"If you can’t walk away from a negotiation, then you aren’t negotiating. You’re just working out the terms of your slavery."

By James Altucher

A bad negotiation leads to these things automatically: anger, resentment, crying, slavery, and poverty.

So it’s very important to constantly study yourself, study the negotiations you’ve done, and try to improve so you don’t experience the above, which can be easily avoided.

Every day for the past 20 years I’ve learned something new about negotiation. Mostly I learned how to screw myself over by doing bad negotiations. You learn more from a bad negotiation than a good one.

Communication is the thread that weaves humans into humanity.

Make sure the result brings you life and love. Tomorrow is 100% based on the negotiations you do today.

When I do the below, when I live life as gently and positively as possible, then my negotiations work out, and then my tomorrows and the tomorrows of the people around me are pleasant.

I’ve learned about negotiation while selling a company, while buying a company, while closing a sale, while buying services, while getting married, while getting divorced, while figuring out what to do with my life, while screwing up my life (in a BIG way), and all the variety of things in life that happen in between. 10,000 negotiations.

I haven’t read any books on negotiation and there may be better suggestions than these. But this is what works for me and I think what will work for others but try for yourself.

So if you have to do a negotiation TODAY, do these things and tell me if they work. And offer more suggestions please.

– NO.

Say “No”.

I told this to someone the other day who is about to get fired from his job. Don’t act like it’s a done deal. Getting fired is a legal action. It’s always a negotiation with many more moving parts than people realize.

Say “No” and that you need to “think about it”. They’ll say something like, “this is not a negotiation”. You can say, “That’s ok, I need to think about this.”

Give it 24 hours. Think about everything that’s happened to you on the job. Think about what you need to get a new job or career. Do the techniques listed below.

In general, with everything you negotiate, give yourself permission to think about it. Else, it’s manipulation and not negotiation.

– DON’T BE A CHILD.

Don’t “meet in the middle”. Here is a dumb negotiation that never really happens

Read the rest here.