Say N.O.

My friends and I have once challenged one smoker friend to stop smoking for a month. He was struggling, stumbling, and battling with his urge to smoke as aches were dwelling in his head day on and day out until the end of that month. As I was chatting with him, he told me about and incident that happened to him as he was taking a taxi and its driver, for some reason, was insisting on giving him a cigarette. He remembered our little challenge and bluntly refused to take cigarette. Only then, he told me, he felt like he finally quit smoking. 

I have always been, just like the majority, a yes-man. People choose this kind of attitude maybe because they hate to turn people down, or maybe because they are not courageous enough to say N.O. But personally, I had a different reason; I was afraid of missing any opportunity that my future self would regret not taking. Because, you know, regret is painful. Who wants to be fifty, or sixty, sitting in couch wondering how his life would have been changed if he has only taken few different discussion. So, for a quite long time, I kept saying yes to every opportunity I encountered. However, recently I had a mind-blowing thought that my future self may also regret being unfocused and unauthentic to myself. Just think about it for a while! Maybe saying to much YESs have blinded me from seeing and seeking my true authentic self. This tiny thought have turned my difficult answer into NO, and believe me, my friend, I have never felt as authentic or as powerful until I kept saying so for any destruction that didn’t aligned with who I felt is me at that moment.

Saying no is hard, but like anything it gets easy be time. So I challenge you, my dear reader, to say No as much as possible to every spam and scam that shows in you way. As Steve Jobs once said: “It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”