Dan Morelle

This is a follow-up to a post I wrote 3 years ago entitled 7 Revelations of Being Caffeine Free.

Apparently it takes only 100mg per day of caffeine per day to become addicted (that’s about 1 cup of coffee or 3 bars of chocolate). Unfortunately I returned to the slippery black slope about 5 weeks ago in order to overcome a productive slump and hit some ridiculous self-imposed deadlines.

It took me 2 weeks and 3-4 cups a day to realise I was once again totally hooked and further 2 weeks to realise that I could not beat coffee on the head by gradually weaning myself off. The ceremony of preparation, sensory stimulation and buzz were all too alluring to stop gradually. And I knew I was postponing the pain whilst stealing from the future and developing a bad habit.

I love the taste of good coffee but the effects are poisonously tempting. It helps me write, lets my brain work on overdrive hosing words on to the page but the ideas I produce are not lateral, it is creativity on stabilizers. Ideas are two dimensional. Cogent and sharp but linear.

Coffee is wonderfully evil because like the bookmakers wife, lady luck, it flirts with you then when you’re addicted it fucks you in the ass – you have to dose up, drink more to get the same effects. Then. Oh god. Then you’re truly shafted.

Make no mistake. Coffee is a drug, albeit one that is well disguised and integrated with culture, economics and the industrial machine. If you dispute any of these facts you’re deluded, that’s the drug messing with your sense of reason.

If you need a coffee at the start of the day before you can face the world, you’re an addict, a drug dependant junkie. If you queue up at Starbucks for an overpriced fix of black hot water you’re a junkie, same as the Heroin addict queueing up for his fix of Methadone. Junkie queueing for junk!

Caffeine is a bitter, white crystalline xanthine alkaloid that is a psychoactive stimulant drug. Look this shit up.

Some lessons learned from this episode :

1. Deadlines are man made. If you can’t make them, reset them. Negotiate.

2. Taking stimulants is like having a credit card on your life. You pay it back with interest.

3. If you feel like you need a kick, take a nap. Drink water, look at your nutrition or perhaps get a full blood count done. You may be deficient in something.

4. Listen to your body. Sleep when you’re tired. Take naps.

5. When you choose food or drink don’t just look to feed your mouth or brain. Feed your body.

6. Chemicals are no substitute to pacing, sleep, exercise and healthy food.

7. Coffee will fuck you up in the end. Caffeine is naturally occurring in plants as an insecticide. Its a poison. Your bodies’ reactions are as if it was being mildly poisoned.

The bad shit will gradually overtake your mind and body like Spiderman’s Alien Costume.

Unlike other articles about negotiation that focus on the practicalities of negotiation, namely getting things in writing, approaching things fairly, communication skills and addressing the issues without letting personalities get in the way, this post is about the strategies you can use to get the best deal.

With the current state of affairs after the 2010 Election in the UK and the subsequent Hung Parliament which left no political party with a clear majority,  one party, although with a few number of seats required to win than the other two major parties they were still in a very strong position as they wielded the seats/votes to tip things over the point required if they teamed up with either of the top two parties to be declared a winner and thus becoming the Government.

It was the Liberal Democrats that were being wooed by The Conservative Party and the Labour Party.  All with differing ideologies and agendas but the goal of taking leadership.

The news channels offered days of vacant ‘watch this space’ padding, commentary and speculation about what was being said behind closed doors. Nobody seemed to have a clue.  Things sounded a little something like this:

Stuff is happening, we know its happing, people are saying things; these things concern you but we don’t know exactly the things they are talking about are. We can say though, that we are certain they are saying things and stuff is happening. That is all you need to know.

So with all the great footage of people walking in and out of buildings for meetings and the brief statesments reporting that discussions were “going well” what were the strategies being implemented by the parties to get the very best deal for themselves?

Negotiate From A Position of Strength
If you have something that the other party wants you will have leverage in negotiations, its likely you’ll get what you ask for however if there are two parties that want what you have on offer you may as well be 10 feet tall and bullet proof. With two parties after you the game notches up a gear as you play them against each other to get yourself the best deal. In the case of the Lib Dems, they announced publicly that they would start negotiations with The Conservative Party as they had publicly stated prior to the election that they would attempt to do a deal with party with the most votes. This did not close the door on negotiations with The Labour Party it simply gave the Lib Dems more leverage, which brings us to the next tip:

The Door Is Never Closed
Even when an offer is rejected it does not mean it can be un-rejected.  Lets say for example, Nick Clegg (leader of the Liberal Democrats) wants Gordon Brown to stand-down as Prime Minister as a condition of beginning talks about double-teaming the electorate from the Governments benches in the House of Commons. Gordon says no. He’s happy to negotiate but he ain’t standing down, that’s not negotiable. Provided Nick has the leverage. Gordon can hold his ground and Nick can afford to call Gordon’s bluff. Rejecting an offer does not mean negotiations have ended. The door never being closed is another way of saying nothing is off the table. Which brings us nicely to our next tip.

Under The Table
All negotiation should be made in good faith, that is to say, you should never lie to get what you want. While negotiations are taking place there are other layers of communication that take place off-the-record. Now if you are a journalist you know that in real-life there is no such thing as off-the-record however in negotiation things do happen under the table. Like, for example the little informal chat whilst standing at the urinal between Peter Mandelson and Paddy Ashdown. Its an opportunity to sound the other party out without the intense pressure that adversarial negotiation can bring about. Its quite common for a Judge in Court to send litigants out to the corridor to bang their heads together to do a deal. Court is an example of a failure to negotiate and should always be considered as a last option to reach a solution. Solutions not arguments.

