F*ck No!: How to Stop Saying Yes When You Cant, You Shouldnt, or You Just Dont Want To By Sarah Knight
How to say no without being an a**hole, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck
Are you burnt out from taking on more than you can handle or accepting less than you deserve? Tired of giving in instead of sticking up for yourself? Sick of saying yes all the time? You're gonna love F*CK NO!
No is an acceptable answer, and it's time to start using it. Whether you're a People-Pleaser, Overachiever, Pushover, or have serious FOMO, bestselling anti-guru Sarah Knight helps you say what you really mean without being really mean--or burning out for fear of missing out.
Life is so much better when you say no with confidence--and without guilt, fear, or regret. F*ck No! delivers practical strategies that give you the power to decline, and concrete examples that put the words right into your mouth. You'll discover:
The joy of no
No-Tips for all occasions
How to set boundaries
Fill-in-the-blank F*ckNotes
The No-and-Switch, the Power No--and how to take no for an answer yourself
And much more!
Praise for Sarah Knight and the No F*cks Given Guides
Self-help to swear by. --Boston Globe
Genius. --Vogue
Hilarious, irreverent, and no-nonsense. --Bustle
F*ck No!: How to Stop Saying Yes When You Cant, You Shouldnt, or You Just Dont Want To
Read F*ck No!: How to Stop Saying Yes When You Cant, You Shouldnt, or You Just Dont Want To
I always enjoy a new book from Sarah Knight! She’s blunt and to the point but helps you’d simplify how you can handle certain situations without causing you more stress. Funny and quirky and highly entertaining with her words of wisdom may just be the perfect book for you to start in the new year! 304 Some useful tips on how to say no...but it can get very repetitive and could have easily been half the book that it is. 304 I should have said no to this book, and I did, eventually, about halfway through.
I've read a few of Sarah Knight's book in the past, and comparatively speaking, this one was disappointing. There was no useful advice in here, nothing that you couldn't get with a quick google search. In fact, at one point, the book talks about how easy it is for people to find things on google. That's the only good advice that you're going to get. If you have a problem with saying no, google it and you'll find all the information you need without spending any of your precious f*ckbucks, both literal and figurative, on this book.
There was a good deal of linking to other parts of the book. I can't remember a single page in my kindle edition that didn't have blue text somewhere on it. The end result is that the book feels more like a click bait website sending you from one article to the other while telling you how great the advice is without actually giving you any advice. I struggle to see how it works in print format when so much energy is spent on sending you to other parts of the book. Like a choose your own adventure book only with no plot and no ending.
We all know Sarah Knight made a parody about Marie Kondo's The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which is all well and good. It was funny and original and actually had some useful advice. But that was five books ago. And bringing it up five books later just seems petty. Maybe there's only so much anti-self-help to be written before someone runs out of ideas. Or maybe if a little more time had been dedicated to this book it might have actually had some useful information. As it stands, the book seems nothing more than a cheap gimmick trying to cash grab on previous books' successes. At some point the same old gag gets tired, and substance is needed to make the book worthwhile.
If you're looking for a New Year's Resolution to stop saying yes to everything, I did a google search and here's a helpful article from 2015. 7 Ways to Say No To Someone and Not Feel Bad About It. It's just as useful as this book and takes a fraction of the time to read. I just saved you some f*ckbucks. I also got better advice from the Peloton app on this topic than I did from this book. If it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no.
Give this one a pass and read one of Sarah Knight's older books instead.
I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. 304 If there was ever a person who needed a book about how to say no, it's me. So thank you to the publishers for giving me an ARC in return for my unbiased review!
My inability to say no has impacted my life greatly. Ultimately, I like saying yes. I think that just comes down to it. I like being able to solve a problem someone else experiences, I like being able to take some work from someone else, being able to say, sure, don't worry, I got it.
