Flexing Your "No Thanks" Muscle

(Thanks to Peter Bregman for reminding me to focus today on the things that matter!  I was going to waste some time shopping online for car insurance rates to try and save $10/month.  I now can mark through that task and move on to the real work that will earn me $10/month a hundred times over.)

"Would you like to save 10% on your purchase by signing up for a Bloomingdales' credit card?" asked the sales person who had helped me pick out several new suits. "It will only take a few minutes."

"Why not?" I thought to myself; the savings would amount to more than a hundred dollars.

Well, here's why not: an hour later, after speaking with the Bloomingdales credit department twice, we still hadn't finished. When, finally, I was approved, they hadn't extended enough credit for the entire purchase, so I had to split the cost between my new Bloomingdales' card and my regular credit card, which gave me more accounting to do as well as an additional bill to pay at the end of the month. Total cost to me? At least two hours of my time and a whole lot of aggravation and stress.

When you catch yourself thinking "why not?" consider it a warning sign. "Why not?" means it's probably not that important to you, but there's a reward and the cost seems small so, well, why not?

But if you say "why not?" to the Bloomingdales' card, you'll also say "why not?" when CVS offers you a free $10 gas gift card when you purchase $30 worth of select products. And when you realize that you need to be an ExtraRewards member to get the savings, you figure, well, "I've gone this far, I might as well sign up for that too," which, of course, takes more time and ushers in more offers, promotions, and distractions.

Then where do you stop? Every deal seems like a good deal. And any one of them probably won't take that much time. But if you take one deal, you'll probably take the others (why not?) and all together the time and attention it steals becomes a costly distraction from your one, most valuable possession — your focus.

The most important skill we possess in this world of infinite distractions is focus. Anything that distracts us — even saving a hundred dollars — is just mind clutter.

We need to clear out our mind clutter and place our attention where it matters most, which requires three steps:

1. Know your focus. This is critical and rarely done well. Knowing exactly where to place your attention is a challenge, especially given the barrage of nonstop offers, opportunities, requests, and needs that compete against each other.

2. Sustain your focus. Knowing where you want to place your attention is one thing. Actually placing and keeping it there day after day is another.

3. Protect your focus. Defending yourself from being distracted by mind clutter is a moment-by-moment discipline. You need to become a master at choosing when to say, "no thanks," even when it seems like there's no downside to saying, "why not?" Because there's almost always a downside.

In my upcoming book, 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, I explore ways to know, sustain, and protect our focus as we cut through the noise to get our most important priorities accomplished.

One thing we can do is recognize that we have a limited amount of space in our minds and each time we say "why not?" to something — or even consider saying "why not?" to something — it takes up room. If we learn to automatically say, "no thanks," to things that seem like a good deal, but don't fit into our main areas of focus, we'll simplify our lives and free our minds to focus.

How do we do that? By exercising our, "no thanks," muscle in the face of temptation. No thanks, I'll skip your rewards program. No thanks, I won't take that savings. No thanks, I'm not going to increase my order size in order to get free shipping.

Then we can practice with the bigger things. No thanks, I'm not going to join that committee. No thanks, I won't be able to make that dinner. No thanks, I won't take on that project.

Of course, the reason we're saying, "no thanks," is so that we can say, "yes please," to the right things. The reason I didn't join the committee is so I can focus on my book. The reason I passed on the dinner is so I can focus on my family. The reason I didn't take on that project is so I can focus on this other one instead.

"No thanks," paves the road for "yes please," and it simplifies your decisions and your life. It helps you do fewer unimportant things.

Over dinner with friends one night, we developed a No Thanks List, consisting of 27 examples when, in our opinion "no thanks" was the best response to eliminate distraction and help us maintain our focus. Feel free to add to the list on my website.

Recently, Bloomingdales sent me an additional 15% off coupon to use with my new Bloomingdales' credit card within a specified time frame. I was tempted. I actually thought, "Why not?"

But I know better. I threw out the coupon and called to cancel the card. When I spoke with the representative, she offered me an additional $25 coupon to keep the card. This time, I wasn't even tempted.

"No thanks," I said, and got back to my writing.

Peter Bregman is a strategic advisor to CEOs and their leadership teams. His latest book, 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, is available for pre-order and will be published in September.

Why Some People Have All the Luck

Anthony Tjan

Anthony Tjan is CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball. An entrepreneur, investor, and senior advisor, Tjan has become a recognized business builder.


Some business builders just seem to have more luck than others. In fact, many of the entrepreneurs and business builders I know say luck is a driving factor in their success.

But luck in business isn't entirely, well, luck. There's a popular saying that "you make your own luck." This "make your own luck" principle has become a central chapter of a book I am co-authoring for Harvard Business Review Press. Luck, alongside Heart, Smarts, and Guts — turns out to be a critical factor in entrepreneurial DNA and successful business-building.

Over the course of now hundreds of interviews, collaborations and interactions with entrepreneurs, my co-authors Richard Harrington and Tsun-yan Hsieh and I found that, while there are certain types of luck which you cannot affect (deterministic or probabilistic or elements such as where you were born, or which card you draw from a deck of 52), there is absolutely a lot of luck that you can meaningfully influence.

Arguably, most of "business luck" can be influenced — i.e. you can increase your propensity to be lucky in business if you understand how.

How? Being "luckier" in business is fundamentally about having the right LUCKY ATTITUDE. As it turns out, luck is as much about attitude as it is about probability.

We have found in our research that people who self-describe themselves as lucky in their entrepreneurial profile with us tend to be luckier because they have the right attitude. Their secret towards a lucky attitude — whether consciously or unconsciously- stems from three traits:

1. At the foundation of a lucky attitude is humility. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, helped identify humility as one of the key traits of the high performing leader. Having a lucky attitude begins with humility and open vulnerability towards your own limitations. You need enough self-confidence to command the respect of others, but that needs to be counter-balanced with knowing that there is much you simply don't know. Humility is the path towards earning respect while self-confidence is the path towards commanding it. But it is humility that humanizes leaders and allows them to be luckier. It is at the root of self-awareness, and creates the openness for one to take on our next lucky attitude trait — intellectual curiosity.

2. Intellectual curiosity is an active response to humility. Humility gives people the capacity to be intellectually curious. Conversely, people who are fully confident or arrogant are less likely to question their personal assumptions and outlook of the world. Business builders who are intellectually curious hold a voracious appetite to learn more about just about anything. They devour reading, listen to suggestions, and explore new ideas at a much higher rate than others. They are more frequently asking questions than trying to answer them. Ultimately they become luckier because they are more willing to meet new people, ask new questions, and go to new places.

3. Optimism is the energy source to allow for positive change. If humility is the foundation for intellectual curiosity, then an optimistic disposition gives one the belief and energy that more, better, faster is always possible. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: more luck tends to come to those who believe in possibility — to those who see the good in something before they see the bad. Optimists are givers of energy rather than takers of it. By having a positive disposition, such individuals are more likely to have a greater number of seemingly "surprise" encounters with good fortune. They are also more likely to act on what they find through their intellectually curious pursuits because they believe — always believe — in the potential for better.

The basic equation of developing the right lucky attitude therefore is quite simple. It starts with having the humility to be self- aware, followed by the intellectual curiosity to ask the right questions, and concluding with the belief and courage that something better is always possible (optimism). The luckiest people in the business world are those who hold all three elements of this lucky attitude equation of humility, intellectual curiosity, and optimism. They are the people who say to themselves: I am humble enough to say I don't know how to make better/perfect happen on my own; I am curious and courageous enough to ask questions that might help make something closer to perfect; and finally I embrace the "glass half-full" optimism that the end result can always be improved, so let me act towards that objective. That is the mindset of the lucky business builder. It is one that most people can have if they are just willing to believe.

Except from "Declaring Independence in the Workplace"

Thanks to Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer for this sage insight into management boundaries and balance!

To be truly intrinsically motivated and to gain a sense of achievement when they do make progress, people need to have some say in their own work. What's more, when employees have freedom in how to do the work, they are more creative. Two key aspects of autonomy are having the ability to make meaningful decisions in work and then feeling confident that — barring serious errors or dramatic shifts in conditions — those decisions will hold. If they often get overridden by management, people quickly lose the motivation to make any decision, which severely inhibits progress. Work gets delayed because people feel like they have to wait and "check in" before they can begin or change anything.

In our research across industries as diverse as consumer products, chemicals, and high tech, we found many knowledge workers whose extensive expertise went untapped and whose initial excitement about tackling challenging projects got deflated. Too often, the culprits were managers who believed that to do a good job, they had to direct the work — tell people exactly what to do and how to do it, making changes as they alone saw fit. These managers failed to realize three things:

1. Managers themselves almost never have the specific knowledge that well-trained, experienced professionals have about the work they are doing. Failing to draw on that knowledge is a lamentable waste of resources.
2. Professionals become demoralized, disgusted, and apathetic if they lack the autonomy to at least co-direct the work they are doing.
3. Organizations lose out in a big way if their professionals become disengaged. Even if those professionals don't decamp for greener pastures, they're not doing their best work.