THE 5 BULLET POINTS:
- It is impossible to make everyone happy, which is why your happiness comes first
- Your NO’s can be much more powerful to YOU than your YESES
- If you are actively pursuing other people’s goals and desires for yourself, you aren’t pursuing yours
- Each of us needs space and energy to hear our calling and attend to it
- Nice people don’t finish last, they don’t finish at all
In Jim Carey’s movie, “Yes Man,” Carey’s character finds himself in an unfulfilling boring life rife with disappointment and a sense of never really having lived. He makes a choice to start saying “yes” to everything that comes his way, and in comedic fashion a hollywood movie is made. If you’re suffering from a complete lack of agency in your life and you really need to turn shit around fast, this might be an amassable tactic, but more than likely your yeses are exactly what’s holding you back from breaking through to your next level of achievement.
Let’s crack the egg on this a get ourselves a little breakfast going.
Our minds don’t really work from a place of no. When we say to ourselves, “I want to lose weight, so I am going to start exercising like I promised myself.” Our brains don’t kick in and thwart our advancement with a list of no’s, although thats what it may feel like. Our brains, in their finite evolutionary wisdom create a series of obstacles or semi meaningful task for us to say yes to, and it’s precisely these pointless, sidetracking yeses that get us into the garage organizing records and not at the gym sweating our asses off and dropping the holiday lbs.
Becoming a yes-person is also about the best way to dilute your real personality, and thus your real personal power forever making sure that you’re not taking care of your number one team player, YOU! Just like the over used idiom about oxygen masks on airplanes, if you’re busy saying yes to everyone else’s demands and needs, how can you possibly be focused on bettering yourself? BINGO! Self-sabotage in full effect.
Men don’t like placating women, women don’t like placating men, and every non-binary gender mode in between are disgusted by people that lack backbone and direction. One of the most valuable things about YOU is that YOU have different wants and needs than others, and that’s exactly how diversity and positive tension is created.
Saying yes to every fleeting request is a great way to waste time, and I mean a really fucking great way to waste time. Imagine for a moment if you will, an experiment: What if we said yes to ourselves with exactly the same vigor and immediate response we say yes to our bosses, friends, family, and hell dogs, homeless people, anyone else? What if we wrote a note to our future selves and said, “Hey Craig, can you do me a favor and go bust your hump off in the gym tomorrow morning instead of hitting the snooze button for an hour and then surfing reddit?” Or maybe your letter sounds something like this, “Hey Margie, can you do me a favor and not go to Keith’s house at 3 am when he calls you drunk and wants easy sex?” There’s a lot of different places to take this and I’m sure you have your own special “arena” (we’ll call it) where your yeses act as anchors around your ankles, forever holding you in the same spot in the ocean of life.
The real crux here is that saying no is just as, if not significantly more important than saying yes. Saying no and meaning no and sticking to our no’s allow us the needed space and precious energy it requires to hear and heed our true direction in life. This is where we achieve real self growth. As fun as clubs, and bars, and birthday parties, and binge sessions of netflix are, nobody is building a better life there. Trust me on that one.