Saying 'Yes' to One Thing is Saying 'No' to Everything Else

We live in a world full of problems of abundance.

For almost everyone in a country like the UK, the greater problem is not having too little food, but how to avoid eating so much it creates health problems for you.

We don’t get bored, we in fact have to limit the things that exist to ‘entertain’ us.

The challenge isn’t know what you could do, it’s choosing between the many, many possible things we could work on.

And so the importance of choice becomes paramount.

More than a decade ago, I was sitting at the back of the room in a leadership programme I worked on, watching my colleague Sarah Cartwright at work. She was mid-session, teaching a group of leaders about Difficult Conversations, or Presenting With Impact; I was observing. As I remember it, she was standing in front of a flip chart stand, dealing with a question, when she said: ‘When you say ‘Yes’ to one thing, you are saying ‘No’ to everything else.’

She wasn’t the first person to coin that phrase, but she was to me. And it had huge connotations for me, my work and my clients.

If, like me, you believe the idea of Time Management is a trap, and start to focus on what ‘time management’ problems are really about, you quite quickly come back to this idea of choice.

More than that, Oliver Burkeman thinks that our whole obsession with time management and productivity hacks is to avoid having to admit to ourselves that one day we’ll die and we won’t have done everything… And I have to say, I agree with him.

Given all that, the importance of this idea that I heard from Sarah (and its corrollary) are central to the challenges that leaders of today face if they want to get more of what really matters done: if you say ‘Yes’ to one thing, you are saying ‘No’ to everything else. And if you say ‘No’ to something, you give yourself the opportunity to say ‘Yes’ to something else.

Therefore - importantly for people pleasers like me - saying ‘No’ is a possibility move.

We only get this one life; we each only have 24 hours in a day. Most of us could do with resting for more of those hours than we currently do - at least if we want to have energy for the next 24 hours.

And so we have to be discerning, and be courageous enough to say ‘No’.

I once heard the prolific author Seth Godin answering a question about how he got so much done. He said, ‘Well, I don’t have Facebook, I don’t have Twitter, I don’t watch TV and I don’t go to meetings.’

Those are some powerful things to say ‘No’ to. And they enabled him to say ‘Yes’ to a lot.

As Warren Buffett reportedly once taught the pilot of his private jet: to say ‘Yes’ to the MOST important things, we often have to say ‘No’ to many VERY important things… at least for now.

Of course there are different ways to say No - we can say No with gratitude, grace and a sense of collaboration, or we can leave our colleagues, friends and clients in the lurch. We need to create our own code, and follow it.

But most of us can do with remembering that ‘No.’ is a complete sentence, and that most relationships that matter can stand a few dozen honest ‘No’s. And more: that all of us have the experience of wishing someone had said ‘No’ at the start, rather than saying ‘Yes’, only to let us down later. Clarity now serves everyone.

Underneath all this, remember, is the truth that as far as we know, we only get this life once.

We can spend it on what other people ask us to do, or on watching TV and checking Facebook, or on what we’re too afraid to say ‘No’ to.

Or, we can be courageous and honest, say ‘No’, and choose to do what really matters.

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PS My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now. Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose

This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.