Finished 21/03/2026
You Can Negotiate Anything
The book has aged poorly. I get some concepts, essentially that you can negotiate almost anything and should not be bound by social conventions, but it feels out of place to go into a supermarket with your family and spend hours tying up a clerk to shave fifty euros off a fridge. The key useful point is that in negotiation we do not know the other person’s motives (for example, a clerk may have a target to hit), and we need to uncover them to gain leverage. Still, it shows its age and often feels off.
Notes
- If life is a game, negotiating is a way of life and you need to understand it
- Ignore your biases and prejudices; look at situations with objectivity
- 🔑 3 main skills to win a negotiation:
- Power -> the other side seems to have more power or authority than you
- Time -> the other side does not have time pressure or constraints or deadlines like you do
- Information -> the other side might know more than you; it is your job to change that
- Do not act as if your limited experience were a universal truth. Push yourself to get in the game
- Everything is negotiable. How do you generate value? By creating competition
- Dumb is better than smart. Do not hesitate to say “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand”
- 🔑 Understand the other person’s needs, and meet them. That is negotiation
- No one will negotiate with you unless they believe you can help them
- Most people are not persistent when they negotiate. They offer once, and if the other side refuses, they walk away. Change that. Be tenacious
- You do a better job when you negotiate for someone else. Why? When we look at ourselves, we do not think we are worth that much.
- See all meetings and situations as a game, and the world as an illusion. Enjoy them. You do not have to win every negotiation, but you can learn
- Deadlines are more flexible than you think. Usually you set them yourself
- A negotiation is a process, not an event. There is no defined time slot in which it happens
- The more confused and defenseless we appear, the more the other side helps with information and advice. Play dumb
- Soviet approach: make offers so absurdly low that you unsettle the other side with extreme positions. And even if you concede something, there is no guarantee they will help you
- Opposition can come in 2 forms: idea opponents and visceral opponents.
- In negotiation, moving fast is always a risk
- Avoid formal written communication. It is easier to negotiate verbally. And what you write can always be used against you
- Show empathy and do not come across as a cynic.
- Negotiate everything. Everywhere. That is the book’s final point. You can do it.