The art of saying no!
Saying no is a hidden yes to something far more important. When you’re faced with choices, it’s often difficult to make the decision. But when your resources are limited, you can’t choose both, and expect them all to produce best results. That’s the price of divided focus! But it’s often not as elusive as it could seem! Let’s see where it goes.
Suppose you’re faced with a choice. You’d have to choose a research topic, and you like the 90 topics that came to your first search result. All of them sounds interesting. You can’t seem to figure out which one to try, right? Then how would you decide? Or perhaps a choice to buy the next laptop. Buy a gaming laptop, or a mac - build a PC or maybe just settle with an iPad? Tough decision, right? How would you decide! Let’s see if this helps.
This is more of a personal observation. But I think you’d understand the story. It’s the apple vs google story. Apple, the rich kid’s gadget. Shiny tool, and even fancier apps in it. Why is it so popular? I really like the apple’s engineering philosophy. I think Steve Jobs did it, or maybe later on someone else. I’m not sure. But apple is notoriously known as the slowest ones to ship the features. The perfectionists! The against the grain people. Apple has a philosophy where they first try to completely build a feature before moving onto the next one. It's also extremely slow in the process. The same feature from android comes to Apple, what, 10 years later? Still, you'd agree, that for quality, they really are the best in the biz. It’s more reliable! You can trust that it will always work! Google on the other hand, has quite a different approach. Instead of pushing for a central goal, they have more of a 50 startups combined approach. And it usually doesn't affect them as much, cause their other sources of revenue (search, youtube, ads) covers almost the entirety of it. But once in a while, you'd see stuff like ChatGPT slipping through their cracks. You know the ones that wrote ChatGPT, Sam Altman and his crew, right? Did you know the people that made the engine that runs it came from google! By skipping the long plan, even the giants make mistakes like these! Last I've heard, they had almost 20 chat apps, that got killed. It's safe to assume, anything from them would eventually make the list, https://killedbygoogle.com/
Here's the point I'm trying to make, no matter how good work you’re doing, it's never going to matter, unless you have the end goal in mind. It gets easier to say no to stuff, once you know goals, it becomes extremely simple by then! Say no more people! And say yes to things that align. You don't have to be Apple to say no, but you will have to do it, but if there is something you care about, chances are, you'd have to say no to protect it. Always!
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