There’s a certain type of old video game where you start moving, and the whole point is just to avoid obstacles for as long as you can. You can swerve back and forth, but you can’t just stop – you keep moving and the obstacles keep coming (often with increasing speed) until you beat the game or you perish.
Life is like that, too.
Sometimes you don’t want to do something. You get a request to do some task, an offer with an opportunity, or a need to be met. It’s fine to not want to do that, whatever it is. But you don’t get to just pause your life. You keep moving forward, like it or not. You have to do something, in other words, even if you don’t want to do that thing.
You can’t say “no,” only “no, but…”
You can give yourself alternatives. You can swerve, juke, and pivot. In fact, you should! But you can’t just halt so the obstacle never comes.
The next time you don’t want to do something, pick something else. It doesn’t even have to be something you’d love, just something you’d hate less than the first option. Keep picking less-bad options each time, and your life will look pretty great before you know it.
The Opportunity Machine 