9 ms·

The Focus to Say No (2011)

196 points by 7d7n 6y ago

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Derek Sivers has published an interesting book about this, called "Hell Yeah or No" [0]. [0]: https://sive.rs/n https://sive.rs/n
ARandomerDude 6y ago
> We want to be the type of person that helps someone. But saying yes carries a cost. One that’s often paid in the days, weeks, or even years in the future. What starts as a single meeting becomes a weekly one... There's a delicate balance here, because saying "no" often carries a cost too, it's just less visible than the cost of saying "yes." Saying "no" too often can mean missing opportunities for relationships, projects, promotions, vacations, etc. But since we never see those things, it's easy to think saying "no" was free.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  That's probably true, but I can tell you that in my previous two jobs, I said "no" a lot, and I basically managed to maneuver into a spot where my boss let me essentially work on what I wanted. I got raises and commendations. I was surprised, but it's like, to some extent, the more assertive and confident you are, the more they respect you. My personal experience has been that when it comes to getting promotions/raises, being liked by your coworkers (including your boss) is 10X more important than the amount of output you produce. You should try to be on friendly terms with your boss... And of course, if a friend asks you to do something, sometimes you say yes, sometimes you say "I would like to help, but I'm feeling saturated with the projects I already have going on right now, to be honest", and a good friend/manager understands that. An extra dimension to this is that you don't necessarily need to get promoted in your current job. In the software industry, it's easy to move from one job to another, and when you move laterally, you can often negotiate a better salary. Again, here, being liked by your coworkers is particularly important. If your coworkers like you, they will give you good referrals. If you can get a referral from your previous boss, that speaks volumes.
  - throwaway713 6y ago
    > being liked by your coworkers (including your boss) is 10X more important than the amount of output you produce Is this really true? I can think of people I like very well as a person, but they are extremely unproductive and I would not want to have them on a project with me. On the flip side, there are people that I would not say I am friends with (not enemies either, just neutral interactions) who do an excellent job at getting work done and who I have given very positive peer feedback to. I always hope that things like promotions aren’t popularity contests, but I never can tell for sure how much that’s the case, particularly at higher levels of management...
    - belval 6y ago
      10X is a huge factor, I would say it's about half-half. One thing to keep in mind is that these things are not exclusive. Having a good relationship with your superior usually means more trust, better projects and much better communications which is key to actually getting what you need to fulfill your assignments. It works with both extremes. If your work output is awesome but you have a harder time with inter-personal relationship then of course in the greater picture you will be left out because people just won't come to you.
    - violetgarden 6y ago
      Unfortunately, unless you have someone to vouch for you, it kind of can be a popularity contest. This is from a corporate point of view, where lower managers have to appeal up the chain to fight for promotions for their people. It’s much easier for the higher ups to grant promotions to the people they’ve heard of.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Yes, but context is important. Most people separate personal likes from office likes to at least some extent. Part of being liked in the office is being seen as productive enough. You can like someone personally and hate them on the job. You can hate someone personally and still like them on the job.
    - jimbokun 6y ago
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Actually, i think it's likely that almost everyone at least unconsciously realizes the costs of no's, and that it's never really free. Hence the difficulty with actually saying no.
- gabea 6y ago
  I agree with this sentiment. As with almost everything in life the answer is not to have too much of any one thing. Moderately saying yes and no will help you go further in my humble opinion. The discussion should focus on 1.) Understanding how much you say yes vs. no and 2.) If you say yes far too often or no far too often here are ways to bring you back to balance.
- hinkley 6y ago
  You want the type of person who helps someone help themselves. Part of that, often overlooked, is doing a summary at the end explaining what were the concrete steps taken to get the result (if you have to poke around a bit to find the right spot, that can be disorienting). It's also giving people tools with guard rails built in so they can trust doing the task themselves. You don't want people who get off on owning a workflow, and are super-helpful but involved in perpetuity. There's a fine line between 'let Tom and Harry do it because they seem to enjoy it while I don't,' and 'everyone thinks Tom and Harry's solution is bullshit and I want nothing to do with it.' The latter leads to codependency, and these people are toxic to productivity, accidentally or intentionally.
corytheboyd 6y ago
Not a lot of concrete advice here to be honest > While yes is easy to say, it’s hard to live. Things like this just don’t mean a whole lot. Maybe it’s helpful to people that need to hear it though.
rwmj 6y ago
Is this sort of pabulum really interesting to HN readers?
- hestefisk 6y ago
  Agree. Looks like some pseudo philosophical motivational babble from my LinkedIn feed.
- toomim 6y ago
  I was just thinking about this concept last night on my own, so yes, it is interesting. It's short, but short is good, and an example of the author saying "no" to a additional thoughts.
- C19is20 6y ago
  Your comment is one of the reasons I read the comments before the articles, so yes.
- dang 6y ago
  Traditionally the space of self-help/entrepreneurial/managerial advice posts has been of interest, but the bar needs to be high because only the top-quality slice is really worth spending time on. That's true of technical posts too, but even more true of this stuff. Often the discussions end up being more interesting than the articles, as HN readers share their related experiences. In such cases we'll often leave the thread up even when the article itself is fluff. The main problem with the current article is that it doesn't include enough detail. If there were a few interesting examples or case studies, that would go a long way. Saying no based on staying focused is an interesting topic and an important and difficult skill, the kind of thing it's easy to think you're doing when you're really not.
scsilver 6y ago
Just say no to friends, family, and all the human things that make life worth living.
- myth2018 6y ago
  Indeed. Things that make life worth living and, when they lack for too long, you start to ask, after all, what is the point of all that hard work.
croisillon 6y ago
The comments here reminds me that post where everybody was saying it was terrible writing and not sure if it even meant anything ; then later came an article "IA wrote an article and nobody at HN noticed" revealing the IA-writing was in fact heavily edited
commandlinefan 6y ago
When I was younger and sort of just starting out, I thought this way. My boss had given me a set of goals to work on, so I would focus on these goals to the exclusion of everything else. If somebody came and asked for help, I'd tell them I didn't have time to help, because I was busy focusing on the stuff that I was supposed to be doing. What I found, the hard way, is that all of those people I refused to help badmouthed me behind my back, and I got a reputation for being unhelpful (which was fair, because I was!). Come review time, all of this negative feedback was a big topic of conversation. Finally I got the hint and did a complete 180 - if somebody asked for my help, at any time, I dropped everything and focused on helping them. I fell behind on what I was "supposed" to be doing, but I also kept close track of where the interruptions were coming from, just in case. Now, come review time, my boss didn't even seem to care that I never met any of my goals, and talked on and on about what a great reputation I had. One boss after another, consistently, every time.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  Work is hell. And hell is other people. Work is people. People are hell.
  - amelius 6y ago
    You can always work for Amazon Mechanical Turk.
  - darioush 6y ago
    :) Wanted to say this comment made me smile. You are not alone. Sending you good vibes
  - Der_Einzige 6y ago
    Hell is other peoples code
    - imoverclocked 6y ago
      Hell is the code I used to write.
u678u 6y ago
I really regret helping people and taking on external work. For me it comes down to interviews for your next job (which realistically is the best chance for promotion). When they're asking you coding quizzes and examples of being productive, all the times you helped out doing annoying paperwork, support calls and bug hunts count for nothing. They can be useful for some stories but not much.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Here is my secret to success. Projects are only successful when somebody knows how everything works together. The person you feel comfortable approaching with a problem knows about problems nobody else knows about. If the problem turns out to be severe, they have more time to come up with a reasonable fix. They look smarter in the emergency meeting. If the problem is malingering, like architecture problems, they're constantly inoculated with details about broad parts of the system they might not otherwise be looking at. If you are being helpful, your goal should be to get promoted into a mentoring or a leadership position. That gets you something concrete to put on your resume for the next place. Nobody knows how big your story points are so feature count tells them nothing at all.
hinkley 6y ago
> Saying no is like saving your money in the bank, whereas saying yes is spending it. The bank pays lousy interest payments that usually don't keep up with inflation. Spending it on things that save you time in the future pays huge dividends. Most places don't invest in boosting productivity. I don't know if it's Cloud-think (horizontal scaling) or if I'm just imagining that it's gotten worse over the years.
- ohduran 6y ago
  This please! Spend your time wisely. Just saying no (or yes, for all that matters) isn't a helpful heuristic.
willemlabu 6y ago
What this entire thought is missing is that you need to have a idea you're saying yes to. This is about prioritisation more than it's about focus.
dustingetz 6y ago
Bad incentive structures prevent this ... root cause is in many scaled up systems of people, optics (appearances and visibility) are what you are judged by, as there is zero accountability or metrics in place other than how you make the decision makers feel about you, so focusing and delivering results is actually not what is rewarded! Basically all human systems at scale have this problem, consider politics. And you don't even get a seat at the table if you opt-out of the game. You either have to play or you can create your own bubble universe, like a startup, and do everything yourself, unless of course you want investors ...
oakfr 6y ago
Saying no is actually the fairly easy part. The hard part is understanding what to say yes to.
adkadskhj 6y ago
Question about FS: I took a look at the root site, and it appears FS advertises values i have been seeking to improve. Thought patterns, knowledge, etc. They have book content, and paid podcasts. With that said, can anyone comment on how good the content of FS is? Is their content worth buying? Is their content worth consuming? Opinions would be appreciated. So far i like what they advertise, so i'm curious how it holds up to scrutiny.
tomlue 6y ago
diversification is valuable in your portfolio, but also in your day to day activities. Being overly focused is a failure to diversify.
rawland 6y ago
