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

LIFE IS NEGOTIATION
While you might be curious how FBI negotiators get some
of the world’s toughest bad guys to give up their hostages,
you could be excused for wondering what hostage
negotiation has to do with your life. Happily, very few
people are ever forced to deal with Islamist terrorists who’ve
kidnapped their loved ones.
But allow me to let you in on a secret: Life is
negotiation.
The majority of the interactions we have at work and at
home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a
simple, animalistic urge: I want.
“I want you to free the hostages,” is a very relevant one
to this book, of course.
But so is:
“I want you to accept that $1 million contract.”
“I want to pay $20,000 for that car.”
“I want you to give me a 10 percent raise.”
and
“I want you to go to sleep at 9 p.m.”
Negotiation serves two distinct, vital life functions—
information gathering and behavior influencing—and
includes almost any interaction where each party wants
something from the other side. Your career, your finances,
your reputation, your love life, even the fate of your kids—
at some point all of these hinge on your ability to negotiate.
Negotiation as you’ll learn it here is nothing more than
communication with results. Getting what you want out of

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life is all about getting what you want from—and with—
other people. Conflict between two parties is inevitable in all
relationships. So it’s useful—crucial, even—to know how to
engage in that conflict to get what you want without
inflicting damage.
In this book, I draw on my more than two-decade career
in the Federal Bureau of Investigation to distill the principles
and practices I deployed in the field into an exciting new
approach designed to help you disarm, redirect, and
dismantle your counterpart in virtually any negotiation. And
to do so in a relationship-affirming way.
Yes, you’ll learn how we negotiated the safe release of
countless hostages. But you’ll also learn how to use a deep
understanding of human psychology to negotiate a lower
car price, a bigger raise, and a child’s bedtime. This book
will teach you to reclaim control of the conversations that
inform your life and career.
The first step to achieving a mastery of daily negotiation
is to get over your aversion to negotiating. You don’t need
to like it; you just need to understand that’s how the world
works. Negotiating does not mean browbeating or grinding
someone down. It simply means playing the emotional
game that human society is set up for. In this world, you get
what you ask for; you just have to ask correctly. So claim
your prerogative to ask for what you think is right.
What this book is really about, then, is getting you to
accept negotiation and in doing so learn how to get what
you want in a psychologically aware way. You’ll learn to

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use your emotions, instincts, and insights in any encounter
to connect better with others, influence them, and achieve
more.
Effective negotiation is applied people smarts, a
psychological edge in every domain of life: how to size
someone up, how to influence their sizing up of you, and
how to use that knowledge to get what you want.
But beware: this is not another pop-psych book. It’s a
deep and thoughtful (and most of all, practical) take on
leading psychological theory that distills lessons from a
twenty-four-year career in the FBI and ten years teaching
and consulting in the best business schools and corporations
in the world.
And it works for one simple reason: it was designed in
and for the real world. It was not born in a classroom or a
training hall, but built from years of experience that
improved it until it reached near perfection.
Remember, a hostage negotiator plays a unique role: he
has to win. Can he say to a bank robber, “Okay, you’ve
taken four hostages. Let’s split the difference—give me two,
and we’ll call it a day?”
No. A successful hostage negotiator has to get
everything he asks for, without giving anything back of
substance, and do so in a way that leaves the adversaries
feeling as if they have a great relationship. His work is
emotional intelligence on steroids. Those are the tools you’ll
learn here.

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