Stop Asking Me.

I was 5 miles into a 10 mile run, 100 degrees out, when Tim Grover said the thing that made me stop hearing the rest of the hour.

We were all born relentless. We were taught to relent. You ever try to negotiate with a two year old? You got no chance. I don't care how great your selling skills are, you can't negotiate with a two year old.

I looked to the side like somebody was standing there. Said damn out loud on an empty sidewalk. Then spent the next 5 miles trying to hold onto it.

He said you cannot negotiate with a two year old. What I heard was harder. You can tell a two year old something objectively, logically correct and they will still refuse. Being right is not a lever. There is no handle on the outside of that kid.

The first thing I thought after that was not about business. It was that I do not want to take that out of my kids. Even the part of it that costs me.

Stop asking me

My daughter asks if we can go out to eat. No. A few minutes later she asks again. No. She asks a third time and I hear myself say stop asking me.

I have said that sentence more than once. I never like how it feels an hour later.

Grover's version: we spend a year desperate for a kid to walk, another year desperate for them to talk, then spend the next 16 telling them to sit down and be quiet. We film the first steps. We text the first words to the whole family. Then the same trait points at us and we call it attitude.

Here is where I landed on the back half of that run. I do not have to say yes. Saying no is most of the job. What I cannot do is train the asking out of her, because the asking is the asset. She should get comfortable being told no, over and over, by somebody who loves her. That is a cheap place to practice.

And parents are not always right. Even when we are right, it does not matter. Being right was never the thing that was supposed to stop her.

I quit after 2 rejections

I wanted to be a vet. Good grades, no AP classes, no idea how the path from my high school to that job actually worked. My parents could not hand me that map. I applied anyway and I got shut down.

Twice. Then I let it go.

Looking back I do not think I would have loved that job. That is not the part that bothers me. The number 2 is.

Around those same years, people close to me told me not to get married. Some of the same people told me not to have kids. Not one of those conversations made it past my ears. I never lost a night to it. I have never regretted either one.

Same person, same stretch of life. One rejection folded me. The other never made it into my brain at all.

That is not willpower. I think I finally know what it is. The vet thing was built out of an argument. I wanted work I would enjoy that also paid, and being a veterinarian was the answer. A want you reasoned your way into can be taken from you by reasoning. Two rejections were new information, so the answer updated. That is what answers do.

Nobody argued me into my wife. There was no (because) underneath it, so there was nothing to attack.

That is what the two year old has. Their want has no argument holding it up, which means your argument has nothing to grab.

Say what you want out loud with no (because) attached to it. If you cannot finish the sentence without justifying it, that want is not going to survive its second no.

I was relentless about the wrong half

I had this backwards for 3 years.

I built a homeschooling app. Virtual staging for real estate. Something that read faces. A podcast tool I kept rebuilding under new names for longer than I want to write down. Almost nobody bought any of it.

Every one of those wants came out of an argument. The market is big. The tech got cheap this year. This could work. So when one of them stopped looking good I did not fight for it. I swapped it, because an argument is easy to replace and I like making them.

What I never questioned once was the method. Alone, at night, in a terminal, building. I would abandon what I wanted inside a week and I would not change how I worked for 3 years.

The washer and dryer rental is the only thing I run where it goes the other direction. Roughly 1 in 10 customers turns into a loss. I have eaten that more than once and I am not quitting, because I never argued myself into this one either. It pays and it is mine.

What did change is everything around it. Now I want the address, pictures of the space, and a picture of the plug before anything goes on the truck. Vetting people up front moved my paid rate more than anything else I have tried, and the tone of the whole business came up with it.

Grover has another line in that hour I liked less. Everybody tells you that when you get knocked down you jump right back up. He says do not. Stay down a second and understand why you went down, because every time you stand up you have to stand up a different person. Otherwise you get knocked down the same way forever.

That is the entire difference between those two businesses. With the products I bounced up instantly every time and stood up the same guy holding a new idea. With the washers I stayed down, ate the loss, and stood up somebody who asks for a picture of the outlet.

The machine relents every time

A two year old cannot be talked out of anything. The tool I use all day can be talked out of everything.

I have instructions sitting in my config telling Claude to push back on me and be brutally honest. I run agents whose job is to check other agents. It still folds. Push on a correct answer with nothing but confidence and it comes back with sorry, I did not mean that, and hands me the wrong one. The setup helps. It does not fix it.

The failure that worries me is not that one. It is the quiet one. If I say no, no, no, no, it keeps going down the path I picked. It never gets tired and tells me I am being ridiculous. It will build the wrong thing well, for as long as I am willing to insist.

The most useful tool I own has no wants of its own. It adopts mine on contact and defends them longer than a person would. Every model is trained to agree with you, which means the last thing in the room able to hold a position is you.

That is a great deal when I am pointed at the right thing. It is the fastest way I know to be wrong.

So stop asking the model whether the idea is good. It will say yes. Ask what would have to be true for this to work, then go check those things yourself, out in the world, with somebody who can hang up on you.

What I did with it this week

My middle daughter has been asking for a lemonade and cookie stand. Asking the way Grover means.

The correct, logical answer is that I do not have room for it. I work, I run the rental business, I build for a client, I write this. Instead I built her the thing. A small site, and a flyer with a QR code so a neighbor can put in an address and an order. One of each for 5 dollars, or 3 dollars each. Now we know what to bake and how much before we bake any of it, which is the actual lesson. My kids drew the flyer.

It is more on my plate. That is the point. She pushed, and I want the pushing to work sometimes, or the thing she learns is that asking twice never pays.

No is fine. Stop asking me is not.

I would rather get worn down at my own dinner table every week for the next 16 years than raise somebody who quits after 2 rejections. I know exactly what that costs. I already paid it.

Earlier in this thread:

Sources:

Tim Grover, WINNING: The Unforgiving Race To Greatness, live at FUBCON 2023 — full talk