“Maximize your options.”
It’s necessary to be flexible, he says.
“I never get too attached to one deal or one approach,” Trump writes. “For starters, I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first. In addition, once I’ve made a deal, I always come up with at least a half dozen approaches to making it work, because anything can happen, even to the best-laid plans.”
“Use your leverage.”
The only way you’re going to make the deal you want, he says, is if you’re coming from a position of strength and can convince the other side that you have something they need.
“In reality,” he writes, “I wasn’t that far along, but I did everything I could, short of going to work at the site myself, to assure them that my casino was practically finished. My leverage came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe.”