I find I give up my social life to work long hours as a people pleaser. Also I end up doing the low visibility low reward tasks that no one else wants. Just to be a team player. Then appear as a low performer compared to the guy that refuses to do anything that doesn't praise.
If he/she doesn't help you, the best thing is to switch teams (start talking with other people who you helped outside your own team). If that's not possible, start interviewing with other companies without mentioning it to your current colleagues.
I have a friend who was doing the same thing as you, went to another team inside the same company, and actually the same kind of thinking that you have (helping other people) helped him get multiple promotions, and he's a team leader with a nice salary, and his team loves him.
Also one more thing: he was using an old language, that's why he was afraid of switching teams. I suggested him to learn any modern language used inside his company to have leverage to be able to switch company if he wants...he just needed to get a bit outside his comfort zone, after that everything came for him (he's still with the same company, but he's happy now).
This is mostly about saying no to yourself, not to others.
The most difficult part of dedicating all your efforts to one objective is to accept that you are giving up on all the other things you might achieve.
Worse, you need to accept that most people that did that and pursued one single thing were not successful and they simply sacrificed everything else.
The few that succeeded are the ones we know about. We think they chose the right strategy in life, while the truth is that they took the wrong strategy and were very simply lucky.
Taking advice from those people is lime taking advice from wingsuit flyers: not something that smart people should do.
The important thing to keep in mind here is that Buffett is talking about "saying no to almost everything" when you are already successful. Not when you're actually still in the process of becoming successful.
The rules are different there, although of course Jobs' quote about focus, I think, applies to both situations, to some extent.
He does not just "no", he know his time is finite. As long you have (free) time, then yes, you might say yes to something more. But as more you climb the ladder up, the more people come to you with all kind of things. And then even if you would like, there is not enought time and energy in a person to do everything for everybody. I guess, thats a reason why people burn out. Even when people work so hard, if you say yes to everything, there is no chance ever to finish your many many tasks. Learning to say "no" is very important.
Well, I'm choosing to say no to try being that successful. Cause I don't want to say no to a million things and find out that I'm not cut for being Steve Jobs in the first place.
"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything."
That's very different. This is a message that is useful to hear for extremely driven ambitious people who are already successful - that it's better to spend all the time you spend working on a few carefully chosen things. It should not be interpreted as advice for people who are not extremely driven to not do things. The baseline assumption is that you already spend a substantial amount of time working on potentially productive things.
That's part of it but I think it's more complicated than that. For instance I have heard b2b sales described as a diagnostic process. If you know exactly what you can deliver and it matches exactly what the customer needs you encourage them to say yes. It will likely go very well and then the relationship will grow over time. Otherwise you thank them for the opportunity and move on.
The same arguably applies to all business deals and doesn't have much to do with your current level of success. If you pursue the right opportunities you will do well. I know people who have struggled for years because they consistently went after the wrong opportunities. The difficult part of course is being able to tell the difference!
Interesting point about B2B as a diagnostic process. I reached a similar conclusion organically but didn’t have that language for it. Essentially, I’ve found that saying “based on your description of your challenge, the product I have today isn’t a good fit” buys you a ton of credibility for when you DO have a good solution available.
...and the article seems to directly contradict this point:
"Whether he meant saying no in the investment sense is not so important; what is important is that his advice, in whatever context, can apply to anyone arriving at the crossroads of daily decision-making."
Adding to your point, an underlying assumption is that you have excellent "deal flow," to so speak. If you are bombardment with great opportunities to invest your time, money or effort into then choosing selectively is optimal. If you are limited by enthusiasm, and/or availability of great opportunities (most of us are) then this is not optimal.
This reminds me of top athlete's advice, often totally wrong for the average person. A top athlete might say that avoiding overtraining, and focusing on recovery is the most important thing. To them, getting really good regular workouts in is a given. To the average person, maintaining discipline, enthusiasm and not quitting are by far more important.
There is a chance that Buffet could say "no" to a deal just because he felt it was rushed.
“I call investing the greatest business in the world,” he says, “because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There’s no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like, then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.”
I've found that with most things (not everything), rejecting artificial urgency is a good heuristic. Sure, there are exceptions when you really do have to act now, but most exploding deals aren't worth taking.
This is an important point. You can say no to everything but video games, marijuana, and junk food. You’re unlikely to be successful in life even though you’re extremely focused on just a few things.
