It feels good to say "I can do anything and everything" but there will be times when you have to say "This is not my cup of tea" - in other words - the art of saying "no"..
There is one short story that I collect in this context :-
There are two donkeys, say A and B, that work for a washerman. One donkey (A) is very proactive always and tries to impress his master all the time. It never says "no" to his master.
On the other hand, B takes up the load only as much as it can..
On one fine morning, the washerman has too many clothes to carry and since he knows the capacity of B, he loads it to the extent that it can bear, and loads A with the rest.
Poor A, though it doesn't have the capacity to handle the load, says 'yes boss' and struggles hard to perform to the expectations of his master, and the master arrives at a conclusion that "A" is a poor performer while "B" is a consistent performer.
Let me relate this story to my work. I am an IT guy, and every alternate day, we keep hearing of new technologies. To give you an example, if it was .NET 1.1 the other day, it was .NET 2.0 yesterday and now it is .NET 3.5.
We had a situation where we were asked to build something in one of the cutting edge technologies and we really didn't have expertise in that. We tried hard to apply our basics, but sooner we realized that we didn't have adequate expertise. Now we have two questions - "should we say "we don't have expertise" or should we just take up the assignment and take a chance?
We could take up the assignment, but what if we can't deliver - we end up as donkey "A" in the story above !
The story really helped me in this situation.. We told our client that we didn't have adequate expertise to take up the assignment and the client was happy 'coz he has got ample time to plan for an alternative :-)
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