ISSUE 83
22 APRIL 2026 | READ ONLINE
Hi Reader,
Last Thursday, I chose fifteen people.
That’s the short version. The longer version is that I spent Thursday morning on a video call, finalizing a list I’d been building in my head for weeks. Fifteen leaders whose applications I’d been reading and rereading while walking the dog, while brushing my teeth, while half-listening to podcasts. Some I’d never met. Some I already knew. All of them, in different ways, inspiring.
By Thursday afternoon, fifteen emails were out the door – invitations into a leadership program I’ve been dreaming about for months.
And by Friday morning, the person I couldn’t stop thinking about wasn’t any of the fifteen.
It was number seventeen.
A woman whose application I’d read twice. Then a third time. She would have been extraordinary. On our scoring, she came in one seat short.
She is not getting an email from me this week.
And that (the quiet weight of a “no” to someone worthy) is the part of leadership I spent most of my career avoiding.
For years, I wouldn’t say no to anyone. I said yes to the extra project, the extra committee, the extra hour, the extra person I didn’t quite have room for but couldn’t bear to turn away. I built a twenty-year corporate career on that posture, and I called it generosity. It was, most of the time, something less flattering. It was the refusal to decide.
When you cannot disappoint anyone, you cannot actually choose. When you cannot choose, you cannot lead. You can only react (faster, and faster) until something gives. Usually, your body. Sometimes, the people who love you. Eventually both.
What finally helped me change was something I read in Harvard Business Review. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, writing about why organizations quietly fail, argued that most of us (whether we run a team, a company, or the portfolio that is our own career) are carrying “far too many … and far too few that truly matter.” The fix, he wrote, is not more effort. It is learning to treat stopping things as a mark of leadership, not a failure of it.
It took me twenty years to hear that. Number seventeen is why it finally landed.
Because my old reflex, hearing about that extraordinary woman on the edge of my list, would have been to create a sixteenth seat. Or a seventeenth. Or quietly add her to a “maybe” list that would haunt us both for six months. I would have called that kindness. I now understand it as the opposite. A refusal to honor the fifteen, by diluting what they had been promised.
So here is the reframe I am trying to live inside this week.
A yes is a door. It is also a wall. You cannot open one without building the other.
Every yes you hold is also a no you’re making, whether you name it or not. The fifteen emails that went out on Thursday are a wall I built, on purpose, around what this year of my life is for. Everything I get asked to do from here on has to sit next to those fifteen people (and next to my family, and my book, and my own health) and prove it belongs.
And the woman at number seventeen? I wrote to her separately. I told her the truth. I told her I hope our paths cross again, and I mean it.
That, as best I can tell, is the actual work.
A small experiment for this week. Pick one.
Option A: Find your number seventeen. Look back at the last month. What did you say no to (or simply never get to) that you’re still carrying some guilt or sadness about? Name the person. The project. The opportunity. Then ask yourself honestly: what did my yes to other things buy me that made that no worth it? If you can’t answer, that’s useful information. If you can, write it down somewhere you’ll see it when the next tempting yes arrives.
Option B: The single-sentence strategy. Finish this sentence, in writing: This year of my life is for ___. Then compare it to your calendar for the next seven days. If the two don’t match, one of them is lying. One of them has to move.
See you next week,
P.S. If there’s a yes (or a no) you’ve been circling for weeks and haven’t landed, that’s exactly the kind of thing my Kickstart coaching package was built for. Four sessions. No long commitment. Just enough structure to help you actually decide. Details here.
On my desk this week
📘 If today’s piece landed for you, my book is the long-form version of it. Clarity in Chaos: Lead with Purpose in Disruptive Times is on Amazon (paperback or Kindle) and sits next to the “yes or no?” questions I’m still asking myself every quarter. (You can also find it at Routledge, Barnes & Noble, or signed by me via Stripe (US only).
📗 Also on my shelf this week, right next to it: Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. If today’s letter made you reach for a pen, this book is the next 200 pages of that same argument, and the line of his that has never quite let me go is: “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” That is, in the end, what the fifteen emails were about.
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