Saying no will sometimes have consequences, and the counterpart is sometimes unreasonable.

1. Who are you saying NO to - Ideally what you are saying NO to should have mattered more however in real world incentives and repercussions matter a lot

2. How are you saying NO - Even if one saying a direct NO the tone matters, other times there are ways where you can add precursor conditions (which make it a automatic NO) or you put it on the backlog way too far down that it never gets a real chance to be acted upon.

Putting it on the backlog is the corporate style of saying no without saying NO. Smart people just avoid getting into backlog and just truncate it if its been in the backlog for way too long.

Is there supposed to be a teaching in here?

> He listed some vague reasons, compressor this, compressor that, costs, etc... which I didn't care to understand.

> two adults should be able to ask each other for what they want

... Which they would be able to do if you actually listened to the guy instead of dismissing him as someone you didn't understand?

Compromise is about figuring out how to give everybody what they want while letting go of how it happens. Turning on half the ACs is a great compromise. Whatever happened at the end is not.

To be generous to the author though, I can see how standing up for yourself in this way would feel revolutionary to someone who has never pushed back in their life. Just know this is the first step on a much longer journey. The next step is figuring out what the compromise would have been with the authority figure on the phone.

Don’t get me wrong, the note itself wasn’t great either, but ignoring it wasn’t some great sign of „saying no“ - it was needlessly escalating a conflict instead of trying to resolve it.

Further more, my rule: the more someone tells you how mature their position is and how child like you're being the more the odds increase that the only problem is that your opponent doesn't have a mirror or an ounce of introspection.

wouldn't part of an "adult-to-adult conversation" also be to try and listen to the other, if nothing else than to understand their arguments?

> After some filler words, he said he will talk to the owner terminating the contract and giving a refund. I said great and hung up.

If that's what OP understands as "negotiating the difference" then ok, I guess...

The closest they came to negotiation was when they were doing yoga alone in one room and "decided" to allow a dozen other people in a different room to turn their A/C on.

> On these days, I've told them to turn the AC off until we're done. One day, I was the only one practicing and I had to tell this to a dozen people outside the room. I will never forget the bugged looks I got back. Eventually their leader spoke up and we decided that they can turn on the AC further away from the room.

Then when the other tenants finally get sick of this, they get the owner on the phone. This is the negotiating opportunity. Instead, this person gloats about not listening:

> The man on the other end introduced himself as some authority figure and told me to turn the AC back on. He listed some vague reasons, compressor this, compressor that, costs, etc... which I didn't care to understand. But then he asked me in an accusing tone, why I turned it off despite the note saying not to. Peter Block would find this question childish. After all, two adults should be able to ask each other for what they want. They should expect a possible answer to be 'No' and be prepared to negotiate the difference.

I think they forgot to consider that the other person can also say "no". This is the climax of the negotiation opportunity, and he uses it to tell off the manager:

> After some filler words, he said he will talk to the owner terminating the contract and giving a refund. I said great and hung up.

The intense worship for Peter Block throughout the post is a strange contrast to the way they fail to implement any part of the advice other than the "No" part.

There was no negotiation here. Just a strange pyrrhic victory.