The Problem with “Yes And:” Sometimes the Right Answer is “No”

In improv comedy, they have a game called “yes and.” In the game, one comedian tosses out an idea without group consultation and the other comedians run with it, taking whatever the first person proposed as a given, adding their own ideas. The game continues until the skit created by combining one random suggestion with another runs its course of creativity and absurdity, naturally running out of steam.

The game has morphed into a technique recommended as overall life advice and as something usable in business situations. Never say no! Add nuance, add ideas, add context, add timelines for consideration—but never say no to a suggestion.

I’ve even had “you need to say ‘yes and’!” snapped at me during a debate with a family member.

Granted, sometimes I do need to say yes more often. My immediate response too often tends to the “no”—even when it comes to my own ideas. As I recognize this about myself, I continue to work on at least responding that I’ll think about the idea, even when my initial gut reaction is “no.”

Problem: The proposer hears this “maybe” and believes they have license to harass me into agreeing or assume that I have effectively agreed and just need some time to give official assent. (Fortunately, this only applies to outside ideas. If I generated the idea, I don’t tend to self-harass. That would indicate a different problem.)

The harassment, which the harasser would certainly call “convincing,” though it sure doesn’t feel that way to me, either commences immediately, after a brief interval, or shortly after I’ve returned with a “no.”

However, though I love the concept of “yes and” and think it works well in group brainstorming sessions—and in improvisational comedy troupes—I believe firmly that we do have to say “no” more often than we say “yes” in this life.

If you say “yes and” to everything presented, including projects and ideas and even opinions, you don’t protect your own values and wants and projects and visions.

I smiled at a tweet from someone who tried using “yes and” in playing with her toddler. The child repeatedly said no to her “yes and” suggestions and finally grew frustrated, snapping at the mother that the story—it could have been a game with self-invented rules, I don’t remember exactly—was her vision and her play and her imagination and to butt out. The kid’s reaction resonated with me. You go, little strong one.

You have to know when to say “yes and—but no.” Or “no for me, but awesome for you.”

Perhaps the best middle ground could be “yes but”—in which you agree to a portion or agree with certain parameters of the proposition that make it acceptable to you and your needs.

We have limited time in our lives to do stuff, a fact that’s crystallized ever further for me as I get older and as I’ve seen how long things take.

We only live so long. We can fully apply ourselves to only so many projects and activities and ideas and beliefs and visions.

After choosing from several different nuggets of ideas for it, some of which had percolated for years—as do all my ideas and themes—it then took me several years to create what I decided was my first “marketable” novel manuscript. By marketable, I mean a novel manuscript that I felt ready to take to literary agents in hopes of representation. For a short story I had published, I drafted the first round twenty years before it appeared, revised the story ten years after I’d drafted it, and then revised it again ten years later before it was ready for a literary magazine to publish.

At a literary festival I attended not long ago, a well-known author said that he often gets asked about where he gets his ideas, though the real concern isn’t finding an idea but choosing which idea to pursue, given that each novel takes him around ten years from idea through writing and publishing through to marketing it in hardcover, paperback, and beyond—and that he then has to talk about that book for the rest of his career, or longer, because every book he has ever published someone may read at any moment, prompting questions about it decades down the line.

Choose carefully, in other words. Even if you’ll never have someone ask you about a project decades after you’ve called it done.

Beyond writing, I have more personal and work examples of this just-say-no principle than I can reasonably share in a simple post like this one. They include ideas from my team about work projects and angles, proposals from clients about additional work or project additions, recommendations and ideas from friends and contacts about things I could or should do in facets of my life, options from family and acquaintances for vacations and hobbies, and even people positing ideas and beliefs and visions that they want me to endorse and that I just cannot.

True, we can say no and later regret it. I have a few of those past experiences. Yet we can say yes and regret it as well—and I might have even more of those examples.

Obviously, I’ve had a constellation of topics around choice and commitment on my mind a bit lately—if not from time to time in my life. Years ago, I wrote an article about the value of commitment and more recently I wrote about how to know where to let go and where to commit.

The challenge of a lifetime is knowing which answer to give: Yes and? Yes but? No?

I believe we’ll never quite know the right answer, or even if a right answer exists in some cases. I believe we will always make mistakes. But here, as everywhere in life, if we live on purpose and not by rote (yet another challenge), we can assess, adjust, improve, and grow.