Saying no is saying yes - Here’s why “no” is crucial for your long-term success

While reading Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism in 2019, I reflected back on how many times I had said yes when I should have said no and realized, perhaps for the first time, that a commitment to saying no is an advantage.

Before I expound on that last idea, I’ll tell you about the time that a best-selling author hurt my feelings.

In June 2011 I emailed Seth Godin and asked to talk to him or take him to lunch:

Seth sent this reply later the same day.

The terseness of Seth’s email stung. Ten words? That’s it? And no acknowledgement of the compliments I’d given him?

The manner of his response wasn’t the real issue, of course. That he wasn’t willing to give me any of his time disappointed me. None of us likes being denied something we want.

However, once the initial wave of feelings ebbed, I reconsidered the situation:

• Seth Godin must receive hundreds of emails and requests each week.
• He had taken the time to reply, something he didn’t have to do.
• He had given me a clear, unambiguous answer.
• He had demonstrated strong boundaries.
• He had apologized.

He obviously wasn’t a complete child-eating, nation-destroying monster. Maybe he could continue to be one of my heroes. Maybe. I could appreciate that he was practicing what he’d preached in a short piece called “Saying ‘no’” published back in May 2009:

“If you've got talent, people want more of you. They ask you for this or that or the other thing. They ask nicely. They will benefit from the insight you can give them.

The choice: You can dissipate your gift by making the people with the loudest requests temporarily happy, or you can change the world by saying 'no' often.

You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can't bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.

Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.”

I wanted to be the exception though, the glittery snowflake unicorn that naturally deserves special treatment. Don’t we all!

In that post, Seth caught the opossum in the garbage can by the tail: We say yes to escape the discomfort of saying no.

How many times had I, against my better judgment, agreed to do something because I wasn’t willing to endure discomfort? How many times had I consented to do something I didn’t want to because I was being too nice? How many times had I blurted “yes” because didn’t have a better answer prepared?

Too many to count, and even so, the idea of saying no may seem rather tired and threadbare. Surely “Say no more” belongs in the slop bucket as other business truisms. “The only failure is giving up.” Yeah, yeah, what else you got for me, O enlightened one? Take that rubbish outside.

Add to that my experience with how favors and yeses cemented relationships, opened doors, and branched into opportunities.

Add to that my quadruple dose of yes-ness. I enjoy helping people, and I run a service business. That’s two teaspoons. I come from a distinguished line of people pleasers, and I generally want people to like me and be happy with me. That’s a third teaspoon. I’m a Christian, and if you know anything about the life and the ways of Jesus, then you’ll be familiar with what he taught about serving others with a heart full of sacrificial love. That’s the fourth teaspoon.

That’s the backpack of invisible stuff I set on the the table next to that book I mentioned, Essentialism.

In it, McKeown presented several uncomfortable truths:

• You can’t always be saying yes to everyone else and have time for your own goals.
• If you didn’t set your priorities, someone else will.
• Every yes is also a no.

If I were honest, I didn’t want to say yes as often as I did. I didn’t want other people putting their problems and priorities on me. Often as not, their poor planning had escalated into a emergency, and they needed Mr. Nice Guy to knot a silly cape around his neck and swoop to the rescue. I could have said no. It’s not like anyone had threatened my family. But I’d say yes and resent myself and the person afterward, and that’s crazy.

All they’d done is ask, and I could have said no.

Let’s passivity (or, niceness, as its more commonly known) aside for a moment, and cut down into the layers of this issue: Why do we say yes when we ought to say no? And what are the real stakes?

We say yes when we should say no for several reasons:

• We don’t know our goals and their priorities. When you’re not clear on what you need to be about, you’re like a boat without an anchor. Any strong current will grab you. That current is often someone who wants something from you.
• We haven’t know our criteria for “good” opportunity. We lob our yeses at anything that might, one day, somewhere out there, become a “good opportunity” because we haven’t taken the time to define what makes an opportunity worth considering or not.
• We don’t want to disappoint people. That’s another way of saying we want people to like us. Wanting to be liked is natural. There’s nothing wrong with that desire, until it causes stress, anxiety, discouragement, and resentment because you’re so busy helping other people that you’re not making progress on your own goals.
• We don’t how to say no. My friend Terry Rice says, “’No’ is a complete sentence.” He’s right, and yet when people spring requests on us, we find ourselves allergic to the word. The solution for me was collecting other ways to politely decline. More on that later.
• We don’t consider the cost. As admirable as being generous with our time is, that generosity is often ill-considered. How will this yes affect my other commitments and responsibilities? What will this yes do to preceding yeses? How will it affect my loved ones?

Essentialism showed me that the stakes are higher than I realized.

Take my book, Free Money. Writing any book takes a lot of time, and writing a short, helpful, and entertaining book takes even more. But where was that time going to come from? I could fritter it away on premature and ill-considered yeses, or I could keep my calendar clear so that the writing could happen.

Notice I wrote “could happen” happen because I had to make the decision to make room in my calendar for writing and keep honoring that commitment to myself, my craft, and my literary aspirations.

It wasn’t easy, let me tell you.

I won’t say that I’m in demand, but as my reputation and authority in the freelance and consulting space have grown, so have the inbound requests. Come be on my podcast. Be on my YouTube channel. Let me write a blog post for you. Speak at this event. Teach a workshop. Let me pick your brain. Can I ask you some questions about consulting? Be my mentor and coach (for free). Braid my hair.

Every yes would have chipped away at the time allocated for the book, and the book gave me an excuse to turn down pretty much everything.

This is important, so let me reiterate: I finally published a book, something I had wanted to do for years, because I got good at saying no.

Are you good at saying no? Are there any aspirations you’ve paused because you haven’t had the time? Or are certain important projects that are moving at a crawl because you’ve spread yourself so thin?

Now you begin to see what I saw in the pages of Essentialism.

“Only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.” (4)

A willingness to say no and a tolerance for the discomfort that brings is an advantage many freelancers, consultants, and solopreneurs set aside. As I mentioned, we even rationalize our many yeses as some oblique or delayed investment in our relationships or careers.

Don’t you already have a handful of ideas that, once implemented, could transform your business? Or don’t you know several key improvements you could make to get better results? If you allocated the time, you could figure out most anything that’s wrong with your business, right?

Every time you say yes to something of lesser importance you say no to something of greater importance. This is as obvious as the superiority of blue cheese dressing compared to ranch, and yet so many of us misdiagnose our sputtering momentum as a lack of intelligence, capability, or even time, not as a lack of nos.

Yes, a willingness to say no is a powerful, enduring advantage.

Start saying no more often, and here’s what you get:

• More focus
• Less complexity
• Fewer distractions
• Less decision fatigue
• More margin in our days
• Fewer competing priorities
• More white space in our calendars
• More uninterrupted blocks of deep work

What most of us need isn’t more [fill in the blank] but more focusing and finishing. You can’t focus and finish if you’re compulsively chopp up your days like a cheesesteak and serve them up to anyone who asks for anything.

McKeown writes, “We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives” (16). Later, he adds, “Yet the key to making our highest contribution may well be saying no” (23).

Oof.

I’m one of the people who has been “amply rewarded for our productivity and our ability to muscle through every task or challenge the world throws at us” (42), so I’ve had to detox from the dopamine hit that the compliments and pats on the head bring.