What matters is saying yes to the right things and no to almost everything else. Perhaps then what it is that makes the most successful people of all is the judgment (or luck) to say yes to the right things and the fortitude (or stubbornness) to say no to everything else.
I spent 15 years thinking I had fortitude. Turns out I was just stubborn. Pretty much ruined my life.
"Winners never quit, and quitters never win. But people who don't win and don't quit are just stupid."
I landed on my feet. Others won't be so lucky. (Ironically, I was only able to be stubborn for so long because I had so much good fortune elsewhere. If I'd had less support, I'd have quit much earlier, and maybe it would all have turned out better.)
The moral of the story: it's better to be lucky than smart.
Same. Got a masters and doctorate out of stubbornness rather than real love of the subject. In many respects, wasted decade. At least I have better self-knowledge now, I guess.
There's a good argument that attaining that self-knowledge takes at least a decade under any circumstances -- and if you can do so while getting a masters and PhD on the side, you've wasted less than most. :)
This is probably good advice for founders of a tech company, but horrible advice for workers like me. I need fortitude to survive. I need to get up every day and believe I have what it takes to push through the work. Maybe I'm smart, maybe I'm lucky, but fortitude is what I tell myself I have to finish projects and get stuff done.
I think you might enjoy this blog post "intelligence is adaptability" [1]. It's not heavy of facts or references, but I like the inspiration. It also sounds a little like what you shared you learned as well.
You'll never know if your "no" answers were a false negative though. Rich people say no to a lot of things because they get a lot of opportunities and there's only so much time to spend.
If you have a lot less opportunities and far more time while starting near the bottom, a false negative can be a more significant miss for you.
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
This seems like a restatement of the explore and exploit cycle in evolution. You start off with very little, so you have nothing to lose by exploring every opportunity. Eventually, one or more of those opportunities pays off, and you become successful. Now the odds favor exploitation, since new opportunities are unlikely to be better than the profitable ones you've already discovered. You're better off leaning into those than you are to go off exploring again. Of course, this also means you could get stuck in a local maximum. But life is finite, and the chances of achieving a higher max are low.
How do you have the assumption chances of achieving a higher max are low? That seems arbitrary and like it'd be a coin flip as I don't know all the possible successes in the world and how they compare to mine.
If you make the assumption that the frequency of opportunities is inversely proportional to their potential (ie, the bigger the opportunity, the less frequent they are), then in the short term you're going to be better off expending your energies exploiting an existing opportunity rather than chasing a new one.
If the distribution of opportunities is fat-tailed enough, then given a long enough baseline I concede that continuing exploration might provide greater expected value. But in practice, most successful founders are in their mid-40s, and most businesses take years to grow to fruition. So I think Buffett's advice is good in the real world.
He also didn't claim it was advice, nor that there is any causal relation between saying no and becoming really successful. It could have just been an observation about everyday reality he's facing.
It's just the writer cherrypicking more or less fitting quotes to the opinion article they would have written anyway.
The submitter correctly rewrote the title, because the article's own is linkbait. (From the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
The submitted title was "Warren Buffett says the most successful people say no to almost everything", which seems reasonable to me. The word "most" conveys what you're saying—in an abbreviated form, but that's how titles work.
However, I've changed the title to the quote now. We often do that when the article is a quote.
Yes. I know a company which has done five acquisitions and a huge spinoff product, all of which failed. Meanwhile, the core moneymaking product is now a decade behind the competition.
Buffett's message is addressed to CEOs in that position.
This seems to be a vice of CEOs who focus on "deals" but are not good at operations.
Yah the this Article can be summed up by Barry Schwartz and a conversation I’ve heard on Joe Rogan from a psychologist and many others. “The richer or more renown you become, the more your opportunities increase, and the more you have to optimize the selection of opportunities to become more rich or renown.”
Internet comment sections hate nuance and critical thinking (yes, even HN, we just put lipstick on that pig by being polite and kicking out snarky comments) so it's not surprising they love rules of thumb (which are nearly the polar opposite of applying critical thinking and considering nuances).
Honestly I think this is entirely counter-productive for anyone that's not mega-rich.
If you're Warren Buffet, of course you'll have a thousand offers and propositions a day and you have to say no to most of them and find that one gem.
If you're regular Joe (and, yes, that most likely includes YOU reading this) you can't afford to shut down most opportunities or you'll never get anywhere.
I don’t think that’s true. Almost every project I’ve been on had most of its major problems due to folks’ inability to say no. Most of the people in my life who are overworked and hurried are that way because they can’t say no. The happiest people I know have great boundaries and say no all the time.
