Category: Self improvement

  • Success as a steadily improving BATNA

    How can you know your life is broadly successful? The question is often asked, but rarely from the perspective of negotiation research. So let me share an answer implicit in that research, an understanding of which can make life negotiable: you can measure success, in part, by the trajectory of your BATNA. Huh? Let me…

  • Do I have to? Convincing yourself to do things

    A significant portion of life consists of convincing yourself to do things—things you know you should do but really don’t want to. From watching your diet, to organizing your garage, to seeing the doctor, unappealing but critical tasks abound. What can negotiations research teach us about such situations? Quite a lot if we treat them…

  • Saving time by learning to trust yourself

    In a world where work-life balance seems like a quaint anachronism, most of us have to find every possible efficiency just to get our jobs done—especially when working on difficult tasks that require multiple rounds of revision: detailed reports, complicated analyses, complex pieces of software code. Though efficiencies on such tasks are often hard to…