Former FBI Director Comey should have been more cautious negotiating with Trump (you’re always negotiating); the latter is a wizard that doesn’t adhere to the styles of normal negotiators. Thus, Comey should have known that he was playing with fire as he interacted with the president in the manner he did. But now that Comey is gone, it’s the president’s turn to play peekaboo with the hidden flame of wizardry. That means Comey may take the president to the school of wizardry in the form of ‘get backs’.

When you negotiate, always play the long-game. Think about what might occur in the future as the result of the actions you engage in today.

You’re fired! Ha, ha, ha. That’s a joke, right? The timing and manner in which Comey discovered that he was out of a job, initially led him to believe just that; his firing was a joke.

A wizard is someone that can turn the hidden into the seen, darkness to light, and in-and-out to out-and-in. In essence, a wizard is someone that can change reality based on how he wishes reality to be. Both Trump and Comey have that ability.

Getting tired of reading this article, don’t stop. Instead, take note of how you’re feeling. At the end of this article, don’t jump ahead yet, you’ll gain more insight as to how you might feel when negotiating with a wizard.

Be more cautious than normal when negotiating with people of power. They can use their power to get others to do their bidding, which means they can have unperceived leverage. Thus, the wizard can work his magic behind the scenes and cause a twitch to occur in you (i.e. perceived strange things to happen).

1. Always be mindful of how you treat people (i.e. you’re always negotiating). You may be in a power position today, but others can combine forces to overpower you.
2. Consider how things look when you make pronouncements; optics (i.e. the way something appears) can have more of a mental impact on a decision than the original intent of the decision.
3. When negotiating with powerful people, they can change the rules of the negotiation and not give a heck about the opinion of others, or their lack of consistency with what they previously stated.

Understand, in any negotiation, the possibility for blowback always lurks in concealment. When negotiating with a wizard the blowback can be in the form of being turned into a toad (i.e. have you and/or your environment viewed as being hollow, suspect to deal with, unfit for interaction).

Be it fair to say, negotiating with people of substantial power has to be done with caution. You have to be mindful not to alienate them, while at the same time getting as much as you can as quickly as you can. Just keep in mind that you might have to walk a narrow road between being amenable and being viewed or positioned as someone that can’t be dealt with. If the latter should befall you and you seek retribution, all you have to do is wait. There’ll come a point, with leverage (i.e. combining forces with others), when you’ll be able to even the score. For you, when that occurs… everything will be right with the world.

Now let me ask, did you experience frustration while reading this article? If you did, that’s what it’s like negotiating with a wizard. The same is true if you didn’t experience frustration. That’s the power of wizardry. The wizard is always right.

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

The idea of telecommuting is a highly attractive one to many people. The attraction arises out of the fact that through it, people can get to work from the comfort of their homes. This would translate to many benefits. For starters, it would translate to savings on travel costs, to and from work. Secondly, it translates to greater convenience. Nothing, in terms of convenience, beats the opportunity to work right from your bed, in your pajamas! And thirdly, it translates to less work stress: starting with that which one would be very likely to encounter on the roads on their way to work, to that which tends to come up as tensions build up in offices.

Unfortunately, in its earliest days, telecommuting was seen as something that was only possible for certain jobs and not for others. People whose work did not involve a lot of personal interactions, the likes of accountants and computer programmers, were seen as the only people who could telecommute. On the other hand, people whose work revolved around a lot of personal interactions and the making of various presentations like managers were told that they couldn’t telecommute.

Thankfully though, through tools like the increasingly popular remote presentation software, it is becoming possible for people whose work previously made it possible for them to telecommute to do so nowadays. That is especially the case for managers whose day to day work, for the most part, revolves around preparing and making various presentations.

It is because of that nature of their work (which involves making and attending presentations), that managers were previously seen as the sorts of people who couldn’t work from home. After all, in the absence of a mechanism through which they could make presentations from home, how would they be able to go about their work?

Remote presentation software changes the dynamics of the issue radically.

Through the remote presentation software, it becomes possible for people to make presentations from wherever they happen to be, in real time, and in a professional platform. And thanks to that, the argument that managers couldn’t telecommute ‘because their work involved making presentations’ doesn’t hold water any more. Through remote presentations software, it becomes possible for managers, from the comfort of their homes, to make presentations to colleagues (or other business stakeholders) who may be thousands of miles away. That means that through this software, the business managers not only get the opportunity to work from their homes, but they could even work from their hotel rooms while on vacation.

To be sure, not all managers will still be able to telecommute even with the emergence of remote presentation software. There are elements of management work that require real person interaction, and which simply can’t be done remotely. What is for sure though, is the fact that on the days when all that the manager is schedule to do happens to be a series of internal presentations, they can manage to work from home, through the use of the remote presentation software. And that opportunity to work from home, even if it is just occasional, would be a great relief to many driven managers who, as things stand, hardly ever get any opportunity even to breathe.

First of all, what is the ordinary meaning of “perpetuity?” It simply means “forever.” So in finance, what do we mean by this same concept? Well, imagine I gave you a piece of paper or certificate, and that paper promised that I would pay you a fixed amount every year, forever. That piece of paper is called a “perpetuity.” Simple! How is it different from, say, a promissory note? It isn’t. We can say it’s a special type of promissory note which lasts forever, with regular payments every year (or every month or other time period).

Now the question is… if I tried to sell you this piece of paper, how much would you be willing to pay for it? If I said… buy this piece of paper for only $100, and I’ll give you $2 for the rest of your life, forever. Would you buy it? It sounds like a great deal, doesn’t it? After all, you just pay once, and then you’ll get money from me forever!

But think about it another way too… Let’s say the bank’s interest is 5% per year. If you put the same $100 in the bank and left it there forever, how much would you get every year, forever? You’ll get $5 per year! ($5 is 5% of $100). Much more than the $2 per year you would get from me if you buy my piece of paper above for $100! So, are you still willing to pay me $100 to get $2 per year forever? Or, would you rather use the same $100 to deposit in the bank, and get a much higher $5 per year instead?

Of course, you’ll prefer to put your money in the bank! However, you might still be willing to buy my piece of paper or perpetuity if I lower the price. How much should I lower it to make it worth your money? $80? $60? $40? Naturally, we can’t simply use our feelings to guess the right price. So how do we find the exact amount? For this, we use the Present Value of a Perpetuity Formula. With this, you will find that the “fair value” in this case is $40. The simplest formula, which assumes consistent annual cash flows, looks like this.
*Fair value = $40 means that if you pay any more than that, you’re getting a sour deal… you’ll be in a better situation putting your money in the bank.

What is the logic behind this “fair value”? We go back to the IRR concept. At the fair value of $40, the IRR of our perpetuity is exactly the same as the interest rate of your bank deposit. Meaning: $40 earning $2/year will have an IRR of 5%. A bank deposit of $100 earning $5 per year will also have an IRR of 5%; thus making the returns the same or “fair.”