Personal essays
Know when to walk away
Negotiation
Well it happened again.
I was talking to someone about a possible contract and the discussions went on for a long time.
They reached out in late February and we met in early March.
I thought we might want to wait until June to start because of announcements that I expected.
They’d rather get started sooner. They wanted us to be further along by June and finished by the end of September. Could I get them a statement of work?
OK.
March turned into April. I checked in every week or so. The next thing I knew May was turning into June.
We continued to chat but we were one week into July and still not making any progress.
So I sent an email saying I didn’t have any confidence I could help the project finish by the end of September.
I thanked them but said I wasn’t interested in the project anymore and perhaps we’d find something else to work on in the future.
A week later everything was arranged and tomorrow I begin the contract.
Mean it
I wish this were a one off. It’s not. I’ve had to walk away at other times.
The last radio station I worked at was a Smooth Jazz station. A friend connected me to the program director and he asked me for a recording of me on the air at my previous station.
Week after week I called Bernie and asked him if he’d listened to my tape yet.
This wasn’t unusual. This is the way applying for radio jobs went.
At some point I had enough. I wanted to work in radio, but I didn’t need to.
During our next phone call when Bernie said he hadn’t listened to the tape yet I said, “Don’t bother. I was told you were different. You really aren’t.”
Ten minutes later, Bernie called back. When I answered the phone he said, “did you listen to my tape?” I laughed and two days later I was in the studio training for my first shift.
Before you add this strategy to your tool belt, let me make it clear, you should never walk away unless you are willing to keep going and not look back.
You don’t walk away as a trick to get them to give in. You walk away because there’s no sense in staying and continuing things the way they are.
Last week I was staying with friends outside of Washington DC. Two of us played a word game where we each drew tiles with letters on them and tried to create a grid of words.
One of the rules was that you are allowed to discard one of your tiles and draw three more. You call out “dump” when you do this.
The first time we played I didn’t dump once. I sat there with my tiles just trying to make them work.
The second time I decided to dump any time I ran into a wall where I couldn’t see how to use my remaining tiles. This meant that towards the end of that round I was left with a ton of spare tiles that I had to use in the saddest two and three letter words you’ve ever seen just to get rid of them.
After that, I learned to dump more strategically.
That’s the walk away.
Don’t use it unless you’ve really hit a wall and there’s nothing you can do with the tiles in front of you.
Kimmy
Thirty-three years ago I was hitting a wall and didn’t know what to do about it.
Kim and I were going out a couple of times a week, but we weren’t dating.
I knew that I wanted to date her. I didn’t know at the time that she was certain that if we dated we’d get married and she wanted to marry a Catholic man. She just figured it would be easier.
There was clearly a wall that prevented us from going forward, so thirty-three years ago this Friday (yes I remember the date), I told her that I would prefer to date her, but if she wasn’t interested I was going to start seeing other women.
She later told me that that was the smartest thing I could have done.
I took another woman to an afternoon show at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Kim sat in her apartment and decided that this was stupid.
That evening when I got home, she was sitting on my front steps and we were together until the day she died.
(Cue song one from side one of the James Gang’s “Third” album.)
Use it cautiously. Use it when you mean it.
But sometimes the best thing you can do is walk away.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 278. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe