The Tim Ferriss Show - #282: How to Say No

Episode Date: November 25, 2017

This is a special episode of the podcast. In writing Tribe of Mentors, I reached out to many people to be featured in the book. More than 130 people said yes -- but many others said no. This episode covers rejection, and -- more specifically -- how to reject other people and opportunities (even if they seem great). How you can you say no to seemingly burdensome "obligations," and say yes to the critical few opportunities. Understanding the difference -- and how to do it -- can make a significant impact on your life and your happiness. Enjoy!This podcast is brought to you by ConvertKit. This my go-to email service provider and the only email tool that has made email marketing intuitive for my team without sacrificing any of the features and benefits I need to run a profitable business. It’s got easy-to-use systems, split testing, resending technology, automation, targeted content, high rates of deliverability, integration with more than 35 services — like WordPress, Shopify, and Sumo — and excellent customer service.Whether you have a thousand subscribers or a million, whether you run a simple blog or a whole company, ConvertKit has a plan that’s scaled to fit your budget and requirements. Go to ConvertKit.com/Tim to try it out and get your first month for free! Test the platform, kick the tires, and make sure it works for you and your business.This podcast is also brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years, and I love audiobooks.All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is visit Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It’s that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and get started today.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen a perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Me, Tim, Paris, show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

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I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet

Friday subscribers. So check it out. Tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. if the spirit moves you. Hello my lovelies, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tribe of Mentors podcast which is likely also being cross-post on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast. This episode is going to cover rejection or specifically, rejecting other people saying no. Many of the questions that I get are about how to parse the noise from the signal, how to separate out the trivial many, say no to obligations and fear of missing out, so you can say yes to the critical

few. This is an ongoing challenge for a lot of people. And the tools and strategies and tactics that help can almost overnight make an enormous impact in different areas of your life. And you have various guidelines that guests I've interviewed, for instance, in the Tim Ferriss show have shared, such as Derek Sivers, who is not only a very, very accomplished entrepreneur who built and sold CD Baby, also a musician and philosopher king of programming in some respects, would use the hell yes or no heuristic. In other words, if he doesn't say or can't say hell yes, I want to do that to something, the answer is a no. It is binary. And there are many, many other guidelines like that that you might use. But when the rubber hits the road, which ended up including 130 of the most incredible world-class performers from around the world

in every discipline imaginable. Many people I reached out to said, no, I was rejected. I was declined. I was mostly polite declined. And it turned out that some of those rejection letters were so good, they were so expertly crafted that I turned right around and I asked the people who rejected me if I could include their letters in Tribe of Mentors, the book itself. So I thought what might be fun is to read, not just fun, but practical, the three rejection letters that come to mind right off the bat and these are in little side featurettes i suppose called how to say no in tribe of mentors which you should check out please i don't uh sell much podcast and uh the blog posts all 700 plus of them are for free but tribe of mentors.mentors.com, thanks. Okay, back to our regularly

scheduled programming. So the first rejection letter is from Wendy McNaughton. Very, very impressive gal. McNaughton is spelled M-A-C-N-A-U-G-H-T-O-N. You can say hello to her on Twitter and Instagram at Wendy Mac.

M-A-C. Or or you can see her work and life, and much more at WendyMcNaughton.com. Alright, here is Wendy. Wendy McNaughton is a New York Times best-selling illustrator and graphic journalist based in San Francisco. Her books include many, many, many, many, many books. I will just read a few of them. First, Meanwhile in San Francisco, comma, the city in its own words, Lost Cat, a true love story, desperation and GPS technology, pen and ink, subtitled tattoos and the stories behind them. And we go on and on and on. She's

really prolific. Two, the newly released Leave Me Alone with the Recipes. Wendy is also the back page columnist for California Sunday Magazine and co-founder of Women Who Draw. Now, some of you who have been tracking perhaps not just this podcast, but some of the writing, will notice that one of the questions I like to ask oftentimes is some variation of the following. In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to, such as distractions, invitations, and so on? What new realizations and or approaches have helped? You may note that what's fantastic about this question is that it's hard to avoid answering. This is true even if, actually especially if,

someone refuses to answer. So when I asked Wendy if she'd participate in this book, she sent a very thoughtful and perfect, I have to pass response after much consideration. That was, in fact, an answer to the question in a sense. I loved it so much that I said, here's perhaps a very odd question. Might you be okay with me printing this very polite decline email in the book? To which she agreed. So here is the email she sent me to decline being in Tribe of Mentors, which ended up in Tribe of Mentors. And now on the podcast, just do double duty.

