Hey — It’s Toffer.
This time, I didn’t go to the future. I went to Earth-9.
Estimated read time: 5 minutes
‘No’ is the norm on Earth-9. Those who say ‘yes’ are either uneducated or homeless.
Unlike on Earth-1, our home world, ‘yes’ seems to be the norm. This is likely because the average person on our world perceives a false binary: either you’re someone who basically says ‘yes’ or you’re disagreeable and say ‘no’. Given only those two choices, no wonder nobody wants to be the disagreeable person — it’s stressful and emotionally taxing.
But in reality, most people in our world actually say ‘no’ a lot. Consider the busiest people you know. It’s highly unlikely that the volume of tasks they’ve said ‘yes’ to exactly matches their busy workday. Almost certainly, they receive many more requests than they can accommodate and they need to implicitly or explicitly say ‘no’. We don't realize it, but most of us are already saying ‘no’. We just do it haphazardly.
The brilliance of Earth-9 is they formally say ‘no’ — they have a plan, intention, and vision for what they’re trying to accomplish. They don’t wait until their stress level is high enough before feeling emotionally justified in turning someone down, and they don’t wait to be overwhelmed to justify saying ‘no’. They understand that without being intentional about filtering what they do and don’t do, they’d end up in a default productivity purgatory — just bearable but uncomfortable — ironically, a comfort zone in our world.
Adopting a default ‘no’ stance means being more specific about what constitutes a reasonable load, and being more intentional about which tasks to take on.
Here are questions that guide them to evaluate opportunities before saying ‘yes’:
Does this opportunity fit my vision and identity?
Does it spark joy?
Do I have time to do a good job without sacrificing existing commitments?
Does the opportunity leave space for my personal life?
Am I uniquely qualified to fill this need?
Earth-9 is an advanced world whose inhabitants likely said ‘yes’ frequently in their earlier stages of civilization. But as opportunities became abundant, they needed a mindset shift from gathering to pruning. By saying ‘no’ they preserved their energy and creative capacity to do a better job on things they chose to devote their time to.
Constraint is a challenge, but is it impossible?
Your Friend in Time,
Toffer