And like, I think this is mostly a good thing. With some of my wonderful friends, it builds a connection where both of you will always help each other. It's amazing to know there's someone out there who will always say yes to you. (Or as I used to refer to it, it's what happens when a Hufflepuff befriends other Hufflepuffs or Slytherins).
Anyways, I read this book because I wanted some help in learning when is it okay to say no. I've found myself slowly realizing that my desire to always say yes comes at the cost of my time and my mental health as well as people's respect towards those things. It is time to learn when to say no.
However, and unfortunately, this isn't what this book is about. Instead, Sarah Knight provides us people-pleasers with a very long list of ways to say no. She seems to assume that our problem is that we simply don't have the words, that if I knew how to say no, I would say no.
This is ridiculous because I know how to express myself. My problem isn't that I just don't know how to say no. It's that I second-guess each no, that I say yes before even thinking about it, that I feel terrible whenever I say no. I was hoping this book would deal with those things.
And yeah, there's a chapter about this but in it, Knight essentially says that it's always okay to say no, or at least, that it's almost always okay to say no. Now, when it comes down to it, I just don't agree with this attitude.
I want to live in a world where if I need help, I can ask people and they'll say yes. I wonder if Knight has ever tried to arrange something and felt how incredibly frustrating it is to need something from people and have all of them be absolutely useless. Or what it's like to arrange some type of gathering and have everyone cancel. Or to need help at work and get tons of excuses from everyone.
Ultimately, even if you manage to mask your no in a nice way, you're still saying no. There's no way to hide that and I think we have to consider the implications of saying no. We have to consider the values that we're building our society with when we teach that you can say no whenever you just don't want to do something.
Knight touches upon this briefly in the last chapter. It's not enough. The world Knight is describing is one where everyone selfishly chooses how to act based on their own comforts and needs all the time, where that's the only thing that guides you.
I would much rather create relationships that foster honesty and loyalty. Where we can say things like, mm, I'm not in the mood but like, I can see that you need my help so I'm going to do it and this clarifies to the other person where you stand. Or alternatively, I don't really want to do this but like, if you absolutely need me to, I will, and that the other side will be honest and demand only what is fair. Where when we say a Hard No, it's because we absolutely do not or can not do the thing and then the other person will respect it.
I just feel like saying yes does open doors and it does lead to stronger relationships. And yeah, I should be more careful when it comes to the people I choose to say yes to but with those people, it's amazing to know that we have each other's back, even when it's inconvenient.
Beyond this, this book could have been a nice blog post. As a book, it was way too repetitive. I mean, come on, I don't need to be told the same thing a dozen times, I get it. The lack of conversation about the impact of your words was disappointing.
Knight's narrative voice is the type of quirky and jokey voice that some readers will adore and others will despise. I was pretty neutral, I didn't laugh but I also didn't find it very annoying. There's a lot of cursing which might make some readers uncomfortable.
So yeah, if you're the kind of person that struggles with wording your nos and you need a book giving you phrases for pretty much every situation you'll encounter in life, this is the book for you. For me, I'm probably going to stick to my people pleaser ways.
What I'm Taking With Me
- I can't shake the feeling that in like 10 years (if the world will still exist), future me is gonna look at this and go, ugh, I can't believe I thought these things, this is why no one ever treated me with respect.
- I will say that the FuckNoTes were cute.
- Ack, it's late. I've got to sleep. 304 An empowering, tough-love, profanity-laced journey into boundaries, etiquette, breaking cultural norms, and defeating your inner Yes-Men. A good read for pushovers, overachievers, people-pleasers, and those who hate to miss out, or in fact for anyone who's trying to get a better handle on when and how to say no. Like most self-help books, the sample phrases are not universally applicable (especially because strong use of snark is not for everyone) but enough room is given for customization that the tips themselves hold true. The big impact of this book is convincing the reader that they deserve to say no at any time and for any reason, because their time and energy are valuable and worth protecting. It helped this reader - and piqued my interest in Knight's other volumes.