So here we go. And this is very, very, very Wendy. So you don't have to sacrifice your personality or be coldly impersonal to say no. And a lot of this can serve as a template and help you to determine how you can establish, perhaps, set language for declining. Here we go. Hi, Tim. Gah, okay.

I've been battling with this, and here's the deal. After five intense years of creative output and promotion, interviews about personal journeys and where ideas come from, after years of wrapping up one project one day and jumping right into promoting another the next, dot, dot, dot, I'm taking a step back. I recently maxed out pretty hard, and for the benefit of my work, I got to take a break. Over the past month, I've canceled contracts

and said no to new projects and interviews. I've started creating more space to explore and doodle again, to sit and do nothing, to wander and waste a day. And for the first time in five years, I'm finally in a place where there's no due date tied to every drawing, no deadline for ideas, and it feels really right. So while I really want to do this with you, I respect you and your work, and I'm honored that you'd asked me to participate. And as capital S stupid as it is for me professionally not to do it, I'm going to have to say thank you, but dot dot dot,

I gotta pass. I'm simply not in a place to talk about myself or my work right now. Crazy for a highly verbal only child to say. Hopefully, we will get a chance to talk somewhere down the line. I promise any thoughts I'll have for you then will be far more insightful than anything I could share with you right now. I hope the space created by my absence is filled

by one of the brilliant people I suggested in my previous email. Which, in fact, ended up being the case. This is Tim talking. Several of them are in Tribe of Mentors. And really, thank you so much for your interest. I'll be kicking myself when the book comes out. Wendy.

So that's number one. The next rejection letter has a different feel to it, but is nonetheless very, very effective. And it is from Danny Meyer. Who is Danny Meyer? Well, you can see him on Twitter at dhmeyer, m-e-y-e-r, or at ushgnyc.com. And you'll learn what that stands for just momentarily. Danny Meyer is the founder and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group. That's the USHG of the ushgnyc.com, which comprises some of New York's most beloved and acclaimed restaurants,

including Gramercy Tavern, The Modern, Maialino, and more. Danny and USHG founded Shake Shack, the modern-day roadside burger restaurant, which became a public company in 2015. Danny's book, Setting the Table, subtitled The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, a New York Times bestseller, articulates a set of

signature business and life principles that translate to a wide range of industries. Danny was included in the 2015 Time magazine 100 Most Influential People list. All right. So for your reading pleasure, or listening pleasure in this case, and to scratch your schadenfreude,

here's another polite decline email. This one from famed restaurateur Danny Meyer. Now, he sent this email to a friend of mine, Jeffrey, who asked on my behalf. So he was rejecting me, but using Jeffrey as a go-between, because Jeffrey, as a good friend to both of us, wanted to protect contact information on either side, until Danny said, yes, please connect us, would love to chat. That ended up not being the case.

So here is the email that Danny sent. And these are all published with permission. Jeffrey, comma, greetings and thanks for writing. I'm grateful for the invitation to participate in Tim's next book project, but I'm struggling at this moment to make time ends meet for all we're doing at USHG, including my ongoing procrastination with my own writing projects. I thought carefully about this. That's And there are different variations of that closing line. And you'll notice in both cases, it was in effect, I'm sure the book or I know the book will be a big success. I'll be kicking myself when it comes out. In this case, know the book will be a big success. I've heard other variations and received other variations, such as I'll be cheering from the sidelines. I wish I could

be part of it. And the sentiment in these is very important if you want to have the effect these people had on me, which is they decline, they refuse my invitation very politely, and I actually respect them and admire them more after the rejection than before. There is a craft to this, and you can borrow a lot of this language. All right, the last one that I'm going to read is from one of my favorite writers of all time, and he is a contemporary. I shouldn't say he's a contemporary of mine. That makes it seem like I'm in the same league, which I am certainly not, but he's an iconic science fiction writer. Neil Stevenson,

N-E-A-L, Stevenson, S-T-E-P-H-E-N-S-O-N, on Twitter, at Neil Stevenson. Facebook is TheNeilStevenson, and you can learn more about him at NeilStevenson.com. One of the most fascinating human beings I have ever encountered, and I've had the good fortune of meeting Neil then and again in Seattle through my friend Chris Young, scientist and incredible writer himself at Chef Steps and beyond. known for his speculative fiction works, variously categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, maximalism, and cyberpunk. His bestsellers include, among others, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, and Snow Crash, which was named one of Time Magazine's top 100 all-time best English language novels.