Anecdotal, but my experience has been that “no” is one of the most useful words in my vocabulary.
I think the sentiment really comes down to prioritizing before trying to execute within the resource constraints. This can apply to any level and I see low-tier employees shooting themselves in the foot from a productivity standpoint because they have an inability to prioritize their efforts effectively
I disagree. We all have many opportunities to say no.
You know how much time I spent working on projects that didn't go anywhere and were a complete waste of time and money? (not mine, my employer's). I didn't say no. My manager didn't say no. Their manager didn't say no. You may say that's part of being successful, many things fail but a few stick and make it big. That's true but often the writing is on the wall but people ignore it.
One thing I do agree is that not everyone can say no. For example, if you're a software engineer in a big company, you might not have much say. That's why it's important to get yourself into a position where you have more control on the things you work on. Not easy but you don't need to be Buffet to achieve that.
> If you're regular Joe (and, yes, that most likely includes YOU reading this) you can't afford to shut down most opportunities or you'll never get anywhere.
Anyone with software development skills gets tons of low quality app ideas from friends and family. And tons of other opportunities from recruiters paying below market.
It's hard walking away from a sort-of-ok opportunity when you don't have anything going on, but I've learned there are always more things coming up.
In general I think it's a bad idea to take advice from successful people. There's a thing that goes around, a piece by Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes[1], talking about how great it was to quit his safe job and become a cartoonist. Except... how many famous cartoonists are there?
How many other people quit their advertising job and just failed? If each of their stories were circulated as much, would we see this swamped by a thousand heartbreaking memes instead?
Doing what Warren Buffett does works very well for Warren Buffett. The odds are good that it won't work for you. "Choose the right things" is pretty vacuous advice.
Sometimes, yeah. Comedy is one such example: it gives huge rewards to a few celebrities, while a lot of other equally talented people just never manage to be in the right place at the right time.
It's perhaps especially true for comedy. You can see it when you watch a comic on TV: they're much less funny than in person, because you're not surrounded by a lot of other laughing people. The same routine by the same person can get little more than snickers when done at somebody's open mic night -- unless somebody recognizes that they're famous. Celebrity reinforces itself.
Burnham is very talented and I'm sure he worked like crazy to market his work. But he will also tell you the names of a hundred others who are equally talented and worked equally hard, but you've never heard of them. The market for celebrity is very fickle, heaping huge rewards on a few, but drop off rapidly for people who aren't in the hump of the long tail.
Warren Buffett isn't profiting from celebrity in the same sense, but there's a similar effect where the biggest winners are lucky as well as smart. Their advice often doesn't take that into account, and it's important to measure that in your appetite for risk.
I think those are good points. I don't know much about comedy or entertainment but I get the same feeling that getting "chosen" matters more than your content.
On the other hand, great work doesn't happen by accident.
Great businesses are a result of good management. Good products are results of good design.
Those don't happen by accident, just like a great program doesn't write itself.
You may not be a warren buffet, due to limited opportunities. But, you could leave someone like that penniless and nameless and i'm sure he could leverage his skills and knowledge to be "successful", even if not a mega-billionaire.
Marketing and sales is an important component which is left out (if you care about making money). That's also something you can deliberately work on and improve.
Absolutely. Talent, luck, and hard work. All 3 are required to strike it big. I've known extremely talented and hard working people who did well, but never got to the super star level.
It’s really not practically helpful unless you have full data.
I have no idea the rate of job quitters to successful cartoonists.
Or the rate of successful cartoonists who kept their job (Adams).
I still like to read this insight, but trying to make some axiom or judgement out of it is only useful for demonstrating that I’m not very smart for saying such a thing.
Bill Watterson didn’t just quit on a whim. He had been making cartoons for years and had received feedback that he was at least half decent at it. And at the time that he quit, “newspaper cartoonish” was an actual career too.
He wasn’t saying “bet it all and jump off a cliff and hope you’ll land”. He just said “feel free to stake your own path”. The quote you link also includes staking your own path as a homemaker.
The central takeaway from his advice was to try to find meaning and happiness in what you do. It worked out extraordinarily well for Watterson but his advice applies to far more pedestrian cases too.
A picture of Warren Buffet is a "dog whistle" you see on Yahoo Finance and other web sites aimed at people of a "certain age". It's like the hypnotic induction (to make you connect to your identity as a consumer) that starts with talking about "our smartphones".
For a long time I would wind up seeing Becky Quick interview Buffet a few times a year on CNBC, it got cringeworthy when his dementia got worse and he started to leer at her. (Becky Quick is a "babe") Once upon a time he was a genius investor, but he's not what he used to be and they don't have a successor in the works.
For me, I deleted my LinkedIn account recently because it had brought a remarkable number of time-wasters into my life.
Between billboards, internet ads, radio commercials, spam, and telemarketing calls, I don't get a thousand offers a day, but I might get a hundred. Of course, it's easier to say no to most of those, since they're not actually things I want. They're just garbage offers.
But even of the ones I want... There are many places offering to sell me lunch today, and there are several places where I'd be interested in eating lunch. I can only eat one lunch today, though.
So I think we have the same thing, just with much smaller offers.
I have a very, very different definition of success than Warren Buffett does.
I say yes to as much as I can, and my life has been extremely fun and interesting as a result. If I could do it again, I'd say yes more and I'd say yes faster.
I've done the opposite with an equally rewarding outcome. I used to say yes to so much just because of FOMO and social pressure. I then realized I actually didn't want to do any of that stuff and didn't have to. I'm finally happy and content with life.
This exchange highlights the uselessness of pithy one-liner self help remarks: they're interpreted according to what people have already experienced, and they're highly contextual.
The above two parent comments' anecdata suggest that for different people, saying Yes to almost everything, or saying No, can have the same result: to be more sastified with how life is going.
What's common between Yes and No is that they're both a deliberate act of choice, of having agency in deciding what happens.
For myself, saying No and sticking to my preferences have yielded great results. For example, I hate phones and insist on emails - it's impractical, I know, but by giving firm No's, people respect my communication preference at work and personal life.
On the other hand, there are some directions that I'd like to say more Yes to, to consciously open up possibilities.
I suppose it comes down to knowing when to say Yes and No, and to act on it.
This. “Agency,” also called “ownership of decisions,” is really what all this talk of “saying yes” and “saying no” is all about. The can even include ownership of the decision to “just go with the flow and do whatever in the moment,” but the intentionality of that decision is essential.
Agency and control over time and decisions is probably also the essence of the regular HN debate over working from home or working from an office. Both can be best depending on the person.
I totally agree with this. I have 3 kids, 2 jobs... But, I find that taking an "abundance view" towards time truly makes me happier. I have way more fun and do better work. I do rush and hurry for deadlines.. But I don't feel harried in my day to day.
I see way too many people limiting their own growth because they see themselves as focusing. I personally think playing around is critical — and that we have way more time than we think.
Related: why is it that we think we don't have time to work out, but almost always, whenever we do exercise, the efficiency of work skyrockets?
The truth is we just don’t want to exercise, and all the other things that we would rather do, including productive things that we really do need to do, therefore push the exercise to the side.
Even though we know in the abstract that exercise will make our time more effective, we let ourselves be persuaded that we don’t have time because we enjoy working out mentally more than working out physically.
I'm the complete opposite in this regard. I currently spend 2 hours a day training for boxing, spend time on weekends mountain biking and wish there was more time! At some point I'll be financial independent where I will be able to devote even more time.
With that being said, would it help people to view exercise as play time? If you go play basketball with a group of guys, are you exercising or playing? For me it doesn't matter, I'm going to be out there either way but for others would the mental shift make a difference?
finding a sport/activity that you enjoy is a great way to shift exercise from the work category to the fun category. I had some success on this front with indoor climbing pre-pandemic. unfortunately, my gym now has a ton of restrictions that make it much less convenient to use, so I'm afraid I haven't gone back yet.
I don't think sports can fully substitute for a deliberate workout regimen though. with the possible exception of swimming, I don't think there are any sports that really give a full-body workout.
As children we didn't focus on a full-body workout. Though most children, at least when I was growing in up in the 90s are in far better shape than most adults. Sure a 12 kid couldn't help move an oak dresser but they are better overall physical shape. If adults were just active playing sports, I'd suspect obesity and related health issues to decrease with mental health improving.
I know there are many here on HN that will loathe the idea of playing sports.
> If adults were just active playing sports, I'd suspect obesity and related health issues to decrease with mental health improving.
I don't disagree. whatever form it takes, some exercise is better than no exercise. there is some risk in developing certain muscle groups while neglecting others though. you can injure the weakest link doing something you simply wouldn't attempt if all your muscles were equally weak.
Deadlines stress me out and I dread impending failures, and I have a very broad definition of failure. I would definitely feel harried. Am I being limited by worries? Are you having some misses in targets here and there but you're trucking right along, or are you really good at meeting what sounds like many many targets?
I miss many targets and it's amazing how little it matters. The key is creating space to be truly passionate about something, that ends up protecting you and sustaining you
Same goes for meditation. People will say they don't have time to sit for ten minutes a day. The longer you sit, the more time you seem to have. A paradox.
I read Altered Traits at the behest of someone here. All I got of it was "I studied meditation for months to reduce my blood pressure, it didn't do anything, so I took some pills, and that was great, but you should meditate."
It seems that all evidence toward any purported positive effects of meditation is extremely speculative, other than "willpower gains" as preached by Kelly McGonigal. The thing is, those can come from focusing on something useful or cardio too.
I can recommend The Mind Illuminated by culadasa. He has a PHD in neuroscience and gives you a very comprehensive framework of how the mind works (with focus on attention) and what kind of improvements meditation brings.
I wish more people would understand that everything that devides us as humans leads to destruction. Everything that unites us leads to good things, which I call success.
Warren Buffett's definition of success is not purely money -- if you look into his life had cares much more about teaching and giving back (both with the giving pledge and one of the largest philanthropists of all time). He just happens to be good at and enjoy making money -- I don't think his advice is less relevant if you see the context behind it, but many just take it out of context.
For me, saying no much of the time has changed my life for the better.
I was constantly doing things I didn't want to do because I didn't know how to say no to friends and family, eventually becoming a little resentful at being dragged to too many events and having no time for myself, even though it was always my fault for saying yes too much.
That may be, but it may not be a causal difference.
Steve Jobs may have had to say no a lot, but that may be because he was presented with a lot of opportunities; opportunities that are less available to less successful people. I also imagine Steve Jobs didn't have a lot of time available.
And I've read his biography. He didn't strike me as a man that said no very much when he was younger.
> They say no to superficial networking events in which people swap business cards and never hear from one another. Why? Because successful people don't network. They build relationships.
I've felt for a long time that there is no such thing as "networking" as its own activity. You build a network by just having life experiences and interests- hobbies, clubs, other parents from school if you have kids, religion, volunteering, side projects, alumni associations, and of course people you've worked with in the past. These relationships need to have some sort of basis other than you wanting something like a job or opportunities.
You are proving out his point. He focuses on only a few things that work for him and is not paying attention to other stuff. When you say no to most things then you will by your own decisions have a very narrow view/experience of the world.
That is the decision. Do you want to be super successful in one thing or a more balanced life.
I think there is an inversion of cause and effect here. People can afford to say no because they're successful. Saying no is not why they're successful.
Poor people rarely get any opportunity at all so they're forced to say yes to every opportunity just to survive.
I own a business. If I was to do a full inventory, I would probably find I'm in the possession of tens of thousands of items. I'm currently in the situation where something breaks daily. It has forced me into being very picky. I no longer buy things, if I can avoid it. Every thing I buy has the potential of being a problem down the line that will require time and attention. Even disposing of broken things can be a big hassle. If I do buy something, brand new, I will take a close look at it and think about how it will fail. And try to reinforce those failure points.
Minimalism is definitely a valid strategy, at large scales.
Yes so true. The golden toilet in Trump's 5th bedroom, has no practical utility to him. He never even uses it. In fact, its a liability. It will likely fail and flood his mansion eventually.
If it serves a purpose, it is to be symbol of his wealth and power. Like a juggler, that juggles a sixth ball. To wow and impress.
There is a point where all possessions become a liability.
This is why I think rich people are sometimes caricatured as Scrooge McDucks. Every new possessions is a problem. So some overreact, and would rather just hold onto money to an extreme.
A local billionaire patches his rusty international bridge with wood beams.
Extremely rich people fascinate me, because their psychological faults, and inherent human pathology has the fuel to really flower.
Looks like you attach ground effect lights, pen holders and some form of computation. Wireless, always on, potentially waterproof with rite in the rain paper [1] (great notebooks btw)
This advice applies directly to software. Bring in more dependencies, bring in more custom tooling, and you're bringing in more maintenance burden. There will be bugs. Make sure you really need that shiny new framework.
Which is the opposite of what a lot of successful people do right - they take loads of risks. It feels as though when you take risks and put yourself out there you deserve the rewards (but I would say this isn't really true either). If you have millions of opportunities like Buffet does of course this statement makes a lot of sense.
I don't think applying Warren Buffet's aphorisms to life is a replicable strategy for success. Like most things making your own path is more important than even being successful in the terms that are important to Buffet or whoever really.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 1172 ms ] threadIf you are a people pleaser, probably not.
I'm more in the successful category, but it meant that I gave up having a social life. Most of us have to choose.
If he/she doesn't help you, the best thing is to switch teams (start talking with other people who you helped outside your own team). If that's not possible, start interviewing with other companies without mentioning it to your current colleagues.
I have a friend who was doing the same thing as you, went to another team inside the same company, and actually the same kind of thinking that you have (helping other people) helped him get multiple promotions, and he's a team leader with a nice salary, and his team loves him.
Also one more thing: he was using an old language, that's why he was afraid of switching teams. I suggested him to learn any modern language used inside his company to have leverage to be able to switch company if he wants...he just needed to get a bit outside his comfort zone, after that everything came for him (he's still with the same company, but he's happy now).
The most difficult part of dedicating all your efforts to one objective is to accept that you are giving up on all the other things you might achieve.
Worse, you need to accept that most people that did that and pursued one single thing were not successful and they simply sacrificed everything else.
The few that succeeded are the ones we know about. We think they chose the right strategy in life, while the truth is that they took the wrong strategy and were very simply lucky.
Taking advice from those people is lime taking advice from wingsuit flyers: not something that smart people should do.
The rules are different there, although of course Jobs' quote about focus, I think, applies to both situations, to some extent.
EDIT: Grammar.
"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything."
That's very different. This is a message that is useful to hear for extremely driven ambitious people who are already successful - that it's better to spend all the time you spend working on a few carefully chosen things. It should not be interpreted as advice for people who are not extremely driven to not do things. The baseline assumption is that you already spend a substantial amount of time working on potentially productive things.
The same arguably applies to all business deals and doesn't have much to do with your current level of success. If you pursue the right opportunities you will do well. I know people who have struggled for years because they consistently went after the wrong opportunities. The difficult part of course is being able to tell the difference!
"Whether he meant saying no in the investment sense is not so important; what is important is that his advice, in whatever context, can apply to anyone arriving at the crossroads of daily decision-making."
Adding to your point, an underlying assumption is that you have excellent "deal flow," to so speak. If you are bombardment with great opportunities to invest your time, money or effort into then choosing selectively is optimal. If you are limited by enthusiasm, and/or availability of great opportunities (most of us are) then this is not optimal.
This reminds me of top athlete's advice, often totally wrong for the average person. A top athlete might say that avoiding overtraining, and focusing on recovery is the most important thing. To them, getting really good regular workouts in is a given. To the average person, maintaining discipline, enthusiasm and not quitting are by far more important.
The average person who feels that deals are few and far between doesn't feel like they are in a position to say no.
“I call investing the greatest business in the world,” he says, “because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There’s no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like, then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.”
What matters is saying yes to the right things and no to almost everything else. Perhaps then what it is that makes the most successful people of all is the judgment (or luck) to say yes to the right things and the fortitude (or stubbornness) to say no to everything else.
"Winners never quit, and quitters never win. But people who don't win and don't quit are just stupid."
I landed on my feet. Others won't be so lucky. (Ironically, I was only able to be stubborn for so long because I had so much good fortune elsewhere. If I'd had less support, I'd have quit much earlier, and maybe it would all have turned out better.)
The moral of the story: it's better to be lucky than smart.
There's a good argument that attaining that self-knowledge takes at least a decade under any circumstances -- and if you can do so while getting a masters and PhD on the side, you've wasted less than most. :)
[1] http://www.actinginbalance.com/intelligence-is-adaptability/
If you have a lot less opportunities and far more time while starting near the bottom, a false negative can be a more significant miss for you.
This seems like a restatement of the explore and exploit cycle in evolution. You start off with very little, so you have nothing to lose by exploring every opportunity. Eventually, one or more of those opportunities pays off, and you become successful. Now the odds favor exploitation, since new opportunities are unlikely to be better than the profitable ones you've already discovered. You're better off leaning into those than you are to go off exploring again. Of course, this also means you could get stuck in a local maximum. But life is finite, and the chances of achieving a higher max are low.
If the distribution of opportunities is fat-tailed enough, then given a long enough baseline I concede that continuing exploration might provide greater expected value. But in practice, most successful founders are in their mid-40s, and most businesses take years to grow to fruition. So I think Buffett's advice is good in the real world.
It's just the writer cherrypicking more or less fitting quotes to the opinion article they would have written anyway.
Some have the luxury of choice. Some take what they can get.
The submitted title was "Warren Buffett says the most successful people say no to almost everything", which seems reasonable to me. The word "most" conveys what you're saying—in an abbreviated form, but that's how titles work.
However, I've changed the title to the quote now. We often do that when the article is a quote.
This seems to be a vice of CEOs who focus on "deals" but are not good at operations.
VCs like to brag about the "deals they missed" just to remind you that they were in the room where it happened, but then left the room.
Internet comment sections hate nuance and critical thinking (yes, even HN, we just put lipstick on that pig by being polite and kicking out snarky comments) so it's not surprising they love rules of thumb (which are nearly the polar opposite of applying critical thinking and considering nuances).
"say no to X"
"say yes to X"
"always do X"
"never do X"
Etc. etc. etc.
If you're Warren Buffet, of course you'll have a thousand offers and propositions a day and you have to say no to most of them and find that one gem.
If you're regular Joe (and, yes, that most likely includes YOU reading this) you can't afford to shut down most opportunities or you'll never get anywhere.
Anecdotal, but my experience has been that “no” is one of the most useful words in my vocabulary.
One thing I do agree is that not everyone can say no. For example, if you're a software engineer in a big company, you might not have much say. That's why it's important to get yourself into a position where you have more control on the things you work on. Not easy but you don't need to be Buffet to achieve that.
Anyone with software development skills gets tons of low quality app ideas from friends and family. And tons of other opportunities from recruiters paying below market.
It's hard walking away from a sort-of-ok opportunity when you don't have anything going on, but I've learned there are always more things coming up.
Doing what Warren Buffett does works very well for Warren Buffett. The odds are good that it won't work for you. "Choose the right things" is pretty vacuous advice.
[1] https://highexistence.com/images/view/illustrated-advice-fro...
It's perhaps especially true for comedy. You can see it when you watch a comic on TV: they're much less funny than in person, because you're not surrounded by a lot of other laughing people. The same routine by the same person can get little more than snickers when done at somebody's open mic night -- unless somebody recognizes that they're famous. Celebrity reinforces itself.
Burnham is very talented and I'm sure he worked like crazy to market his work. But he will also tell you the names of a hundred others who are equally talented and worked equally hard, but you've never heard of them. The market for celebrity is very fickle, heaping huge rewards on a few, but drop off rapidly for people who aren't in the hump of the long tail.
Warren Buffett isn't profiting from celebrity in the same sense, but there's a similar effect where the biggest winners are lucky as well as smart. Their advice often doesn't take that into account, and it's important to measure that in your appetite for risk.
On the other hand, great work doesn't happen by accident. Great businesses are a result of good management. Good products are results of good design. Those don't happen by accident, just like a great program doesn't write itself. You may not be a warren buffet, due to limited opportunities. But, you could leave someone like that penniless and nameless and i'm sure he could leverage his skills and knowledge to be "successful", even if not a mega-billionaire.
Marketing and sales is an important component which is left out (if you care about making money). That's also something you can deliberately work on and improve.
The lottery analogy is quite accurate, yes.
I have no idea the rate of job quitters to successful cartoonists.
Or the rate of successful cartoonists who kept their job (Adams).
I still like to read this insight, but trying to make some axiom or judgement out of it is only useful for demonstrating that I’m not very smart for saying such a thing.
This happens quite a bit.
He wasn’t saying “bet it all and jump off a cliff and hope you’ll land”. He just said “feel free to stake your own path”. The quote you link also includes staking your own path as a homemaker.
The central takeaway from his advice was to try to find meaning and happiness in what you do. It worked out extraordinarily well for Watterson but his advice applies to far more pedestrian cases too.
For a long time I would wind up seeing Becky Quick interview Buffet a few times a year on CNBC, it got cringeworthy when his dementia got worse and he started to leer at her. (Becky Quick is a "babe") Once upon a time he was a genius investor, but he's not what he used to be and they don't have a successor in the works.
For me, I deleted my LinkedIn account recently because it had brought a remarkable number of time-wasters into my life.
Source?
> don't have a successor in the works.
Source?
But even of the ones I want... There are many places offering to sell me lunch today, and there are several places where I'd be interested in eating lunch. I can only eat one lunch today, though.
So I think we have the same thing, just with much smaller offers.
I say yes to as much as I can, and my life has been extremely fun and interesting as a result. If I could do it again, I'd say yes more and I'd say yes faster.
What's common between Yes and No is that they're both a deliberate act of choice, of having agency in deciding what happens.
For myself, saying No and sticking to my preferences have yielded great results. For example, I hate phones and insist on emails - it's impractical, I know, but by giving firm No's, people respect my communication preference at work and personal life.
On the other hand, there are some directions that I'd like to say more Yes to, to consciously open up possibilities.
I suppose it comes down to knowing when to say Yes and No, and to act on it.
I see way too many people limiting their own growth because they see themselves as focusing. I personally think playing around is critical — and that we have way more time than we think.
Related: why is it that we think we don't have time to work out, but almost always, whenever we do exercise, the efficiency of work skyrockets?
Even though we know in the abstract that exercise will make our time more effective, we let ourselves be persuaded that we don’t have time because we enjoy working out mentally more than working out physically.
With that being said, would it help people to view exercise as play time? If you go play basketball with a group of guys, are you exercising or playing? For me it doesn't matter, I'm going to be out there either way but for others would the mental shift make a difference?
I'm pretty sedentary but playing beat saber for 1 hour is a lot more moving than I'm used to.
I don't think sports can fully substitute for a deliberate workout regimen though. with the possible exception of swimming, I don't think there are any sports that really give a full-body workout.
I know there are many here on HN that will loathe the idea of playing sports.
I don't disagree. whatever form it takes, some exercise is better than no exercise. there is some risk in developing certain muscle groups while neglecting others though. you can injure the weakest link doing something you simply wouldn't attempt if all your muscles were equally weak.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU
It seems that all evidence toward any purported positive effects of meditation is extremely speculative, other than "willpower gains" as preached by Kelly McGonigal. The thing is, those can come from focusing on something useful or cardio too.
Money as metric for success leads to destruction.
Someone who helps a stranger is successful.
I wish more people would understand that everything that devides us as humans leads to destruction. Everything that unites us leads to good things, which I call success.
I was constantly doing things I didn't want to do because I didn't know how to say no to friends and family, eventually becoming a little resentful at being dragged to too many events and having no time for myself, even though it was always my fault for saying yes too much.
You are saying "yes" to people, which I applaud.
You are not saying "yes" to non-people stuff.
Practice "yes and."
Warren: No. <Hangs up>
Author: Oh, crap. I need to pay some rent. <Writes "Warren Buffett says the most successful people say no to almost everything">
Really really successful people have handlers that say no to everything.
Steve Jobs may have had to say no a lot, but that may be because he was presented with a lot of opportunities; opportunities that are less available to less successful people. I also imagine Steve Jobs didn't have a lot of time available.
And I've read his biography. He didn't strike me as a man that said no very much when he was younger.
I've felt for a long time that there is no such thing as "networking" as its own activity. You build a network by just having life experiences and interests- hobbies, clubs, other parents from school if you have kids, religion, volunteering, side projects, alumni associations, and of course people you've worked with in the past. These relationships need to have some sort of basis other than you wanting something like a job or opportunities.
Really? other people have so many career goals? I’d be hard pressed to come up with more than 3 or maybe 5 tops. 25??
Why does his advice matter?
That is the decision. Do you want to be super successful in one thing or a more balanced life.
Poor people rarely get any opportunity at all so they're forced to say yes to every opportunity just to survive.
If it serves a purpose, it is to be symbol of his wealth and power. Like a juggler, that juggles a sixth ball. To wow and impress.
There is a point where all possessions become a liability.
This is why I think rich people are sometimes caricatured as Scrooge McDucks. Every new possessions is a problem. So some overreact, and would rather just hold onto money to an extreme.
A local billionaire patches his rusty international bridge with wood beams.
Extremely rich people fascinate me, because their psychological faults, and inherent human pathology has the fuel to really flower.
> it is to be symbol of his wealth
If this week’s papers are any guide, the symbolism has become more complex.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey
Looks like you attach ground effect lights, pen holders and some form of computation. Wireless, always on, potentially waterproof with rite in the rain paper [1] (great notebooks btw)
[1] https://www.riteintherain.com/printer-paper-20-pound
https://www.lotuscars.com/lotus-philosophy/
I don't think applying Warren Buffet's aphorisms to life is a replicable strategy for success. Like most things making your own path is more important than even being successful in the terms that are important to Buffet or whoever really.