..."make the music you want to make now and enjoy it"

Yoko Ono

Sticking your nose out into the public sphere is quite a scene. You can be heralded as an “expert” simply because you are brilliant or daring or showed up.

Often, it is simply because you said yes.

“Just say yes until you're 40” states Atul Gawande in conversation with Adam Grant.

The best advice I got which came late in life, but seemed to register was a colleague who said, "Just say yes until you're 40, and after 40, just say no." When you're young, you don't know what actually energizes you and what you will prove to be good at. You don't have a sample size to know. … I ended up going to a place like Stanford, where everything was open to me. It was too much choice. And so I just started saying yes to stuff. And then I paid attention to the things that actually energized me.

This seems like sage advice. Coincidentally the timing of saying “no” aligned pretty closely with my onset of career fantods.