427. A Career of Finding Common Ground

“After passing the Bar exam and earning a degree in public policy, I was doing important social justice work. But I felt kind of obligated, like it was work that I ‘should’ be doing. I was serving the community well, but I felt guilty I wasn’t passionate about it like my colleagues. One way you can tell you’re operating in your passion is through your energy. My colleagues would see injustice and get energized, but it just drained me. Today, I’m podcasting and teaching people about negotiation.”

“From childhood, I was always trying my hand at business. Growing up as a minority—a young black boy with a thick Caribbean accent in a mostly white town in the Ohio heartland—I was curious about the psychology of how people related to each other, and how I could fit in. Learning negotiation was a perfect combination. It blended my interests in business and psychology, Negotiation is all about relationships with people, finding common ground, and finding a way to make that relationship push you forward.”

“For me, the fear of regret is greater than the fear of failure. I don’t want to live my life with regrets. As the statistics say, many people are essentially sleepwalking through their lives. I don’t want to wake up in a decade and say, ‘I have not enjoyed my job.’ The most time we spend at any one thing is at work.”

1.   Discover your curiosity. It’s a good key to finding your passion.

2.   Don’t run away from your talent. Embrace it and start using it.

3.   Don’t live a life you’ll regret. Risk failure rather than sleepwalk through life.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

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Negotiation for Entrepreneurs, Podcast:

www.stitcher.com/podcast/american-negotiation-institute/negotiation-skills-academy
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