Tahl Raz

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.

—Margaret Wheatley

You can’t get there alone. In fact, you can’t get very far at all.

When you help others, they often help you. “Reciprocity” is

Many people have adapted to these new times with the belief that it’s still a dog-eat-dog world, where the meanest, baddest dog in the neighborhood wins. But nothing could be further from the truth.

as employing what had become one of the FBI’s most potent negotiating tools: the open-ended question.

we call this tactic calibrated questions: queries that the other side can respond to but that have no fixed answers. It buys you time. It gives your counterpart the illusion of control—they are the one with the answers and power after all—and it does all that without giving them any idea of how constrained they are by i

Mnookin, predictably, started fumbling because the frame of the conversation had shifted from how I’d respond to the threat of my son’s murder to how the professor would deal with the logistical issues involved in getting the money. How he would solve my problems. To every threat and demand he made, I continued to ask how I was supposed to pay him and how was I supposed to know that my son was alive.