Sleep On It
Negotiations take time. Some people are impatient. Patience is a virtue. Some amateur house buyers often can’t bare the hours waiting for a response from the vendor and out negotiate themselves before they even get a yes or no. Be patient.

Exercising Deadlines
Deadlines can be used for leverage eg “Gordon must announce he’s standing down by 6pm (in time for the evening news) otherwise we do a deal with The Conservatives”, imposed deadlines can force the other parties hand.

Give Less, Win More
This is a basic tenet of negotiation. Invariably you have to let something give, that is the nature of the beast, how much you give depends on what your bottom line is ie the most you are prepared to concede. The less you concede the more you have over and above your bottom line.

Face
If the other party make’s a concession, allow them the grace to save face publicly and spin their concession in the way that best suits them. It does nobody any good to embarrass your negotiating partner.

When You Get Agreement, Shut The Hell Up
Under stress some people yammer on and unpick the agreement they’ve achieved, this is commonly known as putting your ‘foot in mouth’. You could say something that you regret. Shut up, they’ve agreed. You’ve got what you want. Zip it!

Of course, the best deal is when both parties feel that they can walk away from a deal happy that the agreement was fair. If you’ve ever bought an Egyptian Rug and haggled the price to something you think is ridiculously low, as you walk down the street with the rug rolled-up on your shoulder with a grin on your face, listen carefully. You will hear the cackling salesman, turn around and you will see him rubbing his hands together with glee.

Derek Sivers recently gave a talk at the SxSW music conference called Successful SxSW: the Tao of the Conference. He fielded the question to his contacts ‘what advice would you give people attending’ and asked people to submit short videos with their advice and presented 20 of these at the conference. In all there were 60 videos submitted which he presents on his site.

Whilst a Tao is often referred to as ‘the nameless’, because neither it nor its principles can ever be adequately expressed in words. The Tao that Derek is pointing to is woven amongst the useful networking tips and strategies.

Instead of seeing people as contacts and leads that you want to exploit you should see people as the treasure; each person you meet will literally change your life, even a small change of course now can take your life in a whole new direction.

I ‘won’ a chance to strand  on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London for 1 hour from 3am on Monday 12 October as part of Antony Gormley’s One & Other.

On 12 October in 1797 a famous Mackem nailed the Union Flag to the broken mast of the HMS Venerable. At the time Britain was at war with France, Holland and Spain. 212 years ago British and Dutch navies met in battle off the coast of Norway, near Camperdown, close to Bergen.

During the fierce fighting, HMS Venerable was badly damaged and the main mast was broken. Jack Crawford climbed the broken mast and nailed the flag to it, whilst under heavy fire. The Union Flag was the command flag of Admiral of the Fleet. In a time without electronic communication systems this flag was a very important identifier, and a proud symbol of British power. The loss of the flag could be a great blow to morale and could affect a battle. The phrases to “nail your colours to the mast” and “show your true colours” refer back to the original use and meaning of these flags.

After the battle there was a victory procession in London. Jack’s action was said to have helped win the battle. In 1890 a bronze statue commemorating Jacks deed was erected in Mowbray Park, Sunderland and unveiled by the Earl of Camperdown, the grandson of Admiral Duncan.

I applied to be involved in Gormley’s latest art attack as I thought it would be a good excuse to stand on the plinth and see things in the square from a new perspective. Its a silly thing to do and I love a bit of nonsense now and again. Since being selected the One & Other team have asked me what am I going to do on the plinth? Like I am supposed to attempt some sort of performance for the Sky Arts Endemolesque reality show.

Friends have suggested things, which in there own right would be quite fun to do anywhere – a Punch and Judy show, Nude Karaoke or something else to get a reaction.

Plinths in Trafalgar Square are reserved for monuments of monarchs or military heroes. Places where dead heroes disappear in to the landscape of myth, legend and bird shit. People like Jack Crawford.

So i’m nailing my colours to the mast: I’ve decided to boycott my slot at One & Other. The fourth plinth should not be hi-jacked. It denigrates the value of the real plinthers.

Real ‘plinthers’ make their actions on the ground (or in the air) and the lone and level sands stretch far away.

I don't have thousands of favourites on Flickr. My conditions for starring pictures is not that I simply 'like it'. The images have to inspire me, they have to be good enough that I would spend money to see them.

I don't do this
This particular image I found so powerful and inspiring that I didn't just want it in my favourites, I wanted it on the wall in my home.

The bold brushstrokes look like they were created with the passion and energy of a samurai, spontaneous, confident, potent. Bam bam bam. I love it, it's inspiring. So I bought it from fellow flickr'er Snerdinski, a versatile artist from Boston. I promised him that I'd send him a picture of it framed but I think it deserves another outing on Flickr to be appreciated again. So here it is.

*sorry for the delay John, I've been a little out of sorts for a couple of months and the frame sat in the shop for far too long before I had the energy to bring it home to put on the wall.

Remember that guy from Police Academy who could produce all those crazy noises from his mouth? His name is Michael Winslow, he’s one of my heroes. Check him out in this crazy video of him being Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. More serious posts coming soon, in the meantime enjoy this.

But of course there is a serious message behind this post. You can make any noise you want. You can achieve anything you want, the only person standing in your way is you.

Tags: jimi hendrix, michael winslow, police academy

This is the view I saw as I opened my back door yesterday evening. Awesome. In the old fashioned sense of the word is all around us every moment of every day. You just need to open your eyes. We take it for granted but the occasional smack round the face with a big slice of awe keeps the door ajar.

Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
Hans Margolius