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.
Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.
Leave your ego at the door every morning, and just do some truly great work. Few things will make you feel better than a job brilliantly done.
When I was 15, I left school to start a magazine, and it became a success because I wouldn't take no for an answer. I remember banging on James Baldwin's door to ask for an interview when he came to England. Then I got Jean-Paul Sartre's home phone number and asked him to contribute. If I'd been 30, he might have said no, but I was a 15-year-old with passion and he was charmed. Making money was always just a side product of having a good time and creating things nobody'd seen before.
I financed and made my own films from the start. My path has been autonomous and independent, so I don't have any horror stories about glass ceilings and expectations and tense studio meetings.
You know my dad pushed me to believe that I was going to be the best. I just never thought of life without tennis, even looking forward.
The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.
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