531. NO-vember Special: How to Say No Without Saying No

The ONE Thing

NOVA Media

Entrepreneurship, Business, Careers

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Every November, Jay Papasan dedicates time to exploring one of the most powerful productivity tools you have—the ability to say no. This year's "No-vember Special" dives deep into 11 different ways to protect your time, energy, and focus, often without ever saying the word "no." From Steve Jobs' legendary turnaround at Apple to simple scripts you can use in daily life, Jay explains why saying no is essential for achieving extraordinary results. You'll learn how to anticipate requests, set healthy boundaries, delay decisions, and reframe your priorities so that every "yes" truly counts. He also shares practical tools like the "Get Ahead of the Ask" method, batching decisions, and using alternate resources—all designed to help you focus on your ONE Thing while preserving your relationships and sanity. Challenge of the Week:Identify one thing in your life or work that's not serving you—and say no to it today. Use one of Jay's 11 techniques to make your no both clear and kind. *** To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit: the1thing.com/pods. We talk about: How to say no without damaging relationships Why protecting your yeses leads to extraordinary results Jay’s 11 practical techniques for setting boundaries Links & Tools from This Episode: The ONE Thing by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan Follow Jay on Instagram Speakpipe.com/the1thing — Send us an audio note or feedback Free Resources Want to be a guest or share feedback? Email podcast@the1thing.com or send us an audio note at Speakpipe.com/the1thing. Produced by NOVA

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey there, One Thing Family. Welcome to this edition of November. For the month of November, I sometimes
0:07.2	like to write articles for the 20% or do a podcast around the idea of saying no. How do we say no so that we can
0:15.5	say yes to the stuff that really matters? And my favorite story of saying no actually is one that we
0:20.7	told in the book, The One Thing. And it's about of saying no, actually, is one that we told in the book
0:21.4	the one thing. And it's about Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs was invited back into Apple after his
0:27.2	short period of exile, they had a tremendous number of products. And I'm kind of an old Mac fan. So I
0:34.2	remember it. They used to have printers and print cartridges. They put an Apple logo on just about anything you could think of that you would sell in a computer store, all of the different accessories. And so according to different people, you look at his biography, he took the company from building 350 products or selling 350 products all the way down to 10.
0:56.1	And in some versions, down to 4.
0:58.5	He said no to all of that stuff so they could focus and say yes to a few things and actually
1:05.5	make great products.
1:07.0	The way it's been told is he created a matrix.
1:10.0	We will have one consumer portable and we will have one
1:14.1	consumer desktop we will have one professional portable and we will have one professional desktop
1:19.4	and you would end up and you would have the iBook the iMac you would have the power book and the power
1:25.0	mac and those four products became like kind of the focus of all of their attention.
1:30.3	So did all of that saying no actually pay off?
1:33.7	So I had some fun.
1:35.1	Thank you to our AI friends like ChatGPT and Perplexity doing a little research.
1:40.8	You go all the way back to December of 1997 when he was making these decisions.
1:46.3	Know how much Apple stock was worth? About 10 cents this year. If you invested a hundred bucks
1:51.7	then, do you know how much that would be worth today? That would be worth over $57 million
1:56.4	when you count for all of the appreciation of the value of the stock, all of the different
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NOVA Media, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NOVA Media and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.