No. To this article. If we all weren't taught the skill 'focus' in our early toddler years we wouldn't be able to read or write a single sentence here. No. To Jobs, the bullshitter. And after this little break and business administration fans bullshit, let's get back to understanding why the FFT is so practical when multiplying polynomials. Still don't get it 100%... still looks like magic to me... :)
- nayuki 6y ago
  Were you watching this video by any chance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7apO7q16V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7apO7q16V0 ("The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT): Most Ingenious Algorithm Ever?" by Reducible)
  - rawland 6y ago
    Thanks. :) "You feel a sense of wonder. A sense of awe at the elegance of such an algorithm. It happens to not actually by that useful or efficient as a matter of fact. But we still study it just as we like to read a work of fiction. It inspires us."
spaetzleesser 6y ago
As everything else in life it's a matter of balance and how you get your message across. You don't want to be the ass who never helps people if it's not his direct task. But then you also don't want to a pushover who lets himself constantly being distracted. I have done both. I think most important is to be clear and compassionate when you say "No".
mrexroad 6y ago
I think there's a more nuance here. Focus is saying no -- agreed. Giving help increases surface area for serendipity and opportunity -- agreed. I don't see these as being mutually exclusive.
jaggirs 6y ago
I say learn to say yes first, then learn to say no. Saying no to everything because you think you can't do something is going to result in an extremely boring life. Find your limits first, you probably are capable of doing more than you think.
tonymet 6y ago
There's a lot of nuance here. what to say No to? What are costs of saying No? How to say NO? e..g "No, never" vs "not right now". There are a lot of opportunities that don't reveal themselves in the moment. Say no to those and you'll miss a lot of upside.
karmakaze 6y ago
Similarly Warren Buffet's '2-list strategy' drove this point home for me. [0] https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus
at_a_remove 6y ago
It's a tightrope. I used to work for a "NO" at almost any cost guy. He ended up shouting at me (and I shouted back) over a literal "this will take me exactly five minutes in SQL if I am being lazy about it" request that he said the requestor should have asked for two weeks ago, and they ought to have to wait. Now, at the end of his career, he works as an assistant (to someone who is almost an assistant themselves), where once he was the head of the department. He worked pretty hard for that reputation and it eventually caught up with him. Of course, it was still a ding on my review at the time but whatever. On the other hand, too much "yes" can keep you away from your actual duties, you end up greasing a lot of wheels instead of making formal fixes, and you can saddle yourself with a lot of obligations from what you thought were one-off deals. You can be mired in place by a spider's web of dotted-line relationships, and often yes to one person, right now, means that someone else's possible yes gets blocked and you get problems from there. And, frankly, you can end up doing work better suited for someone else. That road ends up in being taken advantage of. My only "solution," such as it is, is not to maintain just a middle stance, but to slightly vacillate back and forth from it, as time and your mood allows. This can cause people to actually evaluate whether or not you are the person who needs to do this. If you start gathering up all kinds of extra responsibilities, those need to be communicated, first verbally and then in writing, in numerous directions. Tightrope walkers do not stay exactly in the middle, but move slightly back and forth to maintain balance, and that is what I advocate.
fgimenez 6y ago
My experience has been to say "yes" to everything in early career when you are not in demand. Then slowly transition to saying "no" as your career develops. The transition point from "yes" to "no" is when you develop more unique and valuable skill sets. When all you have to offer is energy, excitement, and smarts - "yes" opens doors, creates relationships, and gives you opportunities to learn. That's how you grow, not only in career, but in relationships. After you can bring more differentiated value to an opportunity, you're going to be in more demand and need to filter the best use of your time and energy. The Steve Job's part is absolutely correct when you are sitting in Steve Jobs' position. As a thought experiment, probably every Fortune 500 CEO would want to have a 1-2 hr meeting with Jobs circa 2008. That would be 500-1000 hours of meetings where arguably they would derive more value than he would. So while it would be insane for most to pass up on these meetings, he obviously would need to. Don't confuse the "yes" vs "no" periods of your life.
tzury 6y ago
This one from a few years ago covers similar aspects https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.intercom.com/blog/product-strategy-means-saying-no/%3Famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.intercom.com/blog/product-s...
ganafagol 6y ago
I find that this applies much broader than just work projects. Example: HN articles. I used to scroll through the front page, open every article with a remotely interesting sounding title in a new tab, usually another tab next to it with the HN discussion that I'd read after reading the article and where I'd keep reading quite a while after being done with the article. That's bad. Once I started prioritizing I'd have much more time for meaningful things. Saying no to reading comments about something I actually didn't care that much about. Saying no to actually finishing reading an article that I didn't really like that much. Saying no to even opening an article just because the title suggested it "could" be interesting but not really my cup of tea. A recent new strategy of mine is to first scroll through the list and then pick the article with the most promising title. Saying no to everything else. I may have missed really good stuff, but the payout is fantastic.

196 points by 7d7n 6y ago

Derek Sivers has published an interesting book about this, called "Hell Yeah or No" [0]. [0]: https://sive.rs/n https://sive.rs/n

ARandomerDude 6y ago

> We want to be the type of person that helps someone. But saying yes carries a cost. One that’s often paid in the days, weeks, or even years in the future. What starts as a single meeting becomes a weekly one... There's a delicate balance here, because saying "no" often carries a cost too, it's just less visible than the cost of saying "yes." Saying "no" too often can mean missing opportunities for relationships, projects, promotions, vacations, etc. But since we never see those things, it's easy to think saying "no" was free.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
That's probably true, but I can tell you that in my previous two jobs, I said "no" a lot, and I basically managed to maneuver into a spot where my boss let me essentially work on what I wanted. I got raises and commendations. I was surprised, but it's like, to some extent, the more assertive and confident you are, the more they respect you. My personal experience has been that when it comes to getting promotions/raises, being liked by your coworkers (including your boss) is 10X more important than the amount of output you produce. You should try to be on friendly terms with your boss... And of course, if a friend asks you to do something, sometimes you say yes, sometimes you say "I would like to help, but I'm feeling saturated with the projects I already have going on right now, to be honest", and a good friend/manager understands that. An extra dimension to this is that you don't necessarily need to get promoted in your current job. In the software industry, it's easy to move from one job to another, and when you move laterally, you can often negotiate a better salary. Again, here, being liked by your coworkers is particularly important. If your coworkers like you, they will give you good referrals. If you can get a referral from your previous boss, that speaks volumes.
- throwaway713 6y ago
  > being liked by your coworkers (including your boss) is 10X more important than the amount of output you produce Is this really true? I can think of people I like very well as a person, but they are extremely unproductive and I would not want to have them on a project with me. On the flip side, there are people that I would not say I am friends with (not enemies either, just neutral interactions) who do an excellent job at getting work done and who I have given very positive peer feedback to. I always hope that things like promotions aren’t popularity contests, but I never can tell for sure how much that’s the case, particularly at higher levels of management...
  - belval 6y ago
    10X is a huge factor, I would say it's about half-half. One thing to keep in mind is that these things are not exclusive. Having a good relationship with your superior usually means more trust, better projects and much better communications which is key to actually getting what you need to fulfill your assignments. It works with both extremes. If your work output is awesome but you have a harder time with inter-personal relationship then of course in the greater picture you will be left out because people just won't come to you.
  - violetgarden 6y ago
    Unfortunately, unless you have someone to vouch for you, it kind of can be a popularity contest. This is from a corporate point of view, where lower managers have to appeal up the chain to fight for promotions for their people. It’s much easier for the higher ups to grant promotions to the people they’ve heard of.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Yes, but context is important. Most people separate personal likes from office likes to at least some extent. Part of being liked in the office is being seen as productive enough. You can like someone personally and hate them on the job. You can hate someone personally and still like them on the job.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
zentiggr 6y ago
Actually, i think it's likely that almost everyone at least unconsciously realizes the costs of no's, and that it's never really free. Hence the difficulty with actually saying no.
gabea 6y ago
