This is Your Reminder to Say ‘NO’

They cost me a lot of money.

It’s a pretty weird thing to collect.

But they help me every single day.

They are a bunch of historical documents of minor historical significance — it’s probably a stretch to call them artifacts — that remind me to do one of the most important but most difficult things in the world. A thing that most of us are not very good at.

As it happens, they come from the office of President Harry S. Truman.

You see, shortly after he became president, Truman was invited to the fifth annual Roosevelt Day in Chicago.

His secretary wrote an inner-office memo to ask if they should start saying no to these sorts of requests with all the demands he had on his schedule.

“The proper answer underlined, HST”, he wrote back.

It’s this last document that I have framed and hung in my office next to two pictures of my kids. It’s the idea that the proper response is to say no because everything we say yes to is, in fact, saying no to something else. No one can be in two places at once. No one can give all their focus to more than one thing. But the power of this reality can also work for you: Every no can also be a yes, a yes to what really matters. To rebuff one opportunity means to cultivate another.

I have some other mementos from Truman’s correspondence, too. One comes from 1969 when Truman was 85 years old, still working, and world famous. Sensing his time is limited, he’s explaining his long-standing policy to not answer questions from every random person who contacts him.

My editor gifted me this memento as a reminder to stay on task. Writing demands that we be a little selfish, it requires that we tune out and tune in…