“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
George Bernard Shaw
When I was 18 years old, my first ‘real’ job was selling photocopy machines. One of my early customers was an elderly bookstore owner. To this day I remember how interesting he was. He could converse intelligently on a broad range of topics.
Well, I wanted to be that interesting too, and so over the next decade I followed my curiosity far and wide. I said Yes to almost everything.
It’s an approach I greatly enjoyed, and it served me well.
And then I came across this quote by Warren Buffett …
“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
Warren Buffett
How do we choose when to say Yes or No?
The ‘Say Yes’ attitude is very much in vogue right now. It espouses the expansive, adventurous, abundance mindset that our society is in love with at the moment.
As artists, performers and entrepreneurs, we often want to follow our curiosity. We want to say Yes.
When I tell people that I’ve switched to a ‘Say No’ approach; no TV, no Newspapers, No Radio, No Travel, No to most new business opportunities, well, they’re understandably perplexed.
So how do we choose when to take the say Yes road, and when to take the say No road?
For this conversation I’m going to highlight two repeating journeys in life, namely the journey of a chosen purpose and the journey between chosen purposes.
I think that whether we should have a say ‘Yes’ approach or a say ‘No’ approach will vacillate depending on which of these journeys we’re currently on.
I believe that we can all pursue multiple consecutive or concurrent purposes.
(I wonder if these journeys of purpose are hierarchical, but I haven’t done the work to have an opinion on that, so I’ll cogitate on that idea some more and come back to it.)
I believe it’s also true that sometimes we feel like we lack purpose. I don’t personally subscribe to inherent meaning and purpose, I believe we choose our purpose, we choose something that’s meaningful to us.
To return to George Bernard Shaw again;
“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”
George Bernard Shaw
So I think that when we feel like we lack purpose, really what’s happening is that we haven’t currently chosen a purpose. We haven’t discovered a quest that we feel is mighty and worth embarking on, or our world view has changed, and we have reach the end of our previous journey, but have not yet discovered a new journey we believe is worth taking. In this case we are between purposes.
I think that when we are between purposes we should be divergent in our thoughts and actions. We should go broad, we should discover new things, we should say ‘Yes’ to almost everything.
After a while of following our curiosity in this divergent way we will eventually discover a cause that we believe is mighty, something that sounds fun and worthwhile and is aligned to our worldview, and we choose to pursue it for some extended period of time (usually these journeys will be many years since this is a purpose we believe is mighty). When we do then we are no longer journeying between purposes, we are now living a purpose journey.
I think that when we are on-purpose then our likelihood of realising ‘true joy’, as Shaw puts it, is improved by switching out our divergent (Say Yes) approach and instead converging on our chosen purpose. That means that our thoughts and actions should be going deep and narrow on purpose (double entendre intended). We should be saying ‘No’ to almost everything that is not on-purpose.
At the end of our chosen purpose journey (if we reach the end in our lifetime) we will then switch again to divergent thoughts and actions as we journey between purposes once more.
To summarise, when we are between purposes, say ‘Yes’ to almost everything. When we are on-purpose, say ‘No’ to almost everything.