There’s an approach to work that’s common among top freelancers in many fields. It’s a “whatever-it-takes” attitude, a willingness to go above and beyond one’s official job description in order to ensure a successful outcome for the project one has been hired to work on.

For a freelancer, this can-do approach is a great way to rise above a crowded field of competition. If everyone is more or less equally skilled, the person who brings energy, enthusiasm, and flexibility to their work has an advantage. Self-employed folks tend to know this—here is Lee Sklar, a Los Angeles session musician who’s played bass on 2,500 recording sessions:

“I feel overwhelmed, so I must be in over my head.”

When we’re stressed, we tend to assume that our feelings reflect reality. This is called emotional reasoning, and it’s very common. We experience a negative emotion, and we take that experience as evidence of some dark truth about ourselves or others. Life’s far from easy, but emotional reasoning leads us to see things as far worse than they really are.

Thanksgiving is the holiday of gratitude. And it’s followed immediately by its complete opposite, Black Friday—the holiday of greed.

What a juxtaposition! It feels like a set-up, like we’re being asked to choose between the two. Do we want a little more Thanksgiving in our lives, or a little more Black Friday? More gratitude, or more desire? More contentment, or more dissatisfaction? If you want a little more Thanksgiving in your life, here’s one way to get it.

At the very beginning of a new project, keep your standards low.

High-quality work rarely comes from building up thin layers of perfection. Instead, it’s the result of hacking together a half-finished, half-decent deliverable and tweaking it until it runs, then polishing it until it gleams.

Think of the fiction writer starting a new book. If she holds every freshly-typed sentence to the standards she’ll expect of her final draft, she’ll never finish the first chapter. But if she can temporarily lower her standards and get a few thousand words on the page, she has something to work with. She can add, cut, and rewrite. She can turn half-decent into great. But first, she has to create enough half-decent to have something to work with.

There are right and wrong ways to say “no.”

First, some wrong ways:

• “No, and why would you even ask?”
• “No, and can’t you read the sign?”
• “No, and can’t you see that I’m busy?”
• “No, and you're the 10th person who's asked me that question today.”
• “No, and boy, do I love telling people no.”

Now, some right ways:

• “No, but I understand why you’re asking.”
• “No, and let me explain why not.”
• “No, and I don’t blame you if you’re frustrated.”
• “No, but I wish it were ‘yes.’”
• “No, but here’s a roadmap to ‘yes.’”

When we stand between someone and what they want, we’re in a position of power over them. And what we do with power says a lot about our character. The right way to say “no,” then, is not in a way that makes us feel powerful, but in a way that leaves the other person’s dignity intact.