If you counted my decisions by volume, the overwhelming majority are refusals. Not dramatic ones. Small, unremarkable, mostly of good things.

That is the job. Nobody described it to me that way and I would not have believed them if they had, because at thirty I understood the job to be finding things.

The Week I Counted Them

I counted for a week once, out of curiosity, in the middle of a period when I felt I was accomplishing nothing.

The count was somewhere over forty refusals and three commitments. And the three commitments were continuations of things already running — I had begun nothing new that week at all.

What struck me was that the forty were not bad. If they had been bad it would have been easy and I would not have been keeping count. They were opportunities of the kind I would have pursued eagerly twenty years earlier, brought to me by capable people, most of which would probably have worked.

And I said no to all of them, and the week felt like failure, and it was one of the better weeks I had that year.

Why Good Opportunities Are the Dangerous Ones

A bad opportunity costs nothing to decline. It presents itself, you see the flaw, it is gone. No discipline is involved and no discipline is required.

A good opportunity is the actual test, because the case for it is sound and declining it feels like leaving money on the table — which it is. You are choosing to leave money on the table. There is no version of this where you get to decline the good ones and not lose anything.

What you buy is the ability to keep doing the small number of things that only work with undivided attention. That is the whole trade and it is a bad trade on any single instance and a good one across a life. Which is precisely the shape of thing human beings are worst at evaluating.

The men I have watched dissipate did not do it on nonsense. They did it on a long series of individually excellent decisions, each of which took a little attention from something that needed all of it.

The Two I Should Have Taken

There are two I got wrong and I want them on the record, because a piece about the virtue of refusal that contains no wrongly-refused things is dishonest.

One was a business a person I respected brought me, at a moment when I had decided I was at capacity. My reasoning was structural and I applied it without much thought, because by then declining had become the reflex rather than the conclusion. It went on to do very well without me. I do not mind the money. I mind that I did not actually think about it — I pattern-matched to a rule.

The other was a person rather than a venture, and that one I do mind. Somebody wanted a substantial amount of my time and I said no on the grounds of capacity, and the capacity was real, and I have since spent more hours than that on things of no consequence whatsoever. The refusal was honest arithmetic and the arithmetic was measuring the wrong thing.

“You didn't say no,” he told me, much later, without much heat. “You said you were busy. Those aren't the same and you know it.”

The Distinction I Try to Keep

What I have taken from those two is that a rule and a reason are different, and that a rule which has stopped being examined has become a habit wearing a rule's clothing.

So I make myself state the reason, in a sentence, to the person. Not the euphemism about capacity — the actual reason, which is usually that I have decided to do fewer things and this is one of the things. That is less comfortable to say and it is at least true, and saying it out loud occasionally reveals to me that I do not have a reason, at which point I reconsider.

Perhaps one in fifteen gets reconsidered. That is not many. It is more than zero, which is what the reflex was producing.

He and I are fine. He was right about the distinction and I have never been able to un-hear it, which I assume was the intention.

Note: Victor Draemont is a character, and these notes are written in his voice. Nothing here is financial, investment, tax, or legal advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or gamble on anything.