How to say 'No’ from the perspective of 8 top performers
‘Can you just do this quick thing for me? It’ll take 15 minutes, promise.’
‘Let’s order pizza and binge-watch The Witcher tonight. What do you say?’
‘I’ve got a spare ticket to watch my cousin play the banjo with his feet - do you want to come?’
Sometimes it can be hard to say no, because it’s almost impossible to foresee the paths we are cutting off in our life by saying yes. But to streamline your time and energy towards your core focuses, saying no is an essential skill.
Being clear on what your priorities are can also save you tons of time switching between tasks. In a study from the University of California Irvine, researchers shadowed workers on the job, studying their productivity, and found that it took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on task. Think about the time lost for businesses and individuals, simply because we can’t say no.
So with all that said, what are the best ways to approach things you simply have to reject?
In his book Tribe of Mentors, Tim Ferriss interviews 100 of the top performers from various fields, asking similar questions of them all. This includes one: in the last 5 years, what have you become better at saying no to? This loaded question gives us a few tactics for saying ‘no’, and below are eight of my favourite:
The ‘6 or 8’ rule
Kyle Maynard
Speaker, author, and mixed martial arts athlete, known for becoming the first quadruple amputee to ascend Mount Kilimanjaro without the aid of prosthetics.
My biggest shift came after listening to a successful CEO talk about his philosophy for hiring people. When his company grew and he ran out of time to interview people himself, he had his employees rate new candidates on a 1 to 10 scale. The only stipulation was they couldn’t choose a seven. It immediately dawned on me how many invitations I was receiving that I would rate as a seven – speeches, weddings, even dates. If I thought something was a seven, it was a good chance I feel obligated to do it. But if I have to decide between a six or an eight, it’s a lot easier to quickly determine whether or not I should even consider it.
The notebook
Samin Nosrat
American chef, TV host and food writer. She is a regular food columnist for The New York Times Magazine and has a Netflix docu-series based on her cookbook, Salt Fat Acid Heat.
Truth be told, I'm still working on getting better at saying no. But I will say this: the more clear I am about what my goals are, the more easily I can say no. I have a notebook into which I've recorded all sorts of goals, both big and small, over the last ten or so years. When I take the time to articulate what it is that I hope to achieve, it's simple to refer to the list and see whether saying yes to an opportunity will take me toward or away from achieving that goal. It's when I'm fuzzy about where I'm headed that I start to say yes to things willy-nilly. And I've been burned enough times by FOMO-based and ego-based decision-making to know that I'll always regret choosing to do something for the wrong reason.
The closed door
Dustin Moscowitz
American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Facebook, and in 2008, left to co-found project management software platform Asana.
The first no is by far the easiest and cleanest. Declining a request is uncomfortable, so it’s tempting to equivocate, say you will hear someone out before deciding, or agree to a smaller version of the request, even when you’re confident that you would rather not engage at all. As soon as you open the door, however, you’ve almost always insured at least one more request that you’ll have to accept or decline in the future and thus haven’t saved yourself the discomfort at all. The asker will see this as an opportunity to press harder, or ask you about similar requests that come up in the future, and you will have even more discomfort declining those requests versus if you had simply declined the first one. They may even start handing out your contact information to other people in the network, multiplying the problem.
The 80/20 principle
Gary Vaynerchuk
Belarusian-American entrepreneur, New York Times best-selling author, speaker, and Internet personality. Best known for his work in social media as the chairman of communications company, VaynerX, and as CEO of VaynerMedia.
One of the great issues for anybody who start gaining success is they become crippled by opportunity. And the no’s become being imperatively important versus the yeses. On the flipside as Tyler or any of my other assistance will tell you I still need a healthy balance of 20% yeses to things that seem dumb because I believe in serendipity and that’s an important balance that people struggle with. I do believe that most people reading this will either go too far into one or the other extreme. They become super disciplined and say no to everything and I think that’s the right use of time, or they’re just saying yes to everything and giving it another thought, no strategy. I want to be closer to the no’s and be good at that - I really value my time. However I do think that there is a nice healthy balance of doing things on spec that aren’t obvious ROI on intuition. Because one of those things in that 20% usually makes the entire investment worth it.
The morning after
Kevin Kelly
Founding executive editor of Wired magazine. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.
Whenever I am trying to decide whether to accept an invitation, I just pretend it is going to happen tomorrow morning. It is easy to say yes to something happening six months from now, but it has to be super fantastic to get me to go tomorrow morning.
The security guard
Steven Pressfield
American author of historical fiction, non-fiction, and screenplays. He is most famous for the 2002 non-fiction book The War of Art.
I got a chance a couple of years ago to visit a security firm, one of those places that guard celebrities and protect their privacy-in other words, a business whose total job was to say no. The person who was giving me the tour told me that the business screens every incoming letter, solicitation, email, etc., and decides which ones get through to the client. "How many get through?" I asked. "Virtually none," my friend said. I decided that I would look at incoming mail the same way that firm does. If I were the security professional tasked with protecting me from bogus, sociopathic and clueless tasks, which one would I screen and dump in the trash? That’s helped a lot.
The epitaph and death bed
Tim Urban
Founder of the website Wait But Why (WBW), typically involving long-form discussions of various topics, including artificial intelligence, outer space, and procrastination.
The point of both the Epitaph Test and the Deathbed Test is that by the time you're on your deathbed and your epitaph is being drafted, it's too late to change anything- so we want to do whatever we can to access that magical end-of-life clarity before the end of life actually happens. Of course, actually saying no to your "no" list is a struggle of its own, and I'm still working on that-but having good mechanisms for defining what's important has helped a lot.
No offense, but...
Richa chadda
Indian bollywood actress who works in Hindi films
I have become better at sayıng no to things and people (including friends and family) that drain my energy. This isn't easy, especially if you are a people-pleaser. When I am straightforward and sincere about my needs, I find that no one is offended when I say no. Those who are offended perhaps don't value my needs.
Bonus - ‘Hell yes’ or ‘no’
Derek Sivers
American writer, musician, programmer and entrepreneur best known for being the founder and former president of CD Baby,
Use this rule if you’re often over-committed or too scattered. If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say “no”. When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” — then say “no.” When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!” Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new project. If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about it, say “no.” We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.
