Lately, I’ve been trying to take a “say yes to everything” approach to my career and life. I feel a lot less stress when I just say yes to everything and then figure out how to do it, rather than trying to protect myself from work that I might have felt was beneath me or not my area of expertise in the past.
Saying yes to everything doesn’t mean giving away work for free, or even doing everything I say yes to. For example, if someone asks me to teach a class about a topic I’ve never taught before, I’ll say yes, but tell them I’ve never taught that before and that I need enough time to prepare. If they still want me to teach it, great! If not, that’s great too!
Saying yes to everything also doesn’t mean that I say yes to things I have no business saying yes to. For example, if someone asked me to go sky diving or to join a cult, I’d say no.
I’ve also started enthusiastically saying yes to helping friends and relatives who ask me for help with computer problems. I can usually fix it in a matter of minutes, it’s nice to talk to friends and relatives, and solving computer or phone problems is a nice break from my regular work!
By saying yes to everything, I’ve been forced to learn new skills and I think I’ve made myself more resilient in the face of a changing (or disappearing?) job market. Saying yes goes against advice I’ve gotten from friends and mentors over the years. Many people prefer to protect a balance between their “home” and “work” lives and to see becoming a specialist and saying “no” as a surefire path to the ideal security and balance. After years of being the guy who said “no” to everything and pushed away potential clients and writing jobs that didn’t fit my idea of what I was supposed to be doing, I’ve come to the conclusion that “balance” and “security” are states of mind, not things that you can actually obtain by avoiding their opposites.
If you’re a person who projects an air of “my time is important and hard to get,” people will eventually start to avoid you, because they know you don’t want to be bothered. It gets lonely trying to be important. Once you make the switch from saying “no” to saying “yes”, it’s surprising how much more fun the world is — eventually. I’ve found that during the time I was trying to protect myself I ended up too stressed out to do many of the things I previously liked to do, and I ended up losing touch with a lot of people. It’s counter-intuitive, but things like not answering the phone waste more time and cause more stress than just answering the phone and being honest about whether it’s a good time to talk or not.
My advice: work/life balance is a boat where forces beyond your control are constantly lifting one side or the other. Roll with it. Friends and unexpected events are what make life interesting.