Living Your Best Life Means Saying No — A Creative Journey
There is nothing more destructive to the creative impulse than embracing the cult of busyness.
It is noticeable how many people fill up their daily schedule with meaningless appointments and activities. Their unavailability becomes their badge of honour in terms of how busy they are and how they cannot get to important things because they are so busy.
I used to be like that!
I never had time. I was busy all the time. I was running from one scheduled encounter to another, always apologising for projects running late, explaining missed deadlines, scrapping over the most meaningless things in even less meaningful meetings.
My life consisted of working long hours and compensating with bad lifestyle habits.
Until I woke up one morning, hungover and sick from another relentless day of work followed by too many drinks with colleagues and prospective clients. Feeling decidedly under the weather, the thought that came to my mind was that this was not the life I wanted.
According to all social expectations and measures, I was doing well. I had a good, high-paying job, a prominent role in an up and coming company which grew from less than twenty employees to over two-hundred in around four years, and I had the respect of my colleagues and customers. I was not happy!
As it is said: Even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat!
My “no” moment number one: Saying no to a life poorly lived!
I decided, no more!
So, I got up on that fateful morning, walked into my home office, wrote my resignation letter, showered, dressed, drove into work, and resigned.
A month later, after completing my notice period, I walked out, started my own business, and immediately sold enough work for three months through pure luck. Working furiously, I completed that project successfully.
And then I could not find any work for eighteen months.
Fortunately, this story does not end with those eighteen months. Instead, it launched me on a twenty-year roller coaster ride that continues in the present day.
What those eighteen months gave me was freedom — the freedom to decide how I wanted my life to play out. For the first time since I started my career, I had time and space.
For creativity and creative thinking to flourish, we need time and space.
At first, I did not know what to do with my time.
There were moments of panic, moments of worry about where income was going to come from, fear that I could not make a simple business idea work, and terror that I might work myself into obsolescence and never find another job again.
In turbulent and uncertain times, this is a natural response.
Our ability to project fear into the future and create worst-case scenarios is the unwanted blessing of creative talent. The more creative you are, the vaster the imagination you can summon, the more terrifying and dire your anticipated future becomes.
Up to a point, where you realise that all these fearful futures are just projections, and your creative talents are exponentially more useful in constructing hopeful and valuable strategies for a better future.
And I got there after a month or two of agonizing about what I did not have and what horrible fate awaited me.
My “no” moment number two: Saying no to fear!
No longer would I tolerate the fear fed to me by my unconscious mind and amplified by an excellent imagination and finely tuned creative projection.
This change in thinking was not easy. Anyone that has ever tried to acquire a new habit, or change an unwanted one, will know how easy it is to slip and revert to a previous way of thinking.
Around this time, a friend introduced me to creativity and creative thinking as a conscious process.
At his suggestion, I attended a creativity conference, a moment that brought new ways of thinking and influential role models into my life — exceptional people with who I built fruitful and hopefully life-long relationships.
With time on my hands, an introduction to a whole host of new skills, and a new-found enthusiasm, I started spending time on creating possibility.
A decidedly awkward artist (I still am), I started drawing, listening to music, and reading voraciously into genres and topics inside and outside my fields of interest.
I practised creative thinking, impossible thinking, critical thinking, lateral thinking, positive thinking, and as much other thinking as I could entice my neural pathways to enjoy.
Then I took it back to my thinking around business!
Two significant “no” moments brought me to this point where I could start saying “yes” to possibility.
There are crucial moments in a life, where if you recognise it, saying “no” creates beautiful and productive futures.
In a moment of pure madness, or accidental insight, I decided that my life from this moment on will focus on the things I want to do, rather than that which I have to do.
For the most part, I do that and have been for the past twenty years.
Another significant learning point in my life came around two years ago when I started a fun obsession with finding and verbalising my life’s purpose.
When you have a stated purpose and have the conviction to live a purposeful life, it suddenly becomes apparent when you should say no.
In a recent blog post titled: Finding the One Decision That Removes 100 Decisions, Tim Ferris wrote about making “good fast decisions” vs “good rushed decisions”.
It sent me off on a thinking journey, in which I pondered the impact of finding that one decision that removes a hundred others.
My insight was that it was all about saying no.
Saying no creates time and space to do what you love.
How do you do it?
It is a process.
Know your life’s purpose! (start here if you don’t).
Then:
When a decision, a request, a favour, or an unexpected task comes up, do the following:
- Take a deep breath in, allow yourself to come fully into the present moment.
- Ask yourself the simple question: How does this decision, request, favour, or task, support my life’s purpose?
- Take a moment.
- Make the decision.
When I cannot see clear and compelling evidence that a request, decision, favour, or task will support my life’s purpose, it is always a “no”.
And by saying no, all of the resulting decisions, actions and consequences that a “yes” would have created, disappears.
Not only does it vanish, but it also creates space and time to do the things that set my heart and mind on fire.
I cannot think of a better way to live!
And I wish this for you too!
