I've been thinking a lot about this a related topic lately -- how much of our lives and the things we find ourselves doing are tasks that are imposed upon us by others. I'm trying to come up with strategies to minimize this, which I guess is related to "saying no" to a lot of things. But I'm not sure the ideal path. Let me give some (non-work) examples:

I flew back from Europe on Wednesday, and the airline misplaced my luggage. To get it back, they've imposed a ton of steps on ME. "Here's your reference number. Call our customer support in 24 hours. Follow-up every day until you get it" is what I was told (and what I'll have to do).

It seems unfair that an act that was 0% my fault results in at least several hours of tasks for me. I have to follow-up. I have to wait on hold. I have to spend time thinking and wondering if my luggage will ever show up.

How do we avoid this? Getting angry doesn't work (trust me, they've been yelled at). Ignoring it doesn't work - no luggage will show up. So I guess the only real solution would be to have a personal assistant or otherwise hire someone to deal with situation like this for me? That seems out of reach for most people.

All sorts of things are like that -- if someone sues you, they've imposed literally dozens of hours of work and thousands of dollars of expenses on you entirely without your say. You can delegate as much as you want to a lawyer, but you'll still need to gather documents, think about strategies, and of course pay your lawyer.

So how does one really truly say "no" to things & delegate undesirable tasks unless one has enough money to afford such delegation? I'm not sure I have a good answer to this one yet.

Thoughts?

I own a business. If I was to do a full inventory, I would probably find I'm in the possession of tens of thousands of items. I'm currently in the situation where something breaks daily. It has forced me into being very picky. I no longer buy things, if I can avoid it. Every thing I buy has the potential of being a problem down the line that will require time and attention. Even disposing of broken things can be a big hassle. If I do buy something, brand new, I will take a close look at it and think about how it will fail. And try to reinforce those failure points. Minimalism is definitely a valid strategy, at large scales.

I have a very, very different definition of success than Warren Buffett does.

I say yes to as much as I can, and my life has been extremely fun and interesting as a result. If I could do it again, I'd say yes more and I'd say yes faster.

Hold on. Here's what he said:

"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything."

That's very different. This is a message that is useful to hear for extremely driven ambitious people who are already successful - that it's better to spend all the time you spend working on a few carefully chosen things. It should not be interpreted as advice for people who are not extremely driven to not do things. The baseline assumption is that you already spend a substantial amount of time working on potentially productive things.

The important thing to keep in mind here is that Buffett is talking about "saying no to almost everything" when you are already successful. Not when you're actually still in the process of becoming successful.

The rules are different there, although of course Jobs' quote about focus, I think, applies to both situations, to some extent.

EDIT: Grammar.

I think this is misleading advice. I'm sure it's true that when you have amazing opportunities thrown at you at every turn, it's important to stay true to your mission and be deliberate in choosing which ones to pursue. That being said, if you're just starting your career and have limited options and someone gives you an opportunity that is good but perhaps not in perfect alignment with what you ultimately want to achieve / do, you should probably still say yes.

In other words, I would say that you should start your career saying yes to everything and end your career saying no to everything with some type of smooth interpolation between the two states.

That may be, but it may not be a causal difference.

Steve Jobs may have had to say no a lot, but that may be because he was presented with a lot of opportunities; opportunities that are less available to less successful people. I also imagine Steve Jobs didn't have a lot of time available.

And I've read his biography. He didn't strike me as a man that said no very much when he was younger.

These pithy rules and sayings make for clickbait. But nobody seems to give good examples of when they said no to focus.

VCs like to brag about the "deals they missed" just to remind you that they were in the room where it happened, but then left the room.

I can barely recall a time in my life where saying 'no' to an exploding offer resulted in regret.

I'm not sure when I learned this 'power'. I don't think it should be a power, but I know way too many people who don't have it, and watched a number of them go through a bunch of bad excitement followed by regret.

If it's not someone including you in a spontaneous social activity at the last minute, just say no. They know that if you have time to think about it you'd realize it wasn't that great, which is exactly why they aren't giving you time to think about it. It's an attempt to evoke the same feeling of scarcity you experience when your buddy says, "Hey there are only three beers left. Who wants one?" to a room full of people.

> They say no to superficial networking events in which people swap business cards and never hear from one another. Why? Because successful people don't network. They build relationships.

I've felt for a long time that there is no such thing as "networking" as its own activity. You build a network by just having life experiences and interests- hobbies, clubs, other parents from school if you have kids, religion, volunteering, side projects, alumni associations, and of course people you've worked with in the past. These relationships need to have some sort of basis other than you wanting something like a job or opportunities.

Which is the opposite of what a lot of successful people do right - they take loads of risks. It feels as though when you take risks and put yourself out there you deserve the rewards (but I would say this isn't really true either). If you have millions of opportunities like Buffet does of course this statement makes a lot of sense.

I don't think applying Warren Buffet's aphorisms to life is a replicable strategy for success. Like most things making your own path is more important than even being successful in the terms that are important to Buffet or whoever really.

Reminds me of an old interview with Scott McNealy

    You don't have time in real life to be perfect at everything, and you'd better get a lot of things done.

I'm not saying this is definitely intended, but it kind of bothers me that this title seems to imply "Saying no to almost everything might make you successful".

Really succesful people have enough power and f*ck you money to say no to almost anything.

On the other hand, I've met a bunch of really average people who think saying no all the time makes them the next Steve Jobs. It's very annoying.

As a people pleaser I find this very challenging. But also very true I've seen the damage this has done to my own career.

