Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

THE POWER OF HOPES AND DREAMS
Once you know your counterpart’s religion and can
visualize what he truly wants out of life, you can employ
those aspirations as a way to get him to follow you.
Every engineer, every executive, every child—all of us
want to believe we are capable of the extraordinary. As
children, our daydreams feature ourselves as primary
players in great moments: an actor winning an Oscar, an
athlete hitting the game-winning shot. As we grow older,
however, our parents, teachers, and friends talk more of
what we can’t and shouldn’t do than what is possible. We
begin to lose faith.
But when someone displays a passion for what we’ve

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always wanted and conveys a purposeful plan of how to get
there, we allow our perceptions of what’s possible to
change. We’re all hungry for a map to joy, and when
someone is courageous enough to draw it for us, we
naturally follow.
So when you ascertain your counterpart’s unattained
goals, invoke your own power and follow-ability by
expressing passion for their goals—and for their ability to
achieve them.
Ted Leonsis is great at this. As the owner of the
Washington Wizards professional basketball team and the
Washington Capitals professional hockey team, he is always
talking about creating the immortal moments in sports that
people will tell their grandchildren about. Who doesn’t want
to come to an agreement with someone who is going to
make them immortal?
RELIGION AS A REASON
Research studies have shown that people respond favorably
to requests made in a reasonable tone of voice and followed
with a “because” reason.
In a famous study from the late 1970s,3 Harvard
psychology professor Ellen Langer and her colleagues
approached people waiting for copy machines and asked if
they could cut the line. Sometimes they gave a reason;
sometimes they didn’t. What she found was crazy: without
her giving a reason, 60 percent let her through, but when

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she did give one, more than 90 percent did. And it didn’t
matter if the reason made sense. (“Excuse me, I have five
pages. May I cut in line because I have to make copies?”
worked great.) People just responded positively to the
framework.
While idiotic reasons worked with something simple like
photocopying, on more complicated issues you can increase
your effectiveness by offering reasons that reference your
counterpart’s religion. Had that Christian CEO offered me a
lowball offer when he agreed to hire my firm, I might have
answered, “I’d love to but I too have a duty to be a
responsible steward of my resources.”