The Cost of Saying "YES"

Every opportunity does not deserve your attention. Every invitation does not deserve a yes, and every open door is not one you are supposed to walk through.

In this episode, I explore the hidden cost of saying yes and why being busy is not the same as moving forward. With roughly 28,000 days in an average lifetime, time is the one resource we cannot replace.

We protect our money and possessions, yet often give away hours of our lives without asking whether they are worth the cost.

This week, ask yourself:

• What am I chasing simply because it is in front of me?
• What am I giving time and energy to that does not deserve it?
• What matters deeply to me that I am not pursuing nearly hard enough?

You may not have a motivation or work ethic problem. You may have an allocation problem.

The answer is not always doing more. Sometimes progress begins when you finally decide what truly deserves to be pursued.

Greatness isn’t something you stumble into. It’s built every day.

Transcript

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One of the biggest mistakes I think we make is believing that everything in front of us deserves to be pursued. It doesn't. Every opportunity does not deserve your attention. Quite honestly, every prospect doesn't deserve your time. Right? And we think about relationships, we talk about that a lot. Every relationship does not deserve the same level of investment. One of the things I struggle with is that every invitation that I get doesn't deserve a yes. And you know, many of us look at doors when they open. That doesn't mean you're supposed to walk through it, right? This is something that I'm continuing to learn. The way I'm wired, I like opportunity, I like ideas, I love people, I like movement, and when something interesting gets in front of me, my brain naturally starts trying to figure out how we're gonna make it work, right? Can we do this? Right? Is this, could this become something? How are we gonna build it, man? Let's build it. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, right? Many of you probably think the same way until you realize that can I do this is probably not the most important question. I think the better question is, should I? Should I do this, right? Should I spend the time and the energy it's going to take? Should I pursue the opportunity? Should I keep chasing something simply because I already have so much time in it, right? Those questions are harder because somewhere along the way, we've been conditioned to believe that more is better. Think about it. More opportunity, more customers, more contacts, more meetings, more projects. I'm important, right? More activity, more people knowing our name. If our counter is packed and the phone never stops ringing, we convince ourselves that we must be accomplishing something. I know I've certainly have done that. I can have a day where my phone is ringing nonstop, my emails are coming in, the text coming in, I got meetings one after the other. Somebody needs a decision, somebody else needs five minutes of my time to turn to 25 minutes. Then at the end of the day, I'm exhausted. I've been moving all day. But sometimes I have to stop and ask myself, what did I actually move forward today, right? Because that's a different question. Being busy and moving forward are not the same thing. And I think a lot of people, maybe you are struggling with that right now. We have more access to information, more people, more opportunities, more distractions, and more noise than probably any generation has ever lived. Everything can get your attention. And quite honestly, everything wants it, right? Your phone, your inbox, social media, work, other people. And if you decide, if you do not decide what deserves your attention, I promise you somebody else will gladly decide for you. Many of you know I teach a concept called well hunting. And when it was originally a build was around business development, right, and relationships. But the more I work with it, I realize the principles go far beyond sales. Basic idea is this if you want to land something significant, you can't chase everything that swims by. You got to decide what is actually worth pursuing. You got to research it, understand it, you've got to make a plan, right? You invest in it, you're patient. And then when that opportunity presents itself, you act. You act. That's very different from just running around chasing whatever appears in front of you. But that's what a lot of us do, right? Somebody calls, we respond. A new opportunity pops up, we chase it. Somebody asks for a meeting, we put it on the calendar. Somebody has an idea, now we're thinking about it. Man, we can make this work. We keep adding and adding and adding until eventually we wake up and we realize we've created a life with things we never intentionally chose. They just accumulated. You can spend your entire life chasing small fish and then wonder why you never landed that well. And when I say well, I'm not talking about one person being more important than another. I'm talking about significance. What is significant to you? What deserves your best, your best energy? What deserves a disproportionate amount of your time? What