When You Don't Know What You Actually Want: How To Say No, When To Say Yes, and The One Question That Cuts Through It | Yara Shahidi

What It Covers

Actor and Harvard graduate Yara Shahidi speaks with Chris Duffy about navigating purpose, identity, and decision-making. She shares practical frameworks including the "hard yes list," the "year of no," and the "highest order" question for clarifying values when external anchors like school or career disappear.

Key Questions Answered

• •Hard Yes List: Build a personal inventory of specific things that reliably restore your energy — a color, a food, live music, coffee with a friend. Track these throughout the year so that during low moments, you have a ready arsenal of concrete, material resets rather than relying on willpower alone to push through.
• •Year of No Framework: Before building a "yes" list, run a deliberate period of refusal — declining commitments that don't align with your priorities. This creates the contrast needed to identify what qualifies as a genuine hard yes. Saying yes to everything without that filter produces activity without direction or personal meaning.
• •Highest Order Question: When facing decisions about what to fight for or pursue, identify three core values driving your actions. Shahidi's family uses the phrase "highest order" — replaceable with "priorities" or "purpose." Apply it at both macro life scale and micro project scale to cut through external pressure and social expectation.
• •Intentional Incompetence: Deliberately pursue activities where failure is guaranteed — Shahidi practices glockenspiel, watercoloring, and crocheting without completion goals. This practice dismantles the reflex to avoid unfamiliar domains out of embarrassment, opens unexpected opportunities, and generates joy decoupled from performance metrics or external validation of skill.
• •Optimism as Daily Practice: Optimism is not a personality trait but a cultivated discipline requiring consistent effort. Shahidi frames it as fighting for joy on worst days, not coasting on best ones. Pessimism produces inaction; even naive optimism generates more output. Treat optimism as a skill to maintain through community, conversation, and structured reflection.