Name: The Power of No
Rating: 4.2 (93 reviews)
Author: James Altucher and Claudia Azula Altucher

What’s in it for me? Enhance your life with the power of saying “no.”

Have you ever been in the situation where someone asks you for something, and you know that you should decline, that you should just say no, but you can’t? Maybe it was the last time a friend asked you to help paint the kitchen during your exams, or when you had to run errands for your sarcastic boss.

The truth is, we’ve all been there, and learning how to take hold of those moments and just say “no” is one of the greatest feelings imaginable!

But these blinks take it a step further. It’s not just about saying no to a particular situation, it’s also about saying no to scarcity, and to needless noise. It’s about saying no to the things that harm you. In the end, by learning not just how to say no but also the power of no, you’ll find it’s easy to say yes to yourself.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

how to embrace more silence in your life;
why a bookstore can change your future; and
what a gratitude diet is.

Saying no to bad relationships leads to health and true love.

We all know that there are some things that we should do more often than others, but in the end it all comes down to everyday choices. When faced with these choices, it’s easy to get pulled into situations you would rather avoid or to ignore your well-being. But if you want to get the most out of life, you should choose life.

Choosing life means not pursuing habits that quite literally cause you to die, like poor nutrition or smoking. By abstaining from harmful foods and smoking, you are less likely to die from heart disease or lung cancer, and will have chosen life.

Another way to choose life is by ridding yourself of negative and abusive people. Say no to the people who drain your positive energy or stir up feelings of guilt or fear. It frees up resources, like your time and energy, that can be directed towards your inner circle.

But how do you know who belongs in your inner circle? This exercise will help you figure it out:

List all the people you engage with at least five times per week. Then rate how these encounters make you feel on a scale from one to ten (ten being the best).

Start focusing on the people you’ve ranked higher than eight by spending more time with them. Spend less time with everyone else on your list, and distance yourself even farther from those ranked lower than five.

Taking distance from these kinds of people may be a challenge at first, and like any major change in behavior, starting to say no might require you to overcome destructive behavioral patterns. Take one of the authors, Claudia: She had always pursued unavailable men. In the most extreme case, she pursued someone for almost two years, convinced she was in love with him despite having seen him just four times!

Eventually, she realized that she was addicted to unattained love, and started saying no – first to this particular man and then to her addiction.

To say no to her addiction, she went to a support group, which helped her prepare for a real relationship based on love, honor and respect. She’s now been happily married for over five years.

Saying no to other people’s expectations empowers you to follow your dreams.

Have you ever wondered in the middle of a project: “Is this really me? Or am I just trying to please my boss by laughing at his stupid jokes?” Maybe you’ve had similar feelings about one of your relationships.

It’s time to stop doing things you don’t want to do by using your assertive no. If you ignore what you really want and keep doing things you don’t want to do, you may begin disliking the person you are trying to please or disliking whatever it is you are doing for them.

Saying no to scarcity and noise allows for abundance and silence.

More food, more money, more gossip – nowadays it seems like everyone wants more of everything. For most of human history, that desire was fueled by a real scarcity of resources. Today most resources aren’t scarce, yet we still suffer from our historical scarcity complex.

Saying no to scarcity means shifting your attention away from what’s missing and towards the abundance around you.

Learning to say no allows you to say yes.

In the previous blinks, we saw how something as simple as saying no to the right things could drastically improve your life. In a way, you could say the word no has its own power.

As we’ve seen, this power of no is derived from three elements: discernment (the ability to perceive the abundance in your life), compassion (the basis for listening with an open heart) and health (abstaining from the things that harm you).

Key ideas in The Power of No

About the Author

James Altucher is an entrepreneur, chess master, spiritual teacher and writer who has written twelve books, including the best sellers Choose Yourself and I Was Blind but Now I See.

Claudia Azula Altucher is an author as well as a teacher of yoga, meditation and spirituality. She is also the author of 21 Things Before Starting an Ashtanga Yoga Practice.