What Happens When You Say “Yes” To People For A Week?

A common theme in self-help books and business courses is the “magic of saying no” to anything that isn’t of interest to you. Your time is important and if someone enters your field with a prospect that isn’t perfect, then they will take away from your limited pool of energy and cause you your inevitable success.

That’s the theory anyway. Aside from lacking a level of humility, this might only really apply if you are already at the higher levels of success. Yes, if you are running a 7-figure self-help coaching system on YouTube, you probably should say ‘no’ to most proposals that enter your inbox. Or at least, you can choose from the more interesting ones at this point.

But if you’re like the other 99% of people that don’t quite have that strategy nailed down just yet, then just maybe you’re saying ‘no’ to your next big opportunity. And that includes me. No, I don’t have 7 figures waiting for me behind a metal debit card. But yes, I tend to turn down pretty much everything that enters my inbox.

So for the past week I’ve gone ahead and taken the opposite approach in order to test out this theory. I’ve pretty much said ‘yes’ to every meeting, client inquiry and dog-sitting request that has come my way. And aside from being exhausting, there is some good that came out of this experience. But first, the meetings.

Lots of meetings

I get a substantial amount of emails on a weekly basis regarding my startup experience. As some may know I ran a quasi successful startup from 2017 to 2020. Some people want suggestions on ways to approach their new ventures, but most people actually want a technical co-founder. They have an idea, but they lack the technical chops to make it come to life. That’s where I step in.

So instead of simply ignoring those messages, like I usually do, I took to responding to each one of them. I assumed that off the bat, not everyone would get back to me. Many of these message tend to look like copy and pasted templates that get sent to many people in the hopes that somebody bites. They could be bot generated or sent through an email list.

Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) more people than expected actually responded back to me. After a routine 15…