GETTING TO “NO”
Our country needs a new motivational book, this time one heralding the importance of saying, “No.” I think I’m the person to write it.
One winter weekend morning during the height of the COVID pandemic, I drove to our community food bank to drop off some donations. As I arrived, I saw a long line of cars and drivers already waiting for food packages to be handed out in the parking lot of the church that runs the program.
What surprised me was the large number of late-model luxury vehicles in that line. What I was witnessing, I suspected, was that some drivers were from households which had put too little of their incomes into rainy-day savings for emergencies like the pandemic-induced losses of jobs and income.
That food bank visit got me to thinking that our nation could benefit from a new motivational self-help book. And I think I’m the person to write it. I already have a title, “Getting to No,” and I’m pretty well advanced, in my head at least, on the concept and chapter outline.
Now, some folks may recall the best-seller motivational book Getting to Yes that came out in the late 1980s. If you think I am trying to ride the very successful coat-tails of “Getting to Yes” authors Roger Fisher and William Ury, from the Harvard Negotiation Project, I will unashamedly say yes … I mean no. I mean, I’m not really trying to draw on the success of Getting to Yes, to generate controversy and book sales. But yes, I welcome the opportunity to share how to achieve a better balance between yes and no in our lives.
My initial research reveals that throughout human history, the word “no” has been given a bad rap. Which may be partly why we avoid it, and why mankind has never really learned how to handle that two-letter word. In my book, I want to address that human shortcoming, and in the process, rescue my fellow human beings.
I realize I face strong headwinds in trying to publish and sell a motivational book with “No” in the title. I’m not naïve. Still, I think I’ve identified a market niche for my book. After perusing local bookstore and library shelves and conducting Internet searches, I’ve found that nearly all available self-help and personal-motivation materials address audiences of one. To you. Or to me. To each of us individually seeking help and guidance on how to achieve greater personal fulfilment … starting by buying a copy of the author’s book.
My Getting-To-No audience, however, is not a single individual in need of help. It is our country, the world, all humanity. My efforts are not focused only on inducing individual change, but on fostering collective reform. My audience includes the politicians who promise us everything, corporations that attempt to convince us we can’t live without their products or services, as well as households struggling to distinguish needs from wants.
My book will begin with a brief history of the word “no” and how it has generated negative vibes since the beginning of humanity. It will start with the biblical origins of our species. Adam and Eve were the first to be told “no.” They were instructed not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. We all know how that worked out. Oh well, it was the Creator’s first try.
Many generations later, Moses came down from a mountain with a pair of smart tablets of his day to give us God’s ten commandments, 8 out of 10 of which have “no” or “not” in them. Humanity’s batting average with those commandments hasn’t been exactly stellar either.
Down through the ages, “no” has gotten a lot of folks in trouble. Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment by the religious authorities of his time. His crime? He dared to claim that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system.” Monarchs saying “no” too many times to their impoverished subjects have faced revolutions and royal beheadings. And somewhat more benignly, politicians saying “no” to their constituents have more often than not found themselves voted out of office. “No” has understandably not achieved much of a following.
The thesis of my book, however, is that by not saying “no” we often aggravate many of the problems our country now faces: a despoiled environment, ballooning public and private debt, chronic substance abuse and obesity among them.
My book, having explored the historical and cultural baggage of the word “no,” will then show its potential as a friend, support, and guide. Borrowing from another motivational book, William David Brown’s “Welcome Stress!” welcoming “No” is at the core of my thesis.
To start off, I’ll point to just how many of our difficulties result from our individual and collective failures to use “no” when and where it matters most. One very tangible piece of evidence among the many to be included in my book will be data measuring Americans’ propensity to over-spend and under-save.
There’s ample evidence that today our insatiable consumer-based nation is living beyond its means. We have forgotten how to say “no” now in order to save and be able to say “yes” in the future. All too often, the result has been a decline in our capacity to bounce back from adversity. A recent Federal Reserve survey study reveals that nearly one third of US adults would have to borrow or sell something to cover an unexpected expense of only $400. [Federal Reserve System, Board of Governors, “Report on the Economic Well-being of US Households,” May 2020.]
That’s troubling.
The recent pandemic has exposed the financial fragility of many American families. They haven’t regularly saved money, leaving them unprepared for difficult times. I wonder how many of the heads of household today remember reading as children, Aesop’s Fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper; or have read this allegory to their kids today.
In the story, the ants and their friends worked hard all summer to prepare for winter. Meanwhile, the grasshopper spent his days playing music, wasting the summer away. Come winter, the grasshopper finds himself hungry and cold, and beseeching the cozy and warm ants to take him in.
The moral - work and save today to prepare for and protect against the adversities that might come tomorrow - appears not to have registered for many in our culture. That includes those who could save, but don’t, and then find themselves in tough times, like those driving fancy cars to food banks.
People with few savings likely assumed a pandemic was improbable. They trusted social safety nets like unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and eviction moratoriums to protect them in such an event. Too little funding, too many demands, and a cumbersome bureaucracy have strained social safety nets. As a result, funds are not reaching those who need them most in a timely manner. Emergency social support programs were not designed to last through crises like a protracted pandemic.
I realize that if I’m to encourage our country to “just say no” I need to propose some small incremental steps to get there. I only have one relatively painless step to propose. It’s a policy recommendation that political leaders find palatable and financial managers advise: higher interest rates on savings and lower taxes on personal investment income, to motivate us to spend less and save more of what we make.
Thought leaders like teachers, marriage counselors, investment advisors, and most importantly, parents, should encourage everyone to save and invest a portion of their income, even in small amounts.
The mindset that needs reinforcing is that when we save, our money starts working for us, in addition to us working for our money. “By saving and investing you make money in your sleep,” financial guru and multi-billion-dollar investor Warren Buffet has aptly declared. That simple practice puts savers on the right side of the power of compounding, that “eighth wonder of the world” as he calls it.
Saving and investing a share of after-tax income each year, even with a very low salary, can add up to a comfortable retirement or an emergency fund to get through hard times that inevitably, and often unexpectedly, will come. But you gotta say “no” to other stuff to get there. And when those savings begin to mount up, you gotta resist temptations to dip into them. Saying “yes” too often and ending up a borrower on the wrong side of compounding interest rates can lead to perpetual debt and a precarious future.
I’m not claiming that the more frequent use of “no’ in money matters is the only step we need to take to a better world. There are other problematic practices that we must address, such as our addiction to environmentally damaging fossil fuels and the widespread dependence on physically harmful opioid pain pills. But we can benefit from a few easy wins in this struggle for more sane and sustainable lives. Developing “no” as a currency in money matters seems a good place to start.
When my book, Getting to No comes out, I don’t expect it will achieve anything close to the popularity of Fisher’s and Ury’s Getting to Yes. I’m OK with that. I can understand if a potential buyer picks up my book, browses through it, but decides to borrow a copy from their local library instead. I can even applaud their decision.
You see, I can take “No” for an answer. ###
[1] Federal Reserve System, Board of Governors, “Report on the Economic Well-being of US Households in 2019.” May 2020.
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