I am a sucker for a good commencement speech.
One of my favorites is Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art,” which he delivered in 2012, and which I assigned my students at the aforementioned Admission Masters every year I was there. In it, he describes the life of a freelancer as “sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.”
I referenced Sun Tzu in yesterday’s blog, in which he wrote that “opportunities, once seized, multiply.”
Or, as Gaimann would describe it: “Now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and have to learn to say no.”
No is a complete sentence, the shortest, by letter count, of any in the English language.
It is also the most difficult to say — and, in my experience, the most important.
Time is the only non-renewable resource on the planet. It is finite, and it is precious. Our bandwidth is much the same.
One of the many traits I admire about Marcio Sicoli is his unwavering commitment to his priorities: “My family, Pepperdine University, and then you,” is how he described his priorities, in order, to Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson when they asked him to be their coach during the Paris quad. He never wavered on his commitment. They found a way to make it work, him largely delegating from Malibu, them working on the beach with Fiapo much of the time. There are no regrets on that team and an Olympic silver medal, the first in Canadian beach volleyball history, to show for it.
His family comes first. Always does.
Because he is one of the finest beach volleyball coaches in the world, he is solicited with job offers more than most. I watched him turn down what might be the most lucrative coaching job in the sport — certainly the biggest number I have ever seen — because that would impede upon his time with his family, his first priority, and remove entirely the second, which is Pepperdine.
So he said no, instead taking a job with the Canadians for far less financial incentive but with a schedule that would allow him to dedicate 100 percent of his efforts to the three buckets he wanted to fill, in the order he had arranged.
That’s admirable.
Life, I’ve found, is a bit like defense in beach volleyball: Try to take everything, and you wind up taking nothing. You must give up an area on the court in order to maximize your abilities given the call and the situation.
You must, in other words, say no.
This is both in a professional and a personal sense. Professionally, if you take on too many gigs and roles, you will wind up doing well in none of them. As Matthew McConaughey put it in his magnificent book, Green Lights: “I was making Bs in five areas. I wanted to get As in three.”
So he said no, paring down his work to focus on the three major areas that lit him up the most. For years, he said no to romantic comedies, for which he was the king and most well-known. Turned down lucrative offers in the tens of millions — until the offers stopped coming in at all.
He went years without work.
He said no so much that, when he returned to acting, he was able to start fresh, take the roles he wanted to take, rebranding himself as a dynamic actor, one who can play any character, not just the shirtless guy running down the beach and getting the girl.
He is now considered one of the greatest actors of our time.
All because he said no.
I, too, needed to learn this lesson. It’s a hard shift, going from saying yes to everything to no to almost everything — the parties, the fun, the jobs, the adventures — but necessary, too. Sometimes it takes getting a couple of Cs to realize you’re stretched too thin, the candles being torched from both ends, leaving you a dried husk. It did for me. Occasionally, it still does. The recent Hermosa Open was an example in which I believe I took a hard C, at best, at promoting the tournament, because I was also playing, writing, podcasting and coaching up until the day of the event itself, and even during.
I didn’t say no enough.
Lesson learned.
Like Marcio, if something will take time away from my family, or time I carve out for myself — time that is necessary for me to be at my creative best — that doesn’t inherently help my family or myself, I say no. It’s amazing how easy it is, then, to say no, and how valuable.
Because soon, you will realize that the better your personal life is, the better you will be in your professional one.
And all that saying no will, in a counterintuitive sense, pay real dividends in all areas of your life.