relationships matter enough that they deserve to be protected? What are the things that 10 years from now you're gonna be glad that you spent your time pursuing? Those are your wells. And everybody's got it, everybody's wells different, right? Maybe for you it's your marriage or your health. You might be building a business or repairing a relationship. I don't know. For some of you, it's finally getting yourself financially healthy or becoming a better leader or a better parent. Maybe it's finally doing the thing you've talked about for the last 10 years. Whatever it is, if you say it matters, your life ought to show some evidence, and we've talked about evidence a lot, your life ought to show some evidence that it matters. Because here is where this becomes very real. Listen to me, I came across a number that made me stop for a minute. According to the CDC, the average life expectancy at birth for a man in the United States is about 76 and a half years. 76 and a half years. You know how many days that is? It's not even 28,000. It's roughly 27,900. For the sake of conversation, we'll call it 28,000. But think about that for a second. We tend to think about life in years, 70 years, 80 years, maybe even 90. And they feel like big numbers. But when you convert a life into days, approximately 28,000, that suddenly feels different. 28,000 mornings, 28,000 sunsets, 28,000 opportunities to wake up and decide what you're going to do with that day. Obviously, none of us know what our number actually is. Some people get fewer, some get a lot more. And so this is not a countdown clock. It's a way to put time in perspective. Because every single night, one of those days comes off the board, and you do not get it back. And that changes the way I think about time. A two-hour meeting is not just a two-hour meeting in a Saturday. Man, it's not just another Saturday. An evening sitting beside someone you love is just not another evening. And for me, a sunrise in a morning on the boat. It's just not another morning. They're pieces of the 28,000. And I think there is something fascinating about the way we treat time compared to everything else we own. We protect our money, our houses, we got insurance on our cars, we protect our possessions, you got alarms on your house. We worry about somebody wasting $50. But we will give somebody two hours of our life without ever asking why they need it. Think about it. Two hours of your life. You can't replace those. You can replace $50. You can make more money. I can replace the truck, the boats, you can rebuild a business. There's a lot of things in life that can be recovered. Today is not one of them. Today cannot be recovered. And yet look at some of the things we give days away to. We spend a day angry about something. It's not going to matter six months from now. We give months to drama, sometimes years to relationships that we know toxic. We know they're unhealthy. We spend hours scrolling through lives of people we don't even know. That doesn't make sense, does it? We sit through meetings that we probably didn't need to attend. We spend more enormous amounts of time worrying about what other people think of us, and then we say, I don't have enough time. Maybe the problem is not always that we need more time. Maybe the problem is that we have not become selective enough with the time we already have. And that's where the well hunting becomes more than a business idea. You have approximately 28,000 days. What deserves those days, right? What deserves an hour? What deserves a morning, a year, ten years? Those are serious questions because there's no such thing as a free yes. Think about it, every yes costs you something. If you say yes to one meeting, that hour is no longer available somewhere else. If you say yes to a project, you just said no to whatever else you could have done with that time. If you spend a Saturday doing one thing, you can't spend that same Saturday doing something else. Ladies and gentlemen, every yes carries a hidden no. We just rarely think about it that way. That's why I'm trying to become better at asking myself, does this deserve a piece of my 28,000? Does this problem deserve the amount of energy I'm giving it? Does this person deserve this much of my time? Does this opportunity deserve this much attention? How about the arguments, man? Sometimes, does this argument deserve tonight? The questions create a level of clarity. And quite honestly, I told you a thousand times that clarity matters because without clarity, everything looks important. Every phone call feels urgent, every invitation feels like an opportunity, every single little meeting feels necessary. Every new idea feels like something we got to investigate. But once you know what matters, you've got a filter. Does this move me towards where I said I want to go? That is a powerful question. It works relationships too. Most of us know hundreds, maybe even thousands of people between work, phones, social media customers, old coworkers, neighbors, friends. I can tell you the marina, the gun call. I know a lot of people. We have enormous networks, but a network is not the same thing as a relationship. Having someone's phone number is not a relationship. Following