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Comment by Mvandenbergh | Hacker News Reader

Hold on. Here's what he said:

"The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything."

That's very different. This is a message that is useful to hear for extremely driven ambitious people who are already successful - that it's better to spend all the time you spend working on a few carefully chosen things. It should not be interpreted as advice for people who are not extremely driven to not do things. The baseline assumption is that you already spend a substantial amount of time working on potentially productive things.

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The submitter correctly rewrote the title, because the article's own is linkbait. (From the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

The submitted title was "Warren Buffett says the most successful people say no to almost everything", which seems reasonable to me. The word "most" conveys what you're saying—in an abbreviated form, but that's how titles work.

However, I've changed the title to the quote now. We often do that when the article is a quote.

...and the article seems to directly contradict this point:

"Whether he meant saying no in the investment sense is not so important; what is important is that his advice, in whatever context, can apply to anyone arriving at the crossroads of daily decision-making."

Adding to your point, an underlying assumption is that you have excellent "deal flow," to so speak. If you are bombardment with great opportunities to invest your time, money or effort into then choosing selectively is optimal. If you are limited by enthusiasm, and/or availability of great opportunities (most of us are) then this is not optimal.

This reminds me of top athlete's advice, often totally wrong for the average person. A top athlete might say that avoiding overtraining, and focusing on recovery is the most important thing. To them, getting really good regular workouts in is a given. To the average person, maintaining discipline, enthusiasm and not quitting are by far more important.

Yep, Warren Buffet has a level of deal flow second to none.

The average person who feels that deals are few and far between doesn't feel like they are in a position to say no.

There is a chance that Buffet could say "no" to a deal just because he felt it was rushed.

“I call investing the greatest business in the world,” he says, “because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There’s no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like, then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.”

I've found that with most things (not everything), rejecting artificial urgency is a good heuristic. Sure, there are exceptions when you really do have to act now, but most exploding deals aren't worth taking.

He also didn't claim it was advice, nor that there is any causal relation between saying no and becoming really successful. It could have just been an observation about everyday reality he's facing.

It's just the writer cherrypicking more or less fitting quotes to the opinion article they would have written anyway.

The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

This seems like a restatement of the explore and exploit cycle in evolution. You start off with very little, so you have nothing to lose by exploring every opportunity. Eventually, one or more of those opportunities pays off, and you become successful. Now the odds favor exploitation, since new opportunities are unlikely to be better than the profitable ones you've already discovered. You're better off leaning into those than you are to go off exploring again. Of course, this also means you could get stuck in a local maximum. But life is finite, and the chances of achieving a higher max are low.

How do you have the assumption chances of achieving a higher max are low? That seems arbitrary and like it'd be a coin flip as I don't know all the possible successes in the world and how they compare to mine.

If you make the assumption that the frequency of opportunities is inversely proportional to their potential (ie, the bigger the opportunity, the less frequent they are), then in the short term you're going to be better off expending your energies exploiting an existing opportunity rather than chasing a new one.

If the distribution of opportunities is fat-tailed enough, then given a long enough baseline I concede that continuing exploration might provide greater expected value. But in practice, most successful founders are in their mid-40s, and most businesses take years to grow to fruition. So I think Buffett's advice is good in the real world.

This is an important point. You can say no to everything but video games, marijuana, and junk food. You’re unlikely to be successful in life even though you’re extremely focused on just a few things.

What matters is saying yes to the right things and no to almost everything else. Perhaps then what it is that makes the most successful people of all is the judgment (or luck) to say yes to the right things and the fortitude (or stubbornness) to say no to everything else.

I spent 15 years thinking I had fortitude. Turns out I was just stubborn. Pretty much ruined my life.

"Winners never quit, and quitters never win. But people who don't win and don't quit are just stupid."

I landed on my feet. Others won't be so lucky. (Ironically, I was only able to be stubborn for so long because I had so much good fortune elsewhere. If I'd had less support, I'd have quit much earlier, and maybe it would all have turned out better.)

The moral of the story: it's better to be lucky than smart.

Same. Got a masters and doctorate out of stubbornness rather than real love of the subject. In many respects, wasted decade. At least I have better self-knowledge now, I guess.

On the other hand..

There's a good argument that attaining that self-knowledge takes at least a decade under any circumstances -- and if you can do so while getting a masters and PhD on the side, you've wasted less than most. :)

This is probably good advice for founders of a tech company, but horrible advice for workers like me. I need fortitude to survive. I need to get up every day and believe I have what it takes to push through the work. Maybe I'm smart, maybe I'm lucky, but fortitude is what I tell myself I have to finish projects and get stuff done.

I think you might enjoy this blog post "intelligence is adaptability" [1]. It's not heavy of facts or references, but I like the inspiration. It also sounds a little like what you shared you learned as well.

[1] http://www.actinginbalance.com/intelligence-is-adaptability/

Perhaps it's better to be wise than smart.

You'll never know if your "no" answers were a false negative though. Rich people say no to a lot of things because they get a lot of opportunities and there's only so much time to spend.

If you have a lot less opportunities and far more time while starting near the bottom, a false negative can be a more significant miss for you.

That's part of it but I think it's more complicated than that. For instance I have heard b2b sales described as a diagnostic process. If you know exactly what you can deliver and it matches exactly what the customer needs you encourage them to say yes. It will likely go very well and then the relationship will grow over time. Otherwise you thank them for the opportunity and move on.

The same arguably applies to all business deals and doesn't have much to do with your current level of success. If you pursue the right opportunities you will do well. I know people who have struggled for years because they consistently went after the wrong opportunities. The difficult part of course is being able to tell the difference!

Interesting point about B2B as a diagnostic process. I reached a similar conclusion organically but didn’t have that language for it. Essentially, I’ve found that saying “based on your description of your challenge, the product I have today isn’t a good fit” buys you a ton of credibility for when you DO have a good solution available.

The distinction between extensive practice (an opportunity-rich world) and intensive (sparse, or highly specialised).

Some have the luxury of choice. Some take what they can get.

Yah the this Article can be summed up by Barry Schwartz and a conversation I’ve heard on Joe Rogan from a psychologist and many others. “The richer or more renown you become, the more your opportunities increase, and the more you have to optimize the selection of opportunities to become more rich or renown.”

Yes. I know a company which has done five acquisitions and a huge spinoff product, all of which failed. Meanwhile, the core moneymaking product is now a decade behind the competition. Buffett's message is addressed to CEOs in that position.

This seems to be a vice of CEOs who focus on "deals" but are not good at operations.

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