Eric Dolph

Your boss invites you to the country club to play a round of golf with him and other important higher ups. You’ve never stepped foot in a country club before, and haven’t played any golf beyond putt-putt.

You’re hoping to graