Terry should internalize his teammate’s wise words (unrelated, I’m sure)…maximize your opportunity, but you gotta let go of the fact that it’s “not fair” you came out 3 years older than DK Metcalf in the same draft class.
My 11 year old daughter's favorite phrase in the world is "It's not fair!" She thinks her little brother gets everything and she gets nothing. (She's wrong, but that's a different story.)
I just tell her "life's not fair and then you die." Which might not earn me dad of the year votes, but it's the truth.
From a purely business perspective, a few months ago we were looking to cut significant cost out of our business, and were approaching our vendors about reducing their fees to us, and we had some reasons for doing so.
One particular vendor, for our financial system and some other products, we really wanted to save a chunk of money. However, we have a contract with them, and we can't very well change financial systems, so we kindof have to pay them.
Before the conversation with them, I sat down with our CFO and procurement team, and we openly discussed that we had just about no leverage whatso ever. The leverage we did have is we are a large customer and generally speaking, you want to keep your customers happy. But that was it. They had the contract and we had to renew the licenses because a multi-billion dollar company can't switch financial systems in 3 weeks. So we had to pay them, they knew it, they had the contract, and that was that.
So our understanding of our position altered how we approached the conversation. We made the ask, they countered with something which was somewhat reasonable, though not what we ideally wanted, and we agreed and moved on. Could we have tried to negotiate for more? Maybe. Would it have worked? Probably not.
The key part of that negotiation was us understanding our position. If he had overplayed our hand, everything we did would have been a complete bluff, and they could have called us on it.
I think that self awareness from Terry's camp is missing here. There's no reason you can't negotiate from a position of weakness, sometimes you have no choice. But if you don't recognize your negotiating position, you're going to be in trouble.