Learn to say NO and you will be better off

Aaron Chen
3 min readJan 6, 2021

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Image credit: Isaiah Rustad from unsplash.com

In life and business, we come across lots of temptation. Oftentimes saying NO is harder than saying YES.

You are trying to lose weight, but your husband or wife just bought some chocolate bar which is your favourite snack. Your have to bear the temptation.

You are trying out your “early bed, early raise” plan but you couldn’t fall asleep on time due to your biological clock. When the alarm rings, you are tempted not to get out of bed by you giving yourself a good excuse — “I am suffering sleep deprivation and need to recover.

You have purchased some off the plan property as an investment. The real estate market is going hot so you can’t help but look at some more properties. You want to say YES and buy another property, but you have forgotten your affordability and the market situation which is almost reaching its peak and it will start to cool down soon.

Greed is the biggest enemy in investment. A good investor always knows when to sell and when not to buy.

In the company, your are trying to focus and be productive. But your colleague comes to you and asks you for help. The job is supposed to be done by the admin. Your colleague comes to you because he doesn’t have a good relationship with the admin. To make this colleague happy, you say YES once. And then he keeps coming back to you, which interrupts you and stops you from completing your own task on time.

You are doing a marketing job. You have to look after different departments that sell more than 100 products. If you say YES and try to promote all the departments and products, your effort would generate less results which your work would become mediocre.

Marketing is not about market to everybody. Marketing is about finding certain groups of people in that niche and tell a story that resonates with them enough so they think your products or services are worth more than what they will be paying.

Focus on marketing the most demanding and profitable products, your job will be easier.

You want to say YES to your big customers who asked you to change your basic product merely for them. To keep bringing in new customers, you need to stick with your basic products because they are the perfect fit for the software. You can always customise your basic products for your customers and charge them extra. The real customers will say YES to the extra cost while others will go for the standard ones because the extra cost outweighs the cost they will have to pay elsewhere

Thinking clearly is the key.

What is the consequence of saying YES or saying NO? Ask yourself these questions:

Do I really need this?

What is the most important thing to do right now?

Do I have to do it now or it can wait?

Learn to say NO and you will be better off.

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Aaron Chen
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Digital Marketer, SEOer, Inbound & Content Marketer, Go-getter, Bootstrappe, Blogger at TheDecisionsProject.com