Getting rich often feels impossible, like there’s some secret code only the lucky few know. A graduate of one of the country’s most elite business schools said there basically is — and she knows a thing or two about how to crack it.
Content creator @startupsteph is an alumna of the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has since gone on to find success in the tech industry as a start-up founder. As a woman in that cutthroat field, she knows better than most what it takes to succeed.
So she decided to create a series of TikToks sharing “the best things I learned at Stanford Business School to make you richer.” They all come down to two all-important things: negotiation skills and mindset.
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Whether it’s salary, fundraising for a start-up, or just bargaining on Facebook Marketplace, Steph said the secret to negotiating is basically to shut your mouth! “To win a negotiation, just be quiet and actually be comfortable with awkward silence,” she said in a video.
It is human nature to want to fill that uncomfortable quiet — we’ve all reflexively done this. But Steph said when you make that the other person’s problem by staying quiet, the discomfort often makes them give you what you want, or at least something closer to it.
There’s science to back her up, too: research from MIT found that silence in negotiation also makes the other party more reflective, and it often ends up benefiting both parties.
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Obviously you have to have your ducks in a row before negotiating something. However, Steph said she’s learned from experience that leaning too heavily on facts and figures — say, pulling tons of salary data from similar positions in your industry to justify asking for a raise — can hold you back. Why?
“No one cares. No one cares that you’re right, no one cares about what other companies are doing,” she bluntly said. What the people you’re negotiating with care most about is “that the person sitting across from them has their best interest at heart.” They want to know that what you’re asking for will have a mutual benefit.
This is where skills like mirroring, a natural psychological phenomenon where we mimic a person’s speech patterns and body language as a way to show closeness and solidarity, come in to play. Actually “repeat(ing) some of the words that they use (and) making them therefore feel more understood,” she explained, will take you much further in a negotiation than “shoving numbers and all this research down their throat.”
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If you’re hammering out your salary, asking for $107,000 a year instead of $100,000 is more likely to be successful. Same thing with that couch you’re trying to sell online — that’s not a $50 couch, it’s a $56 couch.
Why? It gives the impression that there’s “thought and analytics and reason behind that specific number,” and hence, they’re less likely to push back. In short, it gives you credibility in the eyes of the person you’re negotiating with.
There’s data to back this up, too. In an analysis of 2,000 acquisition offers for publicly traded companies, economists Matti Keloharju and Petri Hukkanen found that round-number offers were less likely to be accepted. The ones that were accepted came with counteroffers that cost the buyer an average of $18 million.
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“People are afraid of sharing the first number in a negotiation because they’re worried about revealing too much information,” Steph said in another video in her series. The fear is that you’ll throw out a number that’s far lower than what they budgeted for, and then you lose out.
But Steph said you should always lead this conversation no matter what, “because it allows you to anchor the negotiation in a range that makes sense for you.” It also allows you to play yet another mind trick to get even more money.
Again using salary as an example, Steph suggested starting with a number much higher than the salary you actually want — so ask for $400,000 if you want $200,000. “That might be way above the range of what they’re expecting,” she explained, “but now you’re literally anchoring the conversation at 400k.”
Better yet, when the offer ends up falling to $200,000 and you accept it, the person hiring suddenly thinks they got a huge bargain they have to jump on.
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We’ve all heard the advice that to succeed, you must have a plan for your entire career plotted out in advance, but Steph said that’s frankly “dumb.” Instead, she advised in another video to do what one of her professors, Graham Weaver, said to do: “focus on the immediate next step.”
This is in part because who the heck knows where you or your industry will be in 20 years, but more importantly Steph pointed out that you also “miss out on so many opportunities when you’re so incredibly specific and prescriptive about what needs to happen at every single step along the way.”
“Trying to predict the future is a losing battle,” executive coach Melody Wilding wrote for Forbes. “It’s impossible to know what your priorities will be a few years from now, let alone the opportunities you’ll be presented with.” For all you know, those opportunities you turn down because they’re not part of your plan may be the ones that change everything!
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Steph was careful to say that she doesn’t wish to downplay how scary and difficult situations like layoffs can be. But when you’ve lost your way or had the rug pulled out from under you, you are also in a place where “the whole world is your oyster,” especially in today’s fast-changing world.
“If you’re actually too locked into a specific job or company or expertise,” she explained, “(you can) miss these huge waves of innovation and potential opportunity purely because (you’re) so locked into what (you’re) currently doing.”
Thinking about a job loss as an opportunity rather than a calamity may not exactly feel like the truth, but a wealth of research by people like psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that having this kind of growth mindset really does make a huge difference, in part because of the way it helps tamp down anxieties that can hold you back from figuring out your next chapter.
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“Go where other people are not,” Steph advised, another lesson she’s learned from experience. She spoke of how she initially went into investment banking because that’s where all of her old friends and peers she looked up to had launched their careers. “It actually ended up being a terrible choice for me,” she admitted.
It reminded her of a concept she learned in that field which said not to reflexively go for the consensus “good investment,” even if it’s lucrative. That consensus quickly erodes the upsides when everyone and their brother go after the same opportunity.
“Even if consensus is right, those who follow it only do as well as everyone else,” Deepwater Assessment Management explained.
She saw this play out with her Stanford classmates who chose other career paths. “I realized that the most successful ones are the ones that pave their own path,” she said. “(It) maybe (wasn’t) prestigious on paper … but they were able to make a lot of opportunity from it.”
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
