Starting with “No”

A few years ago, I was getting ready to read Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss. In the book, Ferriss sent out the same series of questions to 100’s of successful people in various fields and then composed a book with their answers. Prior to reading the book, I decided to answer the questions myself before I had filled my head with so many of their answers and ideas. 

One of the questions was: 

“In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? What new realizations and/or approaches helped?”

As I read the question I came to realize that I unknowingly had a process for this, but had never really made formal note of it. 

It goes something like this:

Anyone: “Hey Justin, would you be interested in…”

My Head: “No.”

Without even realizing it, I started to understand that my gut reaction when I begin to hear a question is to say no. I can’t help it. I just seem to automatically go into protection mode and start to play out the long game of a scenario that I don’t actually even know anything about yet.

Now, back to the original prompt from Anyone. 

Eventually our friend, Anyone, has finished asking their question and now I actually get to process the question in its entirety. 

Just because I started with a knee jerk reaction of saying no doesn’t mean I won’t say yes. It just means that I have to change my own mind. Once I hear about the opportunity it might clearly be something I view as overwhelmingly positive and quickly say yes and move on to the next step.

However, I think the main advantage to having that knee jerk-NO reaction comes when the ideas and opportunities are just ok. In other words, there are times when I can think of somewhat equal pros and cons to something and find myself feeling 50/50 about it. 

Here’s where saying no to begin with helps. If I’m stuck at 50/50, I stick with my first answer, which is always no. With this process, I leave more room for the opportunities that I see as being overwhelmingly deserving of yes because I’ve said no to enough questions I see as living on the margin. It’s been my experience that most people tend to start with yes and then weigh the evidence before considering a change to no. In those cases, when they find themselves at 50/50 they tend to refer to their original answer of yes. 

With the exact same process, just a different starting point, someone else said yes to something that I said no to, despite us both feeling equally conflicted about it.

Now with all that being said, will I be wrong sometimes? Should I have said yes to certain things I said no to? Absolutely. There are no guarantees. I can also inaccurately assess pros and cons and opt into things I later regret, but this margin of error generally results in extra space for opportunities instead of extra unwanted commitments. Moreover, I find myself with the time to pursue interests and ask questions of my own to others (and hopefully I provided enough evidence for them to say yes). 

One final point I would like to make. The reasons for saying yes can seem entirely contradictory to someone else, but not to you. And that is perfectly fine. You could say yes to helping someone move and no to going on vacation and be completely operating under the same process we’ve talked about. You don’t need to justify or convince anyone other than yourself when it comes to your decision of saying yes.

Too Long, Didn’t Read summary:

Start with no. You can always change your mind. If you can’t find enough reasons to change your answer to yes, you stick with the original no.