That's a hell of a thing. Neil also writes nonfiction articles about technology and publications such as wired magazine and has worked part-time as an advisor for blue origin a company developing a manned suborbital launch system and going off script here a little bit just to add color neil is one of those people who will reach out to astrophysicists and mechanical engineers and so on to interview them, dig into the details and textbooks related to, say, rocket design, just to get a few paragraphs in one of his books technically correct. To such an extent that then people who are on the cutting edge will go back to his book just to refer to what the future might hold. It's that good. And he does this in many, many, many, many, many different domains.

It's pretty mind-boggling. Okay, so by now you know what I'm about to read you. This is the type of email that makes me cry and smile at the same time. So herewith, a lovely hasta la proxima, until next time, from one of my idols, writer Neil Stevenson. Here we go. Hey there, Tim. Sorry for the slow response and thanks for thinking of me in this context.

It has become pretty obvious of late that I'm trying to do too much. And so I started an experiment of not adding anything whatsoever to my to-do list so that it wouldn't get any longer. The result is that the items that were already on my to-do list only spawned more items as I crossed them off. And so it's a little like fighting a hydra. It's the most Neil thing to say ever. So it's a little like fighting a hydra. I am hoping that if I am ruthlessly efficient, I can one day get to the point where the list actually gets shorter instead of longer. In the meantime, unfortunately, the ruthlessly efficient part of this plan means that I'm turning down things like this just as a blanket policy. Again, thanks for thinking of me and good

luck with the project! Neil. All right. There are a few commonalities I want to highlight here and that I've certainly translated into my own language in a lot of the declines that I send out. And I have to, and you have to for that matter, if you've had any modicum of success, even a toehold in something that might be a success, your default answer to almost everything should be no. And this is a pattern that comes up over and over and over again in Tribe Mentors,

both in this podcast and also in the book itself. When I ask people, how do you say no? What are the tips, tactics, and strategies, and so on? There are a few commonalities. Number one is explaining the predicament that you are in. And you don't have to go long with it, but simply saying, my own to-do list in this case is spawning more and more items and getting longer instead of shorter.

And there you have it. You can keep it short and to the point. But in a sense, you're explaining the context. And then the second word that I'd like to highlight in Neil's is policy. So it's not personal. It's not that I'm saying no to your idea. It's not that I think you're a terrible person. But in fact, I am, as I've been turned down before by, in one case, a billionaire investor who I actually met before. He said, I would love to meet, but unfortunately, I'm following a no meeting policy for the next quarter. I'm not meeting with anyone as a policy, right? All right, so it makes it a

blanket response. And I know that I, along with many others, are getting rejected. Another way I've heard this phrased is, I'm going on an across the board, for, for instance, no-coffee diet or no-conference-call diet for the next month, for the next quarter, for the next year, whatever it might be. That is a rejection format that I received when I invited someone to speak at a conference, for instance. I'm going on a no-conference diet for the next year because last year I realized that I overcommitted so much. And by over calendaring, ultimately, the things that most excited me had no room to fit into my life, etc. Right? So those are a few examples of how to say no, in such a way that is perfectly clear. You're not saying ping me in three months, we'll see what happens. It's very clear that the answer

is no. But hopefully, if it's delivered delivered well that people will respect you more they might not like it they might be upset but they will respect you and then over time typically the wounds heal if there are any and they realize that you did exactly the right thing and then they may even borrow the language that you send them and i should should highlight also, this isn't a panacea. It's just a better tool. At the end of the day, you cannot control how people respond to the decisions you make, but as I think it's Herbert Swope, who is a Nobel Prize recipient, has said, there is no one path to success, but I can give you the recipe for failure,

and that is trying to please everyone all of the time. That's a paraphrase, but you get the point. All right, guys, thank you for listening to this short episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I certainly have found a way to enjoy getting rejection letters, which makes me happy.

And if you'd like to learn more about how to say no, dozens of different approaches, dozens of different techniques from people ranging from Dustin Moskowitz, co-founder of Facebook, to everybody imaginable, check out Tribe of Mentors, the book. There are 130 plus people profiled. I asked them all this question. And you can check it out at tribeofmentors.com or find it on bn.com, Amazon, any bookseller, anywhere. Bookstores all over the place. That is it for now. So until next time, thank you for listening.