Say Yes, Then Find Another Way

If you asked me for the closest thing I have to a career philosophy, it comes down to two habits. Say yes. And when someone tells you no, find another way.

Let me tell you where the first one comes from. When I was in my second year of university, I was obsessed with a company called Meyer Sound and its founder, John Meyer, who was quite famous in the audio world. I went to an Audio Engineering Society convention specifically to find him. I'd never met him, but I knew what he looked like, he has long hair and a beard down to his waist, so I figured he wouldn't be hard to spot. I was about twenty years old and terrified. I saw him walking through the convention, walked straight up, and in a shaky voice basically said: could I come do an internship at your company this summer? He looked me up and down and said, go talk to Pete Soper at the booth, tell him I sent you.

That was it. That one nervous conversation turned into an internship, which turned into me learning an incredible amount in a single summer, which turned into my first R&D job straight out of school and my first U.S. patent in my first year. None of it was a master plan. I had the tenacity to walk up to the person, and then I said yes to everything that followed.

That became a rule for me: say yes. Someone calls and asks if you want to do a podcast, you say yes. Someone offers you a conference, a trade show, a trip to Europe or China, you say yes. The point isn't the individual event. The point is that every yes expands your network, and a wide network is what makes opportunities appear in the first place. It doesn't matter whether you're a researcher, an engineer, or a founder, build a web of people around you, and doors you didn't know existed start opening.

The second habit is the stubborn one, and I love it just as much. When someone says no, that's not the end of the project. That's a puzzle.

The clearest example is the robot musician we eventually put on stage at the Sydney Opera House. That project got cancelled twice inside Accenture. Everyone thought it was dead. So I flew back to Bangalore, went to the team at the innovation center there, and made them a deal: help me fund this, and afterward I'll bring the robot to you so it can live in your setup and be used for proofs of concept. They said yes. I came back to Australia, where everyone assumed the project was over, and announced I'd secured about half a million dollars of funding to make it happen. The work went ahead.

I've watched projects "fail" two or three times before they worked. The underwater Street View project failed multiple times before we found the way through. What I've learned is that a no is almost always a no to one particular path, not to the goal. If you keep the goal fixed and stay willing to change the route, most things are more possible than they look.

So that's the whole philosophy, and it's not complicated. Say yes, because that's how the network and the opportunities compound. And when you hit a wall, don't take it as a verdict, go find the other way around.