Day 15 - new content for negotiation chapter - getting what you want versus how you want it
you can get the what, and you can get the how
you often cannot get the what you desire, and also how you desire it
you can follow your desired process to an unpredictable end, and be happy that your process is followed
or be happy that you are getting *what* you want
but very few people very little of the time get what they want, through the method they want it
most people can understand, orient to, and coordinate around only one
sometimes special people can do both, some of the time
this ends up being important for negotiations with people you care about
it can be easy to not be super happy with people when they don’t love you enough to do what you want them to be doing, or changing in ways that you want them to be changing to be making you happy
but people we love often have both more capacity than we expect, in their ability to be different from us and surprise us, and also less capacity than we expect, in that things that may seem “obvious”
For example, you tell your partner you want to spend more quality time. The next day they send you a google calendar invite, DATE NIGHT! HOT TAMALES WITH MY HOT FEMALE. You find this cringey and forced. You wanted something more spontaneous, like them talking less about work at night and cuddling more and asking more about your day. But if you said that’s exactly what you wanted, then if they do it, they are just following your instructions.
This usually ends up being a lose-lose. The person is not going to guess the exact thing you want. Probably you think they will guess because they have guessed before and done something just right, which is why you wanted to date them in the first place / why you like them.
This concept becomes a lot clearer when you think about project management.
If you have a deadline that you have to meet, for a client deliverable, meeting the deadline ends up taking priority over how you meet the deadline, unless the how actually helps you meet it better.
Maybe you are doing a new thing where you are drinking coffee every day. Maybe you are skipping your usual workouts.
If you have a deadline you have to meet for a class, for a master’s program, perhaps the how is different from the what. You don’t really care about your grades. You are still working your full time job. You don’t want to change much about your life, to accommodate this new workload. The how matters more than the what. You want to produce whatever classwork and whatever grades you get, be it an A, a B, or a C, without changing much about your life.
In these examples, you see that doing both the what and the how are kind of hard. Often you pick one or the other. Sometimes you get to have both, but then generally something else in your life has to give.
For example, for the client deliverable, maybe you hire more people, so that your existing team does not have to push. You get the work done, in the usual manner of work, by hiring contractors to pick up some of the slack.
In the master’s program example, perhaps you negotiate to cut back hours at work, in return for presenting to your team at work a high quality master’s thesis, and teach your colleagues what you learned.
Often, people get in trouble because they want the what, and they want the how, and they don’t actually want to move anything else around to get that.