I used to work for a chip design company whose CEO would ask every for new product ideas at every annual sales meeting and said no to every one for 7 years straight. Now his product pipeline has run out of gas. His stock is in the toilet and new hires won't touch his company. Karma.

I say yes to almost everything. I’m massively unsuccessful. But I’ve had an interesting life.

Successful people like Buffett are presented with opportunities constantly. There's some truth here, but his circumstances are radically different. That's why for people at the bottom the advice is to say yes to more things!

Honestly I think this is entirely counter-productive for anyone that's not mega-rich.

If you're Warren Buffet, of course you'll have a thousand offers and propositions a day and you have to say no to most of them and find that one gem.

If you're regular Joe (and, yes, that most likely includes YOU reading this) you can't afford to shut down most opportunities or you'll never get anywhere.

I refuse to read this article.

Family, relatives and friends can be huge sources of distraction, if you can't say no.

I know many people that should be a lot better off in life given their merits, but they are weighed down by an endless parade of other people asking things (help, money, counsel). Their WhatsApps beep every minute without fail. Yet they are incapable of even muting the damn phone for a while.

"Already successful famous billionaires say no to almost everything"

Advice that doesn't really help the rest of us, much ...

So, here is the part that is important but omitted: Once you know what works for you and you found how to do it efficiently, then you say no to almost everything.

Which is something any toddler knows but since the first part is absent, the second can't happen in order to make the first one to be even possible to be found.

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Also... man, as a junior staff member, the opposite is true.

Establish yourself as someone capable, eager, and motivated.

Don't come in to a new org and be like, "No, I'm going to be successful by telling people no." Oof.

This advice is really for senior people, and it's to prioritize so you get the important things done.

It's been posted here before, but Derek Sivers has a similar line to the ones Jobs and Buffett used: "If you're not feeling 'hell yeah!', then say no." https://sive.rs/hyn

I think there is an inversion of cause and effect here. People can afford to say no because they're successful. Saying no is not why they're successful.

Poor people rarely get any opportunity at all so they're forced to say yes to every opportunity just to survive.

You know the problem with advice from rich/already successful people?

They operate within the environment that dozens of people daily are coming up to them and giving them opportunities to choose among new ventures, investing opportunities, charities to lead, ways to spend their money.

Of course, duh, if that's your life, then go ahead and pick and choose, pass up things that others offer you, making your life only better and more focused.

The problem is they forget when they were hungry, unrecognized, struggling-to-make-their-name, more-time-than-money people. When no one was knocking on their door wanting to talk to them. When they were saddled with thousands in student loan debt maybe. Or maybe they were never any of these things.

The normal person is starved for opportunities to advance, to be recognized, to try out new things. The average Joe doesn't get a lot of things to say "no" to. The average person doesn't have a life mission of what to do with their vast wealth and time remaining on Earth, like a Warren Buffett does. Sure, feel absolutely free to say no to fixing GM cars because your passion is Aston Martins, or how about not waiting tables today because you really want to be a cook? Or, for that matter, saying that you don't want this group of Jira tickets on infrastructure because you really want to do UI? Hm?

For many (maybe most) people, life is a combination of random walks that you say "yes" to many of the paths you come across, and hope that it leads you somewhere good. Having choices is a luxury. Don't forget that.

I will say that yes, you should have perspective and opinion about what you want to do, and not want to do in life, and what paths you want to go down. And you should work every day to build up the ability to have choices. But most people operate within far more constraints than these celebrities and don't have such luxury to be passing up new opportunities.

This is like lottery winners telling people how to succeed in life. Fun, but dangerous for the average listener. You go and try being as obnoxious and choosing to focus as Steve Jobs, and please report back...

This is true, but the balancing act between when to push back and when to say yes is VERY minute for many situations. Unfortunately, this comes with experience and many don’t learn it (if at all) until later in life.

Funny, I realized this week that being productive (e.g. doing the dishes) was less about motivating myself and more about saying no to laziness and procrastination (mindlessly browsing Netflix or HN).

Or, the most successful people are able to say no to almost everything.

If you are putting this man on a pedestal you have already lost.

> Write down a list of your top 25 career goals.

Really? other people have so many career goals? I’d be hard pressed to come up with more than 3 or maybe 5 tops. 25??

But the important precondition is that you're working so hard that saying "no" gives you more time to work on what matters.

Nonsense. Really successful people have the opportunity to say no to almost everything, and do so because their time is so valuable.

I think what he means is that people who are already really successful have so many options they get to pick only the best ones.

It should be noted that this is from 2018 (not saying it's less relevant, but adding it to the title seems important)

This assumes you already have a lot of people coming to you with attractive opportunities you can say no to.

Sure like "Intel" and "IBM" would be a good place to start :)

Just sent this to my wife. She's gonna love this.

Well, you can name me the most successful person then.

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i'm not getting distracted by this discussion.

Listening to Warren Buffet is as useful as playing the lottery.

Advice from rich people is useful for other rich people.

Author: Hi Mr Buffett, I'd like to speak to you about what you think most successful people do.

Warren: No. <Hangs up>

Author: Oh, crap. I need to pay some rent. <Writes "Warren Buffett says the most successful people say no to almost everything">

Instead of saying no directly we can use Japanese trick aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys

Warren Buffet happens to have made a lot of money, but is also unhealthy, unimaginative and quite limited in his understanding of the world.

Why does his advice matter?

No they do not

“Get out of bed!”

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Well, I'm choosing to say no to try being that successful. Cause I don't want to say no to a million things and find out that I'm not cut for being Steve Jobs in the first place.