Alexis T.'s Key Ideas from Getting More
by Stuart Diamond

People do some of the most important things in life not for money, not for rational benefits, but for how it makes them feel.

As much as economists want us to believe that people are hyper-rational actors that consider all angles of every decision they make, they’re not. Most of the things we do are because of some feeling we have, not because we have weighed the rationality of a particular course. More often than not, we rationalize our decisions after they’ve been made.

A key to getting other people to give you what you want is to value the other party.

People like to give things to others who listen to them, who value them, who consult with them.

Listen to and value the other party. It will improve your outcomes.

What is the other person feeling? How do they perceive the situation? What are the pictures in their heads?”

 Thinking from the other person’s point of view often turns up surprising results. 

Your outcomes will be improved once you start thinking from the other person’s perspective. What are their needs or fears? How are they approaching the situation? These are critical pieces of information for any successful negotiation.

You make small talk. Not just because you read somewhere that it’s smart to make small talk. You do it because you are interested in them. Because you want to try for a point of connection with other people. It’s a way of approaching life.”

Small talk helps open up and deepen connections. Don’t be above it.

Trust is a feeling of security that the other person will protect you. With some trust, another person will help you until it’s too risky for them or a better opportunity comes along. With a lot of trust, the other party will help you even if it harms them. It is very important to understand the trust dynamic.”

Trust can carry you further than most other things.

Perhaps the biggest cause of negotiation failure, worldwide, is communication failure. And the single biggest cause of communication failure is misperception.

This means that their perceptions are more important than your proposals; that is, if you want to persuade them.

Most communication failures stem from misperception. So before jumping to conclusions, do your research and try to understand the other party as best you can.

When someone is interrupted, the tapes are still playing in their head.

 It’s so easy to interrupt someone once you understand what they are saying or have your response ready to go. But it’s a terrible habit. Because once you interrupt someone, they aren’t listening to you. They are thinking about finishing the point they wanted to make.

Making an exception requires the other person to candidly reflect on whether or not they have treated someone differently in the past, and often, they have. Once they realize this, it’s more likely that you’ll become one of the exceptions as well.

Standards are especially effective with hard bargainers. 

With difficult people, use standards. It is a fundamental tenet of human psychology that people hate to contradict themselves.

So if you give people a choice between being consistent with their standards—with what they have said and promised previously—and contradicting their standards, people will usually strive to be consistent with their standards. 

Knowing that people hate to contradict themselves is a key part of understanding the power of standards and why you should leverage them.

It is much more persuasive to let others make the decision, instead of telling them what the decision should be. You want to lead them to where you want them to go, through framing and by being incremental. 

 Framing and being incremental are two of the hardest things for people to learn. Most people want to rush ahead, and find it hard to break things up into smaller steps. Also, it takes time to get just the right framing; many people don’t have the patience. But great framing can immediately conclude a negotiation in your favor.

In much of business, money is not the most important item of importance to either side, regardless of what they say. The price has to be reasonable, but so much more is required. Intangibles can bridge the gap between seemingly inflexible positions. 

It’s rarely just about maximizing the monetary outcome.

 Look for trades of unequal value. There are things that I have that cost me very little, but that you value highly. Identifying these levers is essential for maximizing the value of the negotiation for both parties.

The best negotiators are dispassionate, and continue to ask for information. 

 Emotion destroys negotiations and limits creativity. Focus is lost. Decision-making is poor. Retaliation often occurs. 

Your goal is not to be “right;” it’s to get the outcome you desire. Leave the emotions and ego at the door, and you will make fewer bad decisions. You’ll keep your eye on the prize.

The more you tell them to calm down, the madder they get. That’s because telling them to calm down devalues the legitimacy of their emotions. And when people feel devalued, they become more emotional. 

Good negotiation requires valuing the other party and their needs. Telling someone to calm down fails to recognize the person’s perspective as legitimate, and more often than not, it will do more harm than good.

 We all think that everyone else has the same thought processes, set of experiences, and perceptual framework that we do.

We all imagine that others think like we do. They don’t. We also attribute people’s behaviors to their identity instead of recognizing the importance of the specific events happening in their lives at the moment. This is the fundamental attribution error at work, and it leads us to make poor judgments about people’s motivations and character.

'Do I trust this person? Before I put my life, and my family’s life, in their hands, without recourse, who are they?’

This is the question that is asked by most of the rest of the world. It is not a question that appears to be asked by most people in the United States. The United States focuses more on punishment and contracts than on relationships. And this hampers the United States and its citizens in their negotiations with the rest of the world.

With compensation, it is especially important to know what the other party is thinking before asking for something specific.

Knowing how your company makes compensation decisions and what your boss values are important pieces of information before you ask for anything specific in a compensation discussion.

Ask how the company retains, trains, and promotes people in their careers. Ask about the company’s philosophy of work? The answers to these questions will give you invaluable information about the culture of the organization and whether or not it’s a fit for your needs.

Contextualize the argument, no matter how heated, with the following: “Hey, we’ve been friends for x years—over 1,000 or 2,000 days. Do you really want to toss everything out over one bad day?”

This will help put things in perspective and diffuse the issue.