I wouldn't say I'm a natural negotiator, though living with a 2.5 and a 5 year old has definitely forced me to sharpen my skills. The real training happened years ago when I spent six months in Southeast Asia. My friend Bernard had grown up negotiating for everything: the tuk-tuk from the airport, mangoes at the market, the price of a last-minute boat tour on a random Tuesday. He never accepted the first number he heard. I, on the other hand, had no idea what I was doing. I was 21 and polite in the way that costs you money. So I just watched him and copied whatever he did and it worked.

A few months ago I finally read Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference, and a lot of what Bernard had been doing, the pauses, the questions, the willingness to walk away, the lines he used, "I have no money, I'm a student" these strategies all had names.

When one of our readers reached out asking how to prepare for a salary negotiation, I immediately thought of that book, and then I thought about Claude Projects, and then I wondered how I could connect the pieces together to make something useful.

Tactics in a book are useful, but realistically we are lucky if we absorb 10% of what we read. What if there was a way to make that number grow? Turns there’s a way and it starts with a file.

In Issue #5 I told you that your AI is stuck in August. Its training stopped at a certain point, and everything you've learned since then, every book you've finished, every workshop you've attended, every article you've saved and actually read, none of that exists inside it yet.

But you can change that by feeding it the information you want it to know. 

A Claude Project is a workspace where your AI remembers context across conversations. One of the things you can add to it is a knowledge file: a simple document that tells your AI what it needs to know before you even type your first message. This is commonly referred to as a .md file, which stands for Mark Down just a fancier way of saying a Google doc you attach to the project that has all the info it needs. Once you have this file, every conversation you have inside that Project starts with that knowledge already loaded.

Here's the difference between a Markdown (.md) and Doc, and why it matters for this:

And this works for anything you've already learned. Photos you took of slides at a workshop. A training session you recorded. An article you keep sending to people because it just explains things well. A methodology your company swears by. All of it can become a knowledge file. All of it can live inside a Project and shape every conversation you have there.

One thing worth knowing: if you find yourself using the same knowledge file across multiple Projects, that's a signal it might be ready to become a skill instead. A skill is a saved set of instructions that travels with you across Projects, not just one. For now, a Project is the right starting point. Once you've used it enough to know what's working, you can graduate it.

For this issue, we're building one Project, for one purpose, with one knowledge file.

You don't need the book or perfect notes. You just need to remember enough to get started, and let Claude do the rest.

Here's the three-step flow I used to build the negotiation knowledge file I'm giving you at the end of this section.

Step 1: Give Claude what you have

Open a new chat (not your Project yet, just a regular chat) and say something like this:

This works exactly the same way if you attended a workshop. You'd say: "I took photos of the slides from a training on [topic]. Here's what I captured. Help me turn this into a knowledge file." Or: "I recorded a session on [topic] and here are my rough notes." You give Claude the raw material, whatever form it's in, and it helps you shape it.

Step 2: Let Claude fill the gaps

Once you've shared what you remember, ask:

This is the part most people skip. Your AI was trained on a lot, let it contribute.

Step 3: Turn it into a .md file

Once you're happy with the content, ask:

Download it, name it clearly, and it's ready to upload.

Now set up your Negotiation Project

Create a new Project in Claude and call it Negotiation Coach. Upload your .md file as a knowledge file. Then add instructions that make it behave like an actual coach.

To get you started, I built the Negotiation Coach .md file for you. It's based on the Voss framework, written as a Claude tool, ready to upload.

Here’s what it looks like when you actually use it:

Step by step instructions for setting this up can also be found in here.

Canada ranked 44th out of 47 countries on AI literacy.

Canada just launched its AI for All strategy on June 4th. Fewer than one in four Canadians has received any AI training. Less than half feel confident using AI tools at all. I'm not sharing this to stress you out. I'm sharing it because you're already doing something about it. Every issue you read, every prompt you try, every Project you build is a small, real step toward closing that gap. You don't need a government program to get started. You just need a Wednesday evening and a Cinz.AI issue.

Read the full Canada AI for All strategy here

Harvard Law School published a piece on using AI for salary negotiation. It says exactly what we're doing today.

Their take is that AI works best when you push it into your actual situation, not just ask it generic questions. Feed it your real numbers, your actual role, the conversation you've been putting off. Sound familiar?

Read it here

This issue started with a reader who hit reply and asked how to prepare for a salary negotiation. One simple question turned into a whole issue. That's how this works. You bring the real situation, we figure it out together.

The Negotiation Project we built today is yours to keep. Use it for the salary conversation, the difficult client, the boundary you've been putting off. Feed it anything you've learned and watch it get sharper every time.

If this gave you an idea for a conversation you've been putting off, that's enough. Go build the Project. One small thing, stacked over time is how AI becomes your unfair advantage.

And if your boss sent you this newsletter, that's your sign to go ask for the raise 😉

Cinz.AI

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