My sophomore year in college, I had a girlfriend who loved me so well she ran off to live in Japan.
I bought a plane ticket to visit her during Christmas vacation. But I was careless with my travel arrangements. I booked my flight for the day before the final exam of one of my computer science classes.
The ticket was nonrefundable. And expensive.
My only option was to go talk to the professor. Maybe I could convince him to let me take the exam early.
As I said, this was a computer science class.
The professor teaching it was a beady-eyed automaton who thought in C code and expressed himself with the preciseness of a computer printout. At one point, there was an entire website, created by current and former students, dedicated to the man’s inhuman, Terminator-like nature.
I mustered all my courage and showed up to his office one day.
He was in there, wearing the same short-sleeve button-up shirt he always wore. It had seen so many washes that it had become faded and paper-thin. His nipples regularly poked through during lectures in the cold engineering building.
“Professor Terminator?” I said from the door to his office.
He swiveled around in his chair and focused on me with his cold and fishy gaze.
I explained my nonrefundable ticket predicament. Would there be any chance to take the exam early? Or late? Or anything?
Without saying a word, he swiveled back towards his computer and started typing and clicking. He pulled up the course syllabus.
“The syllabus clearly states the final is scheduled for December 6!” He faced me again. Through his expressionless mask, I sensed he was furious that I would approach him with such a disturbing and illogical request.
I explained that in that case, I would have to miss the final and probably fail the class. He threw up his arms — how was this his problem?
So I tucked my tail between my legs, thanked him for his time, and left. My heart was beating at around 200 BPM. I felt defeated and ashamed.
Throughout my life, I’ve had a few wins like this. They made me think this is how negotiations and sales always go. And I wanted no part of it.
I bet there are a bunch of people out there just like me. Because if you look around, you will see a growing number of copywriting and marketing gurus catering exactly to weak and feckless negotiators.
I call these gurus “Attractionists”. They promise that you can create your freelance copywriting business without ever needing to sell. All you need to do is “attract leads by giving value,” “be human,” “know your worth.”
I’m sure people can get to the point where they are so in demand that they never have to negotiate. But my feeling is, you’re unlikely to jump from zero to total success, and completely bypass the phase where you need to do some selling. As Mark Ford wrote in Ready Fire Aim:
“To be a truly effective entrepreneur, you must become your business’s first and foremost expert at selling. There is only one way to do this: Invest most of your time, attention, and energy in the selling process. The ratio of time, creativity, and money spent on selling as opposed to other aspects of business should be something like 80/20, with 80 percent going towards selling and only 20 percent toward everything else.”
Now here are some good news:
As you go through life, you don’t have to be in hopeless negotiation situations like I was above, where your only hope is for the other side to take pity on you.
You don’t have to be powerless.
And you don’t have to be afraid of facing disagreement or having a conflict of interests with the other side.
Negotiation, persuasion, and yes, sales, can all be learned. I’ve done it. And I’m an anti-natural.
If you too are naturally reluctant to negotiate or sell, then I recommend Jim Camp’s book Start with No. For one thing, it’s an effective system, particularly if you are looking for long-term success rather than quick “wins”. For another, being accommodating and non-confrontational by nature can actually be an asset to you if you use this system.
One final point. Once you learn the basics of how to negotiate, you can choose to make it less of a daily concern in your specific business. But in my opinion, it makes sense to do that from a position of power, and not out of fear.
Anyways, if you want to check out Jim Camp’s book, here’s the link: