Next time you’re deciding for or against a project: Listen to yourself. What do you hear? A loud YES? A clear NO? Or a thin Maybe?
My experience says everything that isn’t a YES is automatically a NO. Simple, right? Derek Sivers calls this “Hell-Yeah”. Pep Guardiola: Thiago or nothing.
A clear no is easy too. But what about the grey zones in between? Remember: there’s only one YES, everything else is a NO. Yet somehow a “don’t know, not really, mmm, maybe” still morphs into a tortured yes far too often. It’s a half-hearted yes from the start. A fragile yes.
It remains a yes that will always stand on shaky ground. Even when we hope this pathetic yes might somehow become a solid, energetic one.
Often I want to take back such a yes immediately, withdraw it unnoticed as soon as it leaves my mouth or fingers. But then it’s too late—it’s in the world, gaining energy, and pulling it back gets harder. The Maybe became a Yes and then a Brrrrr and an agonisingly long Uuuuuuuugh.
This means: A Maybe is just another No. The Maybe is actually a Nano. And since that word doesn’t exist, it becomes a No. An “Or Nothing”.
Maybe we shouldn’t just listen inward, because then we only hear our mind’s voice. And the mind is usually a terrible adviser—it sounds as sensible as my parents. If they’d had their way, I would have done an apprenticeship at the savings bank and joined the rifle club. Thankfully it turned out differently.
Try asking your gut instead. Feel into yourself. How does a loud yes feel? For me it’s wild fluttering that starts in my belly and shoots up to the crown of my head. My head feels light, buoyant like sparkling champagne. A clear no creates a warm, cosy feeling in my stomach that radiates concentrically from inside out. No thought of the loss that might come from a firm no.
Everything in between feels cold and constricting: stomach rumbling, headaches, scratchy throat, restless from head to toe. That description should make it clear such a yes is no good choice.
If that’s true, why do we still say yes too much and doggedly struggle through? Because we’re scaredy-cats who fear another YES will never come. But why should that be? Maybe we need to charm our way through many NOs (including the Maybes and Nanos) to make space for the big, life-affirming YESes.
I like the thought that patience ultimately knows the way to a strong yes. We just have to trust it.
So we remember: It’s a YES. Or a NO. Nothing in between. Thiago or nothing. If only it were always that simple.
First appeared in German on reinergaertner.de, my blog since 1997. AI-assisted translation — because life’s too short to translate 150 posts by hand, but too long to leave them in German.