Sure

It was a Friday night in San Francisco. October 2008.

I was a young lawyer, spent from a long week, sinking into the couch with a glass of wine and a movie queued up. The plan was no plan.

Then a friend called. He had an extra ticket to see some singer I’d never heard of at a small club.

I almost said no. My body was already horizontal. The couch had me.

But something sparked. Not a firework. Not a life-changing premonition. Just a small, quiet flicker—the kind of thing you could easily talk yourself out of if you thought about it too long.

So I didn’t think about it. I said, “Sure.”

The club was tiny—the kind of place where everyone’s shoulder-to-shoulder and nobody’s famous yet.

The singer took the stage and performed like she was playing Madison Square Garden, not a small club on a random Friday. She had released her first single earlier that year. I’d never heard it. I’d never heard of her.

But you could tell—this woman was born to do this.

Her name was Lady Gaga.

Within a few months, she’d be one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. Within a year, she’d be performing for stadiums. Within two, a cultural icon.

But that Friday night, she was just a woman in a small room, singing her heart out to a couple hundred strangers—one of whom almost didn’t get off the couch.

There’s a popular idea that if something isn’t a hell yes, it should be a no. I’ve challenged this idea before, and this night is a perfect example of why.

I wasn’t feeling a hell yes that Friday. I was feeling tired. I was feeling wine-on-the-couch. If I’d applied the “hell yes or no” filter, the answer would have been a hell no.

And I would have missed one of the most memorable nights of my life.

The problem with “hell yes or no” is that it assumes the best things in life announce themselves loudly. That they show up with fireworks and certainty and a neon sign that says THIS IS IMPORTANT.

They don’t. They show up as a quiet spark on a Friday night when you’re already in your sweatpants.

Butterflies understand this. They don’t map out their day or agonize over which flower to visit next. When something pulls them, they follow it—not because they’re certain it’s the best flower, but because it glows.

They follow the nectar, not the plan.

The nectar isn’t a hell yes. It’s subtler than that. A spark in your body. A flicker of curiosity. A little breadcrumb that doesn’t tell you where it leads.

Most people won’t follow a breadcrumb. They want to see the whole path first. They want to know where it goes, whether it makes sense, whether the destination justifies the effort. They want certainty before they’ll get off the couch.

When I look back at the moments that cracked my life open, none of them were a hell yes. The books I’ve written, the courses I’ve launched, the leaps I’ve made from rocket science to law to writing—they all began with a little whisper inside me that said, This could be interesting. Not a shout that says, This will change your life.

So if you’re standing at a crossroads, waiting for a hell yes before you move . . .

Stop waiting.

Follow the spark.

Not with a plan. Not with a parachute.

Just with the most powerful word in the English language.

Sure.

P.S. Last Sunday, I saw Lady Gaga perform at a sold-out arena in LA—one of four consecutive nights—with the whole place shaking. I stood there thinking about that Friday night in 2008 when she played to a couple hundred people at a tiny club in San Francisco. Same woman. Same electricity. Just a whole lot more people who’d caught on.