On the advice of “saying no”…
Lots of business-y book say that you need to learn to say no a lot.
I didn’t understand this for a long time. Until I worked with customer support and saw how many invitations founders and CEOs get. They literally couldn’t say yes to everything even if they wanted.
Why hadn’t I understood the advice? I think it’s because I wasn’t getting that many invitations. We can expect invites to follow a power law. The people getting the most invitations get a ton of invitations, and everyone else gets very few.
What this means is that when you’re not in the top ~1-3% of invitation-getters, you could say yes to everything. That’s definitely where I am currently in my life / career.
The problem is that if you aren’t careful, you might fail to adopt the advice in time. You’ll find yourself burnt out, or at least spinning your wheels stuck in middling low-value-add activities.
So adopt that mindset earlier!1 Say no like you’re famous.
Footnotes
-
In fact, in the “attention economy”, you already get a famous-person’s quantity “invitations”. There are so many apps inviting you to do something with little rings and pings and urgent red dots! More than you could possibly respond to. ↩