someone online is not a relationship. Knowing their name is not a relationship. Relationships, real relationships, require something. They require time, trust, consistency, showing up, shared experiences. And because they require those things, you cannot deeply invest in everybody. Now that doesn't make you cold, it makes you realistic. There are people in your life who deserve more of you. Ask yourself, who are they? Who are the people you absolutely do not want to look up five years from now and realize you lost? Who makes you better? Who has stood beside you when there was nothing in it for them? Who do you keep saying you need to call? Because those are wells too. Not because of what they can do for you, but because of the value, really what those relationships mean, right? And if they matter, treat them like they matter. We spend so much time networking that we forget to nurture. There's a huge difference because networking asks, who else can I meet? A relationship asks, who deserves more of me? It's a completely different question. Let's go back to business. Not every customer is a customer. Not every opportunity is a good opportunity, and not every piece of revenue is good revenue. Not every partnership is the right partnership. Ladies and gentlemen, not everybody that wants access to your time deserves access to it. That sounds mean, but it's being honest because saying no is one of the healthiest and most profitable decisions you can make. And that is difficult for driven people. It can feel like you're walking away from opportunity and slowing down. It can feel like somebody else could be going to get something that could have been yours. But here's the other possibility. Maybe while you're busy chasing ten things that really do not matter, the thing that does matter is passing right in front of you and you do not even see it. That's the danger of being constantly busy. You can become so consumed with opportunity that you lose your ability to identify significance. Opportunity asks, could I? Significance asks, should I? And I think that question, the should I question, becomes more important the more clearly you understand the value of a day. 28,000. That number still rolls in my head, right? Because when you think about your life that way, a day does not feel disposable anymore. Tuesday matters, right? Saturday matters. To drive home matters. Maybe a phone call with an old friend. That matters. For me, being on the boat, watching the sunrise matters. The hour you spend working on something important matters, but so does the hour you throw away. And I'm not suggesting that we should optimize every second of our lives. My God, that sounds miserable because rest matters. I talk about rest and reflect. Doing absolutely nothing sometimes matters. For me, going fishing matters. Laughing with somebody matters. The point is, not every minute needs to be productive, but it should be intentional. There's a big difference between choosing to spend an afternoon doing nothing because you needed it and losing an afternoon to something you never chose. That's what I want you to think about this week. I want you to look at your calendar, your relationships, and your goals and see exactly where your energy is going. And then I want you to ask yourself three questions. What am I chasing simply because it is in front of me? What am I chasing simply because it is in front of me? Be honest with yourself. When you answer that, ask yourself, what am I giving time and energy to that really does not deserve it? What am I giving time and energy to that really does not deserve it? Then what matters deeply to me that I'm not pursuing nearly hard enough? What matters deeply to you that you are not pursuing nearly hardly enough? Sit with us a while. Because you may discover that you you don't have a motivation problem. You probably don't have a work ethic problem. But you may have an allocation problem. You're spending good effort just in the wrong places. And if that is the problem, working harder is definitely not going to fix it. You just become more exhausted because you're chasing the wrong things. Maybe progress is not about adding something else. The progress may come by removing something, saying no, walking away, protecting your calendar. Maybe investing more deeply in fewer relationships. You have roughly 28,000 days. Maybe more, maybe fewer. You don't know the number. Neither do I. The question shouldn't be how much can I fit into my life? I think the better question for you is and me is what deserves a piece of it? Stop chasing everybody. Stop chasing everything. Decide what matters. Research it, understand it, invest in it, protect it. And when you find something that truly deserves your time and your energy, your relationships in a piece of your 28,000 days, go after it. Again, the answer is not doing more. I think it's finally deciding what deserves to be pursued. I tell you every week that I believe that there's greatness inside of you because I believe there's greatness inside of you. I think it's hard for us to find that greatness when we don't slow down and realize that we are doing this right. We're chasing everything in everybody. And this week, remember the cost of yes.