Price doesn't make deals, and salary doesn't control your career.
Interpretation
Your worth is determined by your skills and decisions, not just by your pay or negotiations.
Christopher Voss emphasizes the idea that true career advancement and value come from one's abilities, choices, and negotiation skills rather than merely from financial compensation or titles. This quote serves as a reminder to focus on self-improvement and the quality of one's work instead of relying solely on offers and salaries.
In practice
In a motivational speech about career growth.
When you expect to get into a negotiation, you expect to be faced by a guy that's going to attack you, a guy or gal that's going to attack or that they're going to try to get the best of you. Two-thirds of us, that makes us very defensive.
There are three kinds of yeses. There's commitment, confirmation, and counterfeit. People are most used to giving the counterfeit yes because they've been trapped by the confirmation yes so many times. So the way you master no is understanding what really happens when somebody says 'no.' When yes is commitment, no is protection.
The sweetest two words in any negotiation are actually, 'That's right.' Before you convince them to see what you're trying to accomplish, you have to say the things to them that will get them to say, 'That's right.'
The secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is to give the other side the illusion of control. Don't try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Ask questions, that begin with 'How?' or 'What?' so your opponent uses mental energy to figure out the answer.
Very few negotiations are begun and concluded in the same sitting. It's really rare. In fact, If you sit down and actually complete your negotiation in one sitting, you left stuff on the table.
The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don't know you're in.
I was on a path. I was going to become a principal dancer. I never let my mind rest.
The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.
The key factor that will determine your financial future is not the economy; the key factor is your philosophy.
When you have a challenge and the response is equal to the challenge, that's called 'success'. But once you have a new challenge, the old, once-successful response no longer works. That's why it is called a 'failure'.
With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
An important attribute of success is to be yourself. Never hide what makes you, you.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.