The message came from a client I’ve worked with for years. [It landed on a weeknight, after dinner.] A CIO he knew had just started a new job and wanted an executive advisor in his corner. Would I take him on?

I’ve been coaching executives since 2018. Referrals like this one are how the practice grew. You don’t build a client list by turning away the people your best clients send you.

So I sat with it for a day. Then I wrote back and said no.

It didn’t feel good. It still doesn’t, a little. A new CIO in his first ninety days is exactly the kind of work I know how to do, and exactly the kind of relationship that pays off in ways you can’t see yet. There was revenue attached. I let it go.

I’m running a company right now. That’s the commitment. A few years ago I set a rule for myself: work on the things that give you the best shot at future success, and nothing else. I didn’t set it as a productivity trick. I set it because I’ve been burned out before, and the one thing that kept me out of it afterward was being able to look forward and see something bright. You can’t see anything bright when your attention is split across six commitments and every one of them is slipping.

Saying yes to the CIO wouldn’t have cost me one hour a week. It would have cost me a slice of the thing I’m supposed to be finishing. A slice here, a slice there, is how a CEO ends up watching his company drift while he’s busy being helpful.

I’ve spent twenty years telling leaders not to say no at work. Take the request in, shape it, come back with options. That advice still stands inside an organization. This was different. Nobody inside my commitments asked for this. It came from outside them, and the only thing it offered was more.

For about a week I kept a tally in my head of what the no had cost. The fee. The relationship. The next referral that CIO might have sent. All of that is real, and all of it is money I didn’t make.

Then I looked at my calendar. The mornings were still mine. The work I’d chosen was still the work I was doing. Nothing I’d already said yes to had to move.

That’s the part that never shows up on an invoice. Every commitment you’re carrying was a yes at some point, and most of them were good ones. The question isn’t whether the new thing is worth doing. It usually is. The question is which of your old yeses has to pay for it.

You can’t keep saying yes to what you’ve already chosen unless you say no to what you haven’t.

Focus isn’t a personality trait. It’s a sequence of small refusals, most of them to good things, repeated long enough that the thing you committed to actually finishes. Once it does, you stand somewhere you didn’t stand before, and the next yes comes from strength instead of appetite.

I still think about that CIO. I hope he found someone good.

Which yes are you about to pay for with one you already made?

If you want more of what I’ve learned, and gotten wrong, as a CIO and CEO, I write about it every week at read.drdegnan.com.

Cheers,

Oliver