Hello friends,

Almost nobody I work with has a problem with boredom.

Nobody is sitting around waiting for something to happen. The problem, almost universally, is the opposite: paralysis. There’s always a swarm of half-opportunities circling a career or an organisation or a life that has reached the point where several directions are genuinely open. These are the things people ask me to help them with.

And I tell them all what I’m going to tell you, dear readers.

You don’t have a boredom problem. Or indeed a focus problem.

You have a threshold problem.

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🔥 HELL YEAH OR NO 🔥

Derek Sivers wrote the essay that became his book Hell Yeah or No in 2009. The premise is simple: if your answer to an opportunity isn't an immediate, wholehearted yes, your answer should be a no.

No hedging, no let’s have a cuppa and see, no let’s test it for a bit.

Hell yeah, or no.

In other words, you need to raise your threshold for saying yes to opportunity.

Most people’s threshold is too low because they’re busy and the opportunity is in front of them, demanding attention. The problem is that too much of this and you end with a career, organisation, or life (!) with a direction you didn’t choose.

Our actions already reveal our real priorities. Someone once told me that employees don’t give a damn about your all-hands presentations and carefully-crafted emails. All they pay attention to is who you hire and who you fire, who you promote and who you don’t. Actions speak louder than words.

(This is equally true, I believe, whether we are considering your career, your creative practice, or your organisational strategy).

The same is true of how we spend our time. If you say you want to write and you haven't written in six weeks, that's information. The hell yeah filter is about forcing you to be intentional with your time, then. But it's not only about raising your threshold for what opportunities you pursue and how you spend your time.

It's about making the gap between your declared life and your actual one impossible to ignore.

⚙️ HOW TO MAKE IT WORK ⚙️

1.

The first move of making sure Hell Yeah, Or No works for you is getting honest about what you're actually optimising for, not what you wish you were optimising for.

Run a simple audit. Pick one thing you've told yourself (or others) is a priority. Now look at last week. How much time did it actually get?

(For example: I consider myself a reader. I tell people about books. I read the NY Times book reviews every Saturday and pontificate on the future of literature to my toddler. And yet, when I did this audit, it turned out that (spoiler alert) I'm just not actually spending that much time reading books).

This isn't about guilt. But the gap between declared priority and actual behaviour is the most reliable signal we have about where our real threshold sits, and we'd do well to listen to it.

2.

The second move is checking your decision against three questions rather than simply hell yeah or no.

1. Is this going to make me happy?

2. Is it smart (meaning genuinely good over time).

3. Is it useful to others?

Sivers frames these as a triangle: neglect any one of them and something breaks.

(Ikigai, which I use with most of my clients, touches on something similar. To feel fulfilled we need to bring four things into balance: what we love to do, what we are good at, what the world needs, and what we can get paid for).

3.

The third move is the one I find most clarifying: judge the opportunity not by how it makes the future look, but by how it changes what you do today. A genuine hell yeah shifts your behaviour immediately: you clear the time, you start thinking about it in the shower, you get s**t done. A hesitant yes produces nothing but a bunch of regretful anxiety when the deadline or meeting comes.

🖼️ THE REFRAME 🖼️

The first trap of this framework, good as it is, is falling into the gap between what you say and what you do and using the framework to paper over it. Hell yeahs are all very well, but you need to be honest about what you want to say hell yeah to and why. If you're already stuck, saying hell yeah will only accelerate your stuckness.

See also: 063: Year Planning 📆

The second is the knowledge gap. Sometimes you can't evaluate an opportunity because you don't yet know enough about the territory. Turning it down therefore might be a mistake. Not everything needs to clear the hell yeah threshold before you walk in the door.

See also: 040: Luck Surface Area 🍀

📅 TRY IT THIS WEEK 📅

1. Look at the last five things you agreed to: calls, projects, meetings, commitments.

2. Score each one: Hell Yeah / Mild Yes / Meh Yes.

3. For each Mild or Meh, write one sentence on why you said yes anyway. Look for the pattern.

Is it social pressure? Fear of missing out? Knowledge gaps? The same pattern will be responsible for most of them.

📖 FURTHER READING 📖

Want to go deeper? I recommend reading the original book for more.

And if you recognise that you are procrastinating about decisions, but don’t know why, take a look at 037: Head Hands Heart 🧠🖐❤️.

🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊

My recent-ish HELL YEAH was agreeing to speak at The Power of Storytelling conference in Bucharest, despite being riddled with imposter syndrome and terrified of the public speaking bit of, er, speaking in public.

Yet, I came back knowing that writing isn't peripheral to what I do, it's central to who I am, and probably always has been. The gap between what I'd been saying and what I'd been doing had become impossible to ignore and saying HELL YEAH helped me figure that out.

Which is exactly what a hell yeah is supposed to do.

This newsletter is one of many things that came into sharper focus as a result. I'm recommitting to it... the cadence, the depth, the ambition of what it's trying to be. And a number of other things that I’ll can't wait to tell you about in upcoming posts and videos.

Thanks for reading. If this was at all useful, please take a second to forward to a friend or colleague. It means a lot - hopefully to them, but definitely to me.

Take care,

Adam

p.s. If you were forwarded this, welcome! You can subscribe over at my website.

p.p.s If you've been here for a while, thank you too! If you'd like to support my work in any of its many forms, you can tip me and I will spin around in my office chair.

You might also like...

... this video about how I survived Europe's biggest media conference last year, or this video about why your lack of focus is a secret gift.

Or check out a little app I built that audits your mission and vision against eight essential building blocks that I’ve spotted during decades of work (and having read 1000s of these damn things). Then it rewrites the whole caboodle in plain, human language you'll actually want to put on your website. It's in beta; feedback is very welcome.

Where to find me (AKA my many, many hats)

• Theory of Change (this newsletter)

• Evenly Distributed (my strategic agency)

• YouTube (videos on leading a curious, multipath life)

• Infinite Content (home of my writing and creative work)

• Preslav Literary School (my experimental / ambient music project)