Really successful people say “No” to almost everything.
— Warren Buffett
Hot girls have to be a filter.
They get asked to do a lot of things.
If you get invited to Fashion Week in New York or someone takes you to the Lakers game in a helicopter, you’re going to go.
But, there are less “wow” experiences available all the time. So, now you are having to make decisions between things that are all good options. Turning down good options is hard.
Beauty is a Curse
Depending on her marketing strategy, a hot girl in a big city can have dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of messages on her phone with embedded invitations.
She appreciates the attention and options, but she eventually bumps into the harsh reality of a 24-hour day: Everything requires energy.
Work requires emotional energy. Friends require emotional energy. Conversations require emotional energy. Skin care routines, reading blog posts, fitness, graduate school, sleep.
Being a hot girl is high maintenance and can be overwhelming.
In other words, she can’t be in the Wasting Time business. This means saying No to a lot of appealing good things, to make room for great things.
Obviously, these are not just applicable to hot girls. It is really about asking what should we be focusing on and how to allocate energy.
These ideas transfer to other parts of life. This is why you need to Think Like a Hot Girl.
Becoming a Hot Girl
If you are in an exploration phase, in a new city, or learning something new, then your default answer to everything should be Yes.
Yes opens up opportunities. The movie Yes Man with Jim Carrey shows the pros and cons of this idea.
Confidence plays a big role in two ways:
- Putting yourself out there to make connections and get the invitations. You have to take personal risk.
- You must have the confidence to say No and put your priorities ahead of pleasing others.
Hot girls generally have loads of confidence.
Think of yourself as being in one of two phases: you are either a ball of clay or a marble statue.
You start as forming clay. You can be anything. You say yes to a lot of things and those experiences start to shape you.
Then, as you get older, more experienced, and see more opportunities, you become more like a block of marble. You know what your priorities are. New things are still fun, but they also become distractions from your priorities.
You simply don’t have the time to do everything.
So, you start chiseling away what is not you, and you become a more refined version of yourself. You do this by saying No to everything that isn’t making you become more of what you want to be and focusing on the things that do.
This process plays out in business and investing. Acquiring a customer, generating revenue, and finding investments. All of these are hard to do, especially early on.
You have to say Yes to get in the game. This process is usually painfully slow or it leads to mistakes and potentially bad deals. As you get more reps, you learn what works and what doesn’t.
You quickly learn what a good opportunity looks like and what a bad one looks like.
Then one day, usually after years of work, you look up and you have more opportunities.
You reach a point where it is not a question of bad and good – they are all potentially good. But, you only have so much time, energy, attention, and money.
You admit to yourself that you’re not looking for just good opportunities, you are looking for the best opportunities.
So, you have to choose. And choosing the best things means saying no to everything else.
You have to be a Hot Girl.
Thanks to James Bunch and Suzanna V. Wood for reading drafts of this.