Here’s what that has looked like for me, in practical terms:

• Being okay with the perception that I am less reliable than I used to be (because, in fact, I’m more focused on the pursuits, projects, and people that I value most highly)
• Being okay with the perception that I am not as generous with my time as I used to be (because I’m being more careful about what and whom I say yes to)
• Saying no to invitations and opportunities that don’t align with my goals (because I’m willing to disappoint someone the way Seth Godin disappointed me)
• Not feeling obligated to respond to text messages promptly or to some emails at all (because this form of conscious incompetence is now acceptable to me)

To my delight, I’ve discovered that no one cared as much as I expected. My “yeses” all those years weren’t as clutch as I had thought. In fact, I realized that I had enabled some people who Chris Do, founder of The Futur, descries as askholes:

“Everyone has a friend that’s an askhole. You know the type. They ask as if they really want to know but don’t listen. Some even argue back. Why did you even ask then? Sometimes you even see the askhole twice a day. Once when you look in the mirror in the morning and once right before you go to bed. Don’t be an askhole. If you aren’t looking for answers, or already know it, don’t ask.”

Now, I want to expand Do’s definition to people who ask for our time, not our just opinion. There’s an inverse correlation between how much people spend on something and how much respect they give to it. Free advice? It costs nothing to ignore it and thus it gets no respect. How many friends and strangers have asked for my advice about some solopreneur snag, freelance frustration, or consulting kerfuffle over the years? Hundreds. How many of them, once I’ve given of my time or expertise, take definitive action? Very few.

And boy, don’t I wish I’d exercised more discernment and politely put those people off after they showed me that I had taken their problems more seriously than they did.

Life and business are full of tradeoffs and compromises, so being discerning and sharply deliberate in what you say yes and no to will ensure that your tradeoffs are strategic—that is, they take you where you want to go.

What I’m saying is that we all need to act more like Seth Godin, embrace the discomfort of saying no, and conserve our time and other resources to make our highest and best contribution. Easier said than done.

Perhaps these tiny practices of mine will enable you to get better at saying no:

• Ask, “Is this person an askhole?” Do I see clear signs that they’re in enough pain to actually benefit if I were to say yes?
• Ask, “What are the downsides of saying yes here? How will this affect prior commitments? Will this take my focus from more important priorities, projects, and people?”
• Ask, “If this takes three times the time and is half as fulfilling, would I still say yes?”
• Ask, “Where is the line between my professional obligation to help clients and a lack of boundaries? Am I bumping up against that line? Is this doing a favor or is this free work?”
• Ask, “Do I really want to do this? Would I have chosen this if the person hadn’t asked? Can someone else do this?”
• Create and save a swipe file of prewritten ways to say no. Pat Walls at Starter Story collected a bunch of good examples.
• Create an “opportunity bouncer” with minimum criteria an opportunity must meet for you even to consider it and maximum criteria it must meet for your answer to be yes.
• Create a “No List.” Whenever you ignore a distraction or turn down an opportunity, add it to the list. As the list grows, you begin to feel a sense of accomplishment for your ability to say no and remain focused on what matters.

You can avoid disappointment, regret, and resentment by saying no more often. Not everyone is going to like you. You can’t please everyone. You can’t say yes to everyone. The great opportunities are easy, but it’s the pretty good opportunities that eat up your time and consume all the momentum you might otherwise have had.

No matter where you are in your career, your time is precious. Well-defined rules will enable you to make decisions and say yes or no quickly so that you can focus on and finish what matters most.

Seth Godin, if you’re reading this, and I know you never will, thank you for saying no. I appreciate the lesson that stung at the time and that serves as a guiding light now.

When you’re ready, here are ways I can help you:

1. Free Money. A pricing and money mindset guide for freelance creatives. If you’re unsure about your freelance pricing, this is the book for you.
2. Morning Marketing Habit. This course will help you build an “always be marketing” practice, become less dependent on referrals, and proactively build the business you want with the clients you want. My own morning marketing habit has enabled me to consistently make  6 figures as a freelancer.
3. Custom Business Roadmap. Gain clarity, confidence, and momentum in your freelance or consulting business.
4. Business Redesign. Raise your effective hourly rate, delegate with confidence, and free up 40 hours a month.
5. Clarity Session. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. I've done well over 100 of these 1:1 sessions with founders, solopreneurs, and freelancers who wanted guidance, a second opinion, or help creating a plan.