The Difference Between Successful People And Very Successful People

I’m reading Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind from the 99U book series. The other day, I shared an image from it on Facebook.

“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.” -Warren Buffett

After I posted it, a smart friend commented:

Explain please. It seems to me that very successful people A) say yes when others say no and B) don’t take no for an answer.

Okay, I’ll explain.

To me, it means that once you reach a certain level, you’re faced with lots of hard choices between good/great things. You don’t have enough time or energy to say “yes” to everything and have to be very wise about focusing your time, energy, enthusiasm, and optimism toward the things that best advance your overall objectives. Or something like that.

(The late Steve Jobs – unsurprisingly – had an interesting take on this.)

And speaking of Apple, they released this video last week:

Click me if you can’t see the embedded video full of awesome.

(And here’s another recent take from the sublime Donald Miller.)

How about you? To what will you say “no” this week?