Use this strategy to protect your time.
Welcome to One Thing Better. Each week, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine (that’s me) shares one way to feel more successful and satisfied — and build a career or company you love.
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Today’s one thing: Saying no to new things.
That one thing, better: Saying yes to existing things.
You hate saying no to new opportunities.
You want to say yes! You want the extra money, responsibility, accomplishments, or accolades — and you’re worried that, if you say no, opportunities like this won’t come again.
As a result, you’re stretched thin and feeling crazy.
Which begs the question: When should you say no?
Today, I’ll give you an answer.
It’s a simple framework that I learned from Brian Lee, the cofounder of LegalZoom. And he learned it by accidentally almost killing the company.
Now you can benefit from his mistake. Here’s how.
The day LegalZoom almost died
LegalZoom helps consumers create legal documents, and it was almost instantly profitable.
In the company’s early days, LegalZoom’s founders noticed something weird: The same customer repeatedly created divorce documents. Who gets that many divorces!? So Brian looked into it. Turns out, a divorce attorney was using LegalZoom to make documents for his clients.
That felt like a revelation, Brian told me recently — because LegalZoom was built for consumers. His team had no idea that lawyers would use it too.
“We were like, ‘Oh my goodness. We’re not just direct-to-consumer — we could be a B2B business too!” Brian said.
LegalZoom’s founders spun up a new service called ProxyLaw, which was made for lawyers. They were excited. But here was the result: “LegalZoom went from profitable to unprofitable, ProxyLaw never took off, and we were days away from bankruptcy,” Brian told me.
What happened? There were two problems:
- LegalZoom assigned its best designers, engineers and marketers to ProxyLaw.
- ProxyLaw was a hard sell, because it required a different sales strategy that their team wasn’t built for.
In short: LegalZoom had drawn resources away from the thing that worked, and put them on something that didn’t work. That nearly killed LegalZoom — and the only way to save it was to kill ProxyLaw. So that’s what they did. LegalZoom went on to be worth billions, and Brian would later cofound ShoeDazzle, Honest Company, and now Arena Club.
I asked Brian what he learned from this near-disaster, and he said it’s simple: “A lot of your responsibility is saying no.”
You are a professional noper
Your job isn’t just to say yes. Your job is also to say no. It doesn’t matter if you’re leading yourself, a team, a startup, or a massive company. You contribute by creating focus, and you create focus by eliminating distractions.
Brian explained it this way:
“Every day, you’re seeing more opportunities. It’s like, ‘Oh, we could do this, we could do that. We could do all of it.’ Guess what? You can’t. Instead, if you have something that’s working, make sure to go deep and build a foundation of strength before extending.”
That’s great advice — especially the first sentence: “Every day, you’re seeing more opportunities.”
If you jump at every new opportunity, it’s as if you’re thinking: “I might not get another one like this.” That’s a scarcity mindset, and it’ll lead you to hoard the wrong things.
Instead, Brian says, operate from an abundance mindset: You must believe that more opportunities will come. That allows you to make better decisions.
Here’s how I used Brian’s advice
After talking to Brian, I realized that all opportunities could be broken down into one of two categories:
Every opportunity is either a LegalZoom, or it’s a ProxyLaw.
Which is to say: Everything is either a growth opportunity, or it’s a harmful distraction. Your job is to know which is which.
By total coincidence, on the same week I talked to Brian, a friend reached out to me with a business idea. My friend is smart and accomplished, and his idea was appealing. We could have had fun and made a lot of money together.
But then I applied Brian’s lesson to this idea.
First, I thought about what I already do. It’s a lot of things — Entrepreneur magazine, my podcast, this newsletter, speaking, a CPG coaching company, and more. How do I balance it all? Largely, it’s because they all build off my same core competencies as a communicator. I work quickly and confidently. That is my LegalZoom.
But my friend’s opportunity required more of me. I would have needed to learn new skills, understand a new audience, and build in ways I haven’t before. I’m sure I could have done it, but it would have drawn energy away from my existing work — and that made it a ProxyLaw.
Once I broke it down that way, the answer became easy. By declining my friend, I wasn’t saying no to new opportunity. I was saying yes to the opportunities I already have.
So, what’s your LegalZoom and ProxyLaw?
There’s a good reason everyone struggles with this problem: It’s really hard.
Truly, I struggle with it daily. My greatest frustration in life is that there’s just one of me. I have so much more I want to do, to see, to experience. It is cruel to have just one life, just 24 hours in a day, just one little timeline in which to fit only some of our interests, and pursue only some of the paths, and enjoy only some of the benefits. I want more. I want more than more. I want infinity.
But this is what it is. So we have a choice: We can do some things great, or we can do many things poorly.
Hard as that sounds, the answer should be clear.
That’s how to do one thing better.