I agree with this sentiment. As with almost everything in life the answer is not to have too much of any one thing. Moderately saying yes and no will help you go further in my humble opinion. The discussion should focus on 1.) Understanding how much you say yes vs. no and 2.) If you say yes far too often or no far too often here are ways to bring you back to balance.
hinkley 6y ago
You want the type of person who helps someone help themselves. Part of that, often overlooked, is doing a summary at the end explaining what were the concrete steps taken to get the result (if you have to poke around a bit to find the right spot, that can be disorienting). It's also giving people tools with guard rails built in so they can trust doing the task themselves. You don't want people who get off on owning a workflow, and are super-helpful but involved in perpetuity. There's a fine line between 'let Tom and Harry do it because they seem to enjoy it while I don't,' and 'everyone thinks Tom and Harry's solution is bullshit and I want nothing to do with it.' The latter leads to codependency, and these people are toxic to productivity, accidentally or intentionally.

corytheboyd 6y ago

Not a lot of concrete advice here to be honest > While yes is easy to say, it’s hard to live. Things like this just don’t mean a whole lot. Maybe it’s helpful to people that need to hear it though.

rwmj 6y ago

Is this sort of pabulum really interesting to HN readers?

hestefisk 6y ago
Agree. Looks like some pseudo philosophical motivational babble from my LinkedIn feed.
toomim 6y ago
I was just thinking about this concept last night on my own, so yes, it is interesting. It's short, but short is good, and an example of the author saying "no" to a additional thoughts.
C19is20 6y ago
Your comment is one of the reasons I read the comments before the articles, so yes.
dang 6y ago
Traditionally the space of self-help/entrepreneurial/managerial advice posts has been of interest, but the bar needs to be high because only the top-quality slice is really worth spending time on. That's true of technical posts too, but even more true of this stuff. Often the discussions end up being more interesting than the articles, as HN readers share their related experiences. In such cases we'll often leave the thread up even when the article itself is fluff. The main problem with the current article is that it doesn't include enough detail. If there were a few interesting examples or case studies, that would go a long way. Saying no based on staying focused is an interesting topic and an important and difficult skill, the kind of thing it's easy to think you're doing when you're really not.

scsilver 6y ago

Just say no to friends, family, and all the human things that make life worth living.

myth2018 6y ago
Indeed. Things that make life worth living and, when they lack for too long, you start to ask, after all, what is the point of all that hard work.

croisillon 6y ago

The comments here reminds me that post where everybody was saying it was terrible writing and not sure if it even meant anything ; then later came an article "IA wrote an article and nobody at HN noticed" revealing the IA-writing was in fact heavily edited

commandlinefan 6y ago

When I was younger and sort of just starting out, I thought this way. My boss had given me a set of goals to work on, so I would focus on these goals to the exclusion of everything else. If somebody came and asked for help, I'd tell them I didn't have time to help, because I was busy focusing on the stuff that I was supposed to be doing. What I found, the hard way, is that all of those people I refused to help badmouthed me behind my back, and I got a reputation for being unhelpful (which was fair, because I was!). Come review time, all of this negative feedback was a big topic of conversation. Finally I got the hint and did a complete 180 - if somebody asked for my help, at any time, I dropped everything and focused on helping them. I fell behind on what I was "supposed" to be doing, but I also kept close track of where the interruptions were coming from, just in case. Now, come review time, my boss didn't even seem to care that I never met any of my goals, and talked on and on about what a great reputation I had. One boss after another, consistently, every time.