-Callen 304
As a life-long people pleaser myself, I found this book to be educational, insightful and also a lot of fun. Sarah repeatedly emphasizes the importance of knowing when to say no, giving many random examples and answers for each case. I am definitely taking notes from her and applying her methods and advice IRL as of now. 304 Dammit I hate it when the GR app “loses” your incomplete review because you dared switch to another page to look up the meaning of a word so as to not appear a complete ignoramus, sigh. I thought they were working on that. Never mind, starting again...
I don’t read many self-help books, mainly because in my experience they are usually repetitive and patronising collections of personal anecdotes and tortuous reworkings of the central premise (usually the title), padded out over 300 pages. However, I saw this on NetGalley and decided it was an area I could use some help with, and found it an amusing light-hearted guide to navigating personal relationships, which doesn’t take itself too seriously, that I will probably re-read in future.
This turns out to be the fifth book in the author’s “No F***s Given Guides” which began with “The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a F***” which I had heard of but conflated in my mind with “The Subtle Art if Not Giving a F***” - I imagine these two best-sellers cover similar territory but had not read either, for reasons stated above. I haven’t read Marie Kondo either although do like her lesson on how to fold a T-shirt. Having clearly found a market, Sarah Knight has gone on to explore related areas like getting organised and celebrating your individuality, and this time she tackles that seemingly innocuous but surprisingly difficult challenge that we all face: saying no!
Explaining that people who have difficulty saying No fall in to four different personality types - People pleasers, Overachievers, FOMO and Pushovers - or combinations thereof (surprise surprise I’m all of these), she starts by exploring the reasons why we have such difficulty turning down requests, be they from colleagues, friends, family or even complete strangers. She breaks these down into chapters with plenty of examples and a few well-chosen and not-too-annoying anecdotes. I like her writing style but if the liberal use of the F-word offends you, you should buy a different book. (Similarly Trump-supporters and the highly religious should skip this one.)
Reading this made me reflect that I have already become a lot better at saying No - to extra work-shifts, to requests to borrow money, to loaning things, but it’s the way I feel about it afterwards - sleepless nights, anxiety about the impact on my relationships, angst about being a bad person... so I think the no-nonsense way she points out that other people aren’t necessarily thinking what you think they are, very helpful. I’m even going to apply this to my reviewing - just because an author or publisher I’ve never heard of reaches out to ask me to review their novel, doesn’t mean I have to...
Yes it gets repetitive, but that didn’t bother me as the general idea is to learn how to use the same principles in different situations - deciding when to reject/decline a request, being polite and/or honest about it, backing yourself and avoiding the associated guilt (the bit I struggle with the most) - which as she points out is mostly self-inflicted. Having stock phrases ready in advance, buying yourself time when caught unprepared, suggested ways of softening your rejection, were all concepts that seem very obvious but made a lot of sense to me. I am actually now tempted to read TLCMONGAF!
My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc which allowed me to give an honest review. F*** No is available on 31st December. 304 Some funny moments had me thinking the author could do stand-up comedy. I liked her book you do you much more. 304 This book has a few useful tips but nothing noteworthy!
I’d classify it more as an entertaining read than an informative one.
It is also worth mentioning that as the book progresses, it does get a tad repetitive. In my opinion, it would’ve worked better as a short and to the point article on ‘how to say no in different situations’.
I would like to thank the Publishers, NetGalley, and the Author for sending me a copy of this book.
You can check out my reviews on my blog. 304 I love how timely Sarah Knight's books come into my life. In F*ck No, not only does she presents creative answers to a varied range of situations, but the book can help you (like I'm trying to convince myself right now) to understand when someone says No to you.
Yes, it can be hard, yes, it's not easy, but we need to say no and choose ourselves before everybody else. But you have to understand that if you ask something to someone, they too can choose themselves. That's the hardest part!
Like in every book, Sarah's sarcasm is priceless. I haven't realized how many puns you could do with No... It's really funny!
Many thanks to Little, Brown and Company for the complimentary e-copy of this book through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. 304
