You are dscribing a perfect way for an early burn-out and a lonely life.
Relationships are one of the most important things in life, and I say this as a guy who could litteraly not talk to anyone for two weeks strait. It's relationships with people that get you your first customers for your start-up, your key employees. relationships keep you down to earth, friends and fmily. The latter being one of the most important elements in your life, your kids and spouse.
Why am I saying this? Because relationships go both ways. When you care about people, chances are some of them will care about you as well. And if you don't really care about your customers, your company is screwed anyway.
Granted, everyone has a different bandwidth to handle these relationships, and seperating the toxic ones from the rest is problem. Which makes relationships all the more important.
I didn't say that you should say no to everything. I said you should develop the ability to say no to things that you don't want to do because you have more important things to spend your time on. Trying to make everyone around you happy by giving up time you want to spend on important things is a much quicker route to burn out than declining some meetings you don't care about.
"declining some meetings you don't care about" isn't normally going to make your family angry and your friends drop you, so I don't think that's how people are interpreting your comment.
Relationships are one of the most important things in life, and I say this as a guy who could litteraly not talk to anyone for two weeks strait. It's relationships with people that get you your first customers for your start-up, your key employees. relationships keep you down to earth, friends and fmily. The latter being one of the most important elements in your life, your kids and spouse.
Why am I saying this? Because relationships go both ways. When you care about people, chances are some of them will care about you as well. And if you don't really care about your customers, your company is screwed anyway.
Granted, everyone has a different bandwidth to handle these relationships, and seperating the toxic ones from the rest is problem. Which makes relationships all the more important.