fartcannon 6y ago
Work is hell. And hell is other people. Work is people. People are hell.
- amelius 6y ago
  You can always work for Amazon Mechanical Turk.
- darioush 6y ago
  :) Wanted to say this comment made me smile. You are not alone. Sending you good vibes
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  Hell is other peoples code
  - imoverclocked 6y ago
    Hell is the code I used to write.

u678u 6y ago

I really regret helping people and taking on external work. For me it comes down to interviews for your next job (which realistically is the best chance for promotion). When they're asking you coding quizzes and examples of being productive, all the times you helped out doing annoying paperwork, support calls and bug hunts count for nothing. They can be useful for some stories but not much.

hinkley 6y ago
Here is my secret to success. Projects are only successful when somebody knows how everything works together. The person you feel comfortable approaching with a problem knows about problems nobody else knows about. If the problem turns out to be severe, they have more time to come up with a reasonable fix. They look smarter in the emergency meeting. If the problem is malingering, like architecture problems, they're constantly inoculated with details about broad parts of the system they might not otherwise be looking at. If you are being helpful, your goal should be to get promoted into a mentoring or a leadership position. That gets you something concrete to put on your resume for the next place. Nobody knows how big your story points are so feature count tells them nothing at all.

hinkley 6y ago

> Saying no is like saving your money in the bank, whereas saying yes is spending it. The bank pays lousy interest payments that usually don't keep up with inflation. Spending it on things that save you time in the future pays huge dividends. Most places don't invest in boosting productivity. I don't know if it's Cloud-think (horizontal scaling) or if I'm just imagining that it's gotten worse over the years.

ohduran 6y ago
This please! Spend your time wisely. Just saying no (or yes, for all that matters) isn't a helpful heuristic.

willemlabu 6y ago

What this entire thought is missing is that you need to have a idea you're saying yes to. This is about prioritisation more than it's about focus.

dustingetz 6y ago

Bad incentive structures prevent this ... root cause is in many scaled up systems of people, optics (appearances and visibility) are what you are judged by, as there is zero accountability or metrics in place other than how you make the decision makers feel about you, so focusing and delivering results is actually not what is rewarded! Basically all human systems at scale have this problem, consider politics. And you don't even get a seat at the table if you opt-out of the game. You either have to play or you can create your own bubble universe, like a startup, and do everything yourself, unless of course you want investors ...

oakfr 6y ago

Saying no is actually the fairly easy part. The hard part is understanding what to say yes to.

adkadskhj 6y ago

Question about FS: I took a look at the root site, and it appears FS advertises values i have been seeking to improve. Thought patterns, knowledge, etc. They have book content, and paid podcasts. With that said, can anyone comment on how good the content of FS is? Is their content worth buying? Is their content worth consuming? Opinions would be appreciated. So far i like what they advertise, so i'm curious how it holds up to scrutiny.

tomlue 6y ago

diversification is valuable in your portfolio, but also in your day to day activities. Being overly focused is a failure to diversify.

rawland 6y ago

No. To this article. If we all weren't taught the skill 'focus' in our early toddler years we wouldn't be able to read or write a single sentence here. No. To Jobs, the bullshitter. And after this little break and business administration fans bullshit, let's get back to understanding why the FFT is so practical when multiplying polynomials. Still don't get it 100%... still looks like magic to me... :)

nayuki 6y ago
Were you watching this video by any chance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7apO7q16V0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7apO7q16V0 ("The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT): Most Ingenious Algorithm Ever?" by Reducible)
- rawland 6y ago
  Thanks. :) "You feel a sense of wonder. A sense of awe at the elegance of such an algorithm. It happens to not actually by that useful or efficient as a matter of fact. But we still study it just as we like to read a work of fiction. It inspires us."

