YES MAN! I watched this movie the other night at a friend’s house. Jim Carrey is a single, divorced guy, who is working in a dead end job. As usual Jim Carrey did a great job portraying his character.

The plot goes like this, stuck in a rut for 3 years; he bumps into a friend, who has just gone through a personal growth course, called “Yes Man”. He finally decides that he should check the course out and after some reluctance make a covenant with the facilitator of the course, to say  “YES”; to every situation that he encounters rather than “NO” or “MAYBE”.

As you can imagine this leads to all kinds of situation that  normally would not have happened. Besides being a really funny movie, it made me thing how often I say “NO” or “MAYBE”, before I have really given myself a chance to think about the opportunity that has just be presented to me.

“YES”! I usually say “NO” out of habit, fear or a past experience. I can give you all kinds of reasons and justifiers, even some good stories to prove my point, why I said “NO”, but I don’t tend to just say “YES” and jump in. This may sound like a wiser, smarter move to not just jump in, but this is where the spice of life is.

When I was in my twenty’s. I found that I would say “YES” a lot of the time, to see what happened. Several times I sold everything and caught a plane, landing in a foreign country, with just my back pack, a few cloths and a camera.

I remember being in Cairns, Australia, walking down the street and a man came up to my friend and me and asked whether we would like to sail up to Papua New Guinea. It sounded like fun, so we turned up at the dock and a short time later we were on our way to PNG. We sail through a Cyclone (Hurricane on this side of the plant), where the waves were so high that when we were in the trough of the wave the mast of the 45ft sailboat was at the crest of the wave and we could see the shoals of tuna running in the wave beside us.

This went on for 5 1/2 days and nights, until we hit the coastal waters of Papua New Guinea, then the weather broke and it became calm. Crystal blue waters with dolphins riding in the bow wave of our boat and palm trees all around. Every day was a new adventure, diving, climbing up to the rim of a still smoking volcano, going into the tunnels where the Japanese had housed their fleet and men. Lots of the boats, subs and equipment where still in there.

Japanese ship in a tunnel.

The people of PNG were great and I made many friends in my time there. They say that PNG is like ” every place you have never been before” and they are right. I would have missed it all if I had said “NO”. Yes, it might have been safer, wiser, less risky, to stay home and do  ”normal thing”, but where’s the fun in that and I would not have had this story to share with you or such an amazing experience.

I have come to realize, that doing what I think I should or what is safe and smart is just another form of slow death and where as I don’t recommend stupidity when saying “YES”, I do think that taking more chances is a good thing. So I encourage you to say “YES”, as often as you can in your life. I plan to recommit to saying “YES”, as it bought a quality to my life that is normally not there, when I just go with the safe and wise choices.