Entrepreneur and Silicon Valley oracle Paul Graham writes that having kids is what finally made him realize that life is in fact short: 

“If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it’s impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.”

Once you know that life is short, arguments in the form of “life is too short for X” are increasingly important.

Graham calls the category of things that life is too short for is “bullshit.”

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a long and influential essay in 1986 exploring the nature of bullshit, but Graham offers a characteristically succinct definition: “It’s the junk food of experience.” 

Entrepreneur Derek Sivers writes on his blog that your life can be improved by adding things to it – or by subtracting things from it.

Other people and organizations often push us to add more things to our lives because it benefits them, but as Sivers notes, “the secret is to focus on subtracting.”

For Sivers, the least successful people he knows are drawn to distractions, run in conflicting directions, are chained to emotional obstacles, and say “yes” to almost everything.

But the most successful people he knows “have a narrow focus, protect against time-wasters, say no to almost everything, and have let go of old limiting beliefs.”

In a Periscope video, entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant says that our biology is at odds with the number of choices available to us in modern society.

We evolved in tribes of 150 people, and in that context if you passed on one option, a second option was unlikely to come along.

But in modern society, we’re inundated with options: there are over 7 billion people on the planet, we’re connected to most of them through the internet, and each of us potentially has access to hundreds or thousands of career opportunities.

It can be hard deciding among all the available options.

To make this process easier, Ravikant uses the following decision-making heuristic: If you can’t decide, the answer is no.

For example, say you’re facing one of the below decisions:

These are all difficult decisions, and their effects can last far into your future. Because of that, you should only say yes if you’re relatively certain.

If you find yourself creating a spreadsheet to weigh your options or making a list of pros and cons, “forget it.”

The answer is no.

“Most of any individual’s significant achievements – most of the value someone adds in professional, intellectual, artistic, cultural, or athletic terms – are achieved in a minority of their time. There is a profound imbalance between what is created and the time taken to create it, whether the time is measured in days, weeks, months, years, or a lifetime.”

- Author and consultant Richard Koch in his book The 80/20 Principle