spaetzleesser 6y ago

As everything else in life it's a matter of balance and how you get your message across. You don't want to be the ass who never helps people if it's not his direct task. But then you also don't want to a pushover who lets himself constantly being distracted. I have done both. I think most important is to be clear and compassionate when you say "No".

mrexroad 6y ago

I think there's a more nuance here. Focus is saying no -- agreed. Giving help increases surface area for serendipity and opportunity -- agreed. I don't see these as being mutually exclusive.

jaggirs 6y ago

I say learn to say yes first, then learn to say no. Saying no to everything because you think you can't do something is going to result in an extremely boring life. Find your limits first, you probably are capable of doing more than you think.

tonymet 6y ago

There's a lot of nuance here. what to say No to? What are costs of saying No? How to say NO? e..g "No, never" vs "not right now". There are a lot of opportunities that don't reveal themselves in the moment. Say no to those and you'll miss a lot of upside.

karmakaze 6y ago

Similarly Warren Buffet's '2-list strategy' drove this point home for me. [0] https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus

at_a_remove 6y ago

It's a tightrope. I used to work for a "NO" at almost any cost guy. He ended up shouting at me (and I shouted back) over a literal "this will take me exactly five minutes in SQL if I am being lazy about it" request that he said the requestor should have asked for two weeks ago, and they ought to have to wait. Now, at the end of his career, he works as an assistant (to someone who is almost an assistant themselves), where once he was the head of the department. He worked pretty hard for that reputation and it eventually caught up with him. Of course, it was still a ding on my review at the time but whatever. On the other hand, too much "yes" can keep you away from your actual duties, you end up greasing a lot of wheels instead of making formal fixes, and you can saddle yourself with a lot of obligations from what you thought were one-off deals. You can be mired in place by a spider's web of dotted-line relationships, and often yes to one person, right now, means that someone else's possible yes gets blocked and you get problems from there. And, frankly, you can end up doing work better suited for someone else. That road ends up in being taken advantage of. My only "solution," such as it is, is not to maintain just a middle stance, but to slightly vacillate back and forth from it, as time and your mood allows. This can cause people to actually evaluate whether or not you are the person who needs to do this. If you start gathering up all kinds of extra responsibilities, those need to be communicated, first verbally and then in writing, in numerous directions. Tightrope walkers do not stay exactly in the middle, but move slightly back and forth to maintain balance, and that is what I advocate.

fgimenez 6y ago

My experience has been to say "yes" to everything in early career when you are not in demand. Then slowly transition to saying "no" as your career develops. The transition point from "yes" to "no" is when you develop more unique and valuable skill sets. When all you have to offer is energy, excitement, and smarts - "yes" opens doors, creates relationships, and gives you opportunities to learn. That's how you grow, not only in career, but in relationships. After you can bring more differentiated value to an opportunity, you're going to be in more demand and need to filter the best use of your time and energy. The Steve Job's part is absolutely correct when you are sitting in Steve Jobs' position. As a thought experiment, probably every Fortune 500 CEO would want to have a 1-2 hr meeting with Jobs circa 2008. That would be 500-1000 hours of meetings where arguably they would derive more value than he would. So while it would be insane for most to pass up on these meetings, he obviously would need to. Don't confuse the "yes" vs "no" periods of your life.

tzury 6y ago

This one from a few years ago covers similar aspects https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.intercom.com/blog/product-strategy-means-saying-no/%3Famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.intercom.com/blog/product-s...

ganafagol 6y ago

I find that this applies much broader than just work projects. Example: HN articles. I used to scroll through the front page, open every article with a remotely interesting sounding title in a new tab, usually another tab next to it with the HN discussion that I'd read after reading the article and where I'd keep reading quite a while after being done with the article. That's bad. Once I started prioritizing I'd have much more time for meaningful things. Saying no to reading comments about something I actually didn't care that much about. Saying no to actually finishing reading an article that I didn't really like that much. Saying no to even opening an article just because the title suggested it "could" be interesting but not really my cup of tea. A recent new strategy of mine is to first scroll through the list and then pick the article with the most promising title. Saying no to everything else. I may have missed really good stuff, but the payout is fantastic.