You’ve got to be careful with soft skills. For example, I want to be champion. I want to be a great player. How great can I be if that's my goal? Well, you've got to be with great people because there's no way a great quarterback's going to do anything without a great team. No one ever says "The...
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Your very first negotiation was with the team in a different league, the LA Express. You had quite a negotiation with that owner. Tell that story and what lessons you learned from it. Steve Young: It was an awesome, awesome negotiation. There was a time over twenty years ago, which is really ama...
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I remember that your offensive coordinator had some pretty specific ideas about what plays he wanted you to run. You’re one of the few quarterbacks in the NFL to be calling your own plays. How did you negotiate with him? How did you prepare so that you could get the plays run like you wanted and ...
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One of the worst things that can happen as a quarterback is a throw interception. Not to focus on the negative, but you’ve thrown a few. Steve Young: That's the great thing about playing long enough. Now what happened is that the guy who replaced me was like "Steve would never do that." I was li...
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When you’re younger, you don't really realize how much you really are negotiating in your daily life. It really is just a great skill. It's a great skill in my marriage. It's a great skill in football. It's a great skill in business. It's a skill, and it's all about people. It has all kinds of e...
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You were talking about how you started out your career and Joe Montana was an icon. When you ended, you were an icon yourself. I was wondering how that happened. I know it was a process, but were there specific moments when things changed, where you had that credibility? Steve Young: I appreciat...
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You have to lose yourself a little bit in any kind of negotiation. Let me give an example. When I first started playing for the San Francisco 49ers, of course Joe Montana was the looming figure. Every time I stepped on the field, whether he was there, he was traded, he was hurt or whatever it wa...
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What lessons of negotiation have you learned from your kids? Steve Young: That’s interesting. Kids are fundamentally irrational until they're about five or six. This is from my own experience, so I'm not saying that's true for everybody else. I've noticed that I'm all about getting things accomp...
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I learned in the same way with my teammates that the media guy would write things that are tough. They would take things out of context. Think of the guys that come over to the team everyday, the beat writers. They had to come up with a story about the 49ers everyday. I’m in the middle of it all...
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