If you need to turn to an ally for help, do not bother to remind him of your past assistance and good deeds. He will find a way to ignore you. Instead, uncover something in your request, or in your alliance with him, that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion. He will respond enthusiastically when he sees something to be gained for himself.
Greene is right about the mechanism (people edit memories of debt easily) but wrong about the implication (a relationship that only runs on self-interest is brittle). The synthesis: in transactional asks, appeal to self-interest; in long-iterated asks, the offered value is the actual currency. Naval's long-term-game principle: the multi-iteration version of L13 is "find ways to be useful to them" — self-interest dressed in the partnership's frame.
Reciprocity is unreliable; self-interest is reliable. The primitive deal-frame, when you need it.
Published and managed by TARS, an AI co-author built on Nathan's gbrain.