the ninja is shrouded in a fog of mystery so thick that not even 5 minutes on Google could penetrate it, you can’t be a ninja without training.
My No-Ninjas, the ones that protect my Big Yes, are highly trained. They are trained to move in at the first sign of anything that makes a move on my bigger priorities, and to keep a wide perimeter. But before all of that can happen you need to know what your big Yes is.
Sometimes it’s a big Yes for today. The one thing that, once done, make other things unnecessary or easier. Sometimes it’s a bigger Yes that takes weeks or months. And ultimately even they serve the biggest Yeses of all, the things that I want to accomplish with my life. The work I want to get done. The person I want to be. The changes I want to effect and the value I want to bring to this world.
You can’t have it all. You can’t do it all. And in the absence of an identified and well-protected big Yes, the small yeses will fight over your time and attention and they’ll swarm in and fill every gap you allow them to, creating for you a week, a year, or most tragically, a lifetime, of serving every urgent little thing that begs you to say yes to it. And they accumulate, many of them good things, and they demand your time, your money, your focus and attention. and you’ll have nothing left over for the big Yes, or the handful of big Yeses, that might otherwise have given direction to your work and your life.
When we do not intentionally identify our big Yes, and defend it with an army of No, we default to playing small, and condemn ourselves to never accomplishing the big pieces, the legacy work, the stuff that would make the biggest difference in our lives, and to perpetually apologizing because “we just couldn’t say no”
You’re not the only one who finds it hard to say no. I think most of us need to train ourselves to say it, and to do so without apology or justification. For me it has become much easier to do that, and to stick to it, when I know what my big Yes is. My big Yes is like my compass. It gives me a direction in which to work while I send my No-ninjas everywhere else. I don’t say no because I’m a negative person. I don’t say it because I’m not kind or generous. I say no because it protects the Big Yes.
No gives my life more freedom, not less. It gives me time. It gives me all the things my creativity needs to thrive and not be squashed down by a million well-intentioned yeses. And ultimately it frees me from the one thing I think is most responsible for the whole reluctance to say no in the first place: the fear of missing out.
So many of us say yes to every little thing, so scared we’ll miss out on those things. But though I wish it were otherwise, the Prophet Mick Jagger was right when he told us “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well, you might find, you get what you need.” There isn’t the time to get it all, to do it all, and get everything we fear missing out on. But you can make choices that help you get what you need. That’s your big Yes. That’s the thing I most fear missing out on. Not the little things, the easily-achieved, the trivial little pleasures or obligation, but the big stuff. The great joys, the hardest but most rewarding work, the big adventures. It’s one or the other and I fear missing out on them, having made a fool’s bargain by trading a handful of truly brilliant diamonds for a truckload of pebbles.
What’s your big Yes today? What do you need, either deep down or more practically, to have accomplished by the end of this month or this year? What do you truly want? Write it down. Now take a moment to consider all the things that will require you to say no. What are they? What demands will be placed on you that will require the full force of your No-ninjas? Anticipate them. Some things can be dispatched immediately. Some things can be lumped together and done more efficiently once a week. Some things can be delegated. And some things can be simply ignored. You are under no obligation to deal with all the many things that come unsolicited into your life.
We all fear missing out on things. Ot course we do. But not making a choice about what we are willing to miss out on in order to say yes to the most important things, is just settling. It’s abdicating our decision-making and letting the loudest voices drown out the deepest ones, and letting the seemingly urgent forever keep us from the truly important. This isn’t about saying Yes or No. It’s about saying Yes by saying no.
Thank you so much for joining me today. If you want more of this kind of thing to fuel your everyday creativity, I’ve got 2 new books for you. Start Ugly, The Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity, and The Problem with Muses. Both can be found in all the usual places, like Amazon, or through the links at StartUglyBook.com, and both will support this podcast and help you protect and pursue the Big Yes in your life.
If you’re only just discovering A Beautiful Anarchy I post new episodes 3 out of every 4 weeks but there’s no reason you should take a break on those 4th weeks so I‘d like to send you a monthly issue of On The Make which is basically an email version of A Beautiful Anarchy and you can get it by going to StartUglyBook.com, scrolling to the bottom and telling me where to send it. At the same time I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways to Get Your Groove Back, and once a month I’ll draw the name of one reader to whom I’ll send a signed copy of one of my books.
Thanks so much for being part of this. You’re part of my big Yes, and I’m grateful. We’ll talk soon. Until then, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0