Negotiate Like Shiroe from Log Horizon, Death of Lance Reddick, Fuyu no Okurimono: A Cute Anime Short
Learn from Shiroe on how to negotiate.
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What’s Up in Anime?
Ranking of Kings new episode promo trailer. R.O.K. is the story of the deaf, weak prince Bocci and his journey to gain strength & reconcile who he is. Certainly a great watch. Season 1 Trailer here.
Cute anime short of a girl & her yeti: Fuyu no Okurimono (Winter Present). 😢
Lance Reddick dies at 60. Known for his roles as Lieutenant Cedric Daniels in The Wire, Charon in the John Wick films and less known for his voice acting in Castlevania as The Captain. He’s the voice actor behind the man in the blue cloak w/ the heavy accent here. Absolutely loved this scene.
Attack on Titan Opening#2 “The Rumbling” hit record charts (#1 on U.S. Hard Rock billboard).
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Let’s Negotiate like Shiroe.
You awaken in an odd yet familiar surroundings. Where am I?.. The last thing you remember was falling asleep at your PC, gaming late into the night.
You get up and take a look around. Oh shit, I’m in the game I was playing earlier. Wtf is going on? You decide the best thing to do is to go find your buddies and get together to form a party to figure this new reality out.
After all, things are always better when your friends have your back. You’re looking for your friends when..
Welp, shit. At least you can take heart that you are not the only one. Without Gamemasters or rules to curb people’s worst behaviors, this new world has become a free-for-all; the tyrannical rule of the strong dominates.
People are being PK’d, while powerful guilds bully, rob & kidnap weaker players. Since surviving requires very little money, most players sit around, unsure of what to do with themselves, bored out of their minds.
With no real economy, little pay needed to get by, and no jobs, the city of Akihabara has no hustle or bustle to it, consumed by a overwhelming sense of dejection.
Determined to fix this, you march up to a player (w/ that main character energy) &…
Yeah that didn’t work. Turns out main character energy isn’t enough to get others to do what you want but you don’t want your city to suck. Maybe you just need to be more forceful, more commanding. So you go to a weak player and…
Yeah, so violence isn’t scalable. What are you missing?
That is where understanding people’s interests comes in. Have you met real people? We are all self-interested in some ways. We want money, status, sex, fulfillment, meaning; each represented in our own myriad of ways, shapes and forms. It’s the default software that runs in our heads.
To leverage that default software, you’ve got to align your interests with those of the people around you. To understand what it is that they want and what you want & to demonstrate to them that by working together, you can both achieve what you want, oftentimes to a greater extent than either of you could do so alone.
Shiroe understands this, he recognizes what people’s core drivers are and focuses on aligning people’s interests together in order to get things done. He knows that people possess deep self-interests and that in order to align those interests for a common purpose or good, you must (at minimum) enable others to see that working with you is what is in their best interest.1
As he walks around Akihabara, he sees the rapid degradation of the city with its dejected adventurers lining the sidewalks. It’s not quite what he wants for the players of Log Horizon; he wants a vibrant, thriving Akihabara.
So what does he do? He doesn’t try to be the hero; with the nickname ”Villain in Glasses”, that doesn’t really work well for him. So he sticks with what he knows and what he’s good at. Strategizing AKA aligning people’s interests in such a manner so as to get them to do what he wants.
Working with me works well for you. This is also how the corporate world functions too. Consider how basic things such as equity and salary work. Your employer gives you X dollars (either per hour or per month) and in exchange you perform Y task. For startups, they recognize that you are not getting paid market-rate as is, and so, they provide equity as means of saying, “Hey I know you are not worth this much right now, BUT this little bit of stock will grow and it’ll be worth much more.”2
Shiroe negotiates between the Battle Guilds (Honesty, Silver Sword, D.D.D., West Wind Brigade, Black Sword Knights), the smaller guilds(Radio Market, Crescent Moon Alliance), the merchant guilds(Marine Organization, The Roderick Firm, Shopping District 8); Shiroe understands that the major battle guilds that raid dungeons need work, the merchant guilds want business and the small trade guilds thrive on a bustling economy.
He also understands that human behavior is shaped via the speculation of future gain and how that influences present decisions. He leverages his reputation as a master strategist and allows the guilds to speculate as to his real intentions until the final reveal where he utilizes his leverage to convince the guilds to form the Round Table(the governing body of Akihabara).
Watching the Round Table scene where his work throughout Season 1 culminates is awesome to see.
Mountains move when people want you to succeed since your results benefit the whole group. Take negotiating a job offer. By understanding where your interest & where your potential employer’s interests intersect, you can better leverage and negotiate a job offer that works for you.
Your employer wants to fill a position and has spent thousands of dollars & hundreds of hours searching for & interviewing many candidates to whittle the candidate pool down to you. You want the job (& don’t want to be unemployed) and your employer wants to fill the position & doesn’t want to waste the time & resources put into finding & screening you.
There’s a mutual intersection of interests & there’s room to utilize your leverage.
Just as Shiroe understood, it’s more so seeing where yours & others interests intersect that matters & appealing to their sensibilities than attempting to convince a disinterested person or force your will onto others. By understanding the interests of various guilds in the city of Akihabara, he aligned their interests (both selfish & selfless desires) to create a governing body, the Round Table & establish basic protections for all people in Akihabara.
- Anime Buff
This is funnily enough the argument behind why democracies remains so strong relative to autocracies in The Dictator’s Handbook. Effectively, all classes of people (from the wealthiest to the poorest) are better off in a democracy and therefore, it is incredibly difficult to convince even the obscenely wealthy to usurp the system.
Whether or not it does is another question entirely since 80-90% of startups fail. (link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-startups-will-fail-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-10/?sh=1ea1453f6679)
Guide to Where to Watch Anime
Please note that this may not cover every platform or even the current availability of the shows (after some time has passed from the posting of this piece). Anime availability can change due to negotiations between studios & streaming giants, so please use this as a guide!
Log Horizon
Stream: Crunchyroll (2 Seasons)
Buy: Amazon (1 Season), Google Play (1 Season), Apple TV(1 Season)
Ranking of Kings
Stream: Crunchyroll (1 Season)
Buy: Amazon (1 Season)
Dr.Stone
Stream: Crunchyroll (2 Seasons), HBO Max (2 Seasons)
Buy: Amazon (3 Seasons), Google Play (2 Seasons), Apple TV (2 Seasons)
Castlevania
Stream: Netflix (4 Seasons)
Buy: AppleTV (4 Seasons), Amazon(4 Seasons), Google Play(4 Seasons)
Attack on Titan
Stream: Crunchyroll (6 Seasons), Netflix (1 Season)
Buy: AppleTV(4 Seasons), Amazon(3 Seasons), Google Play(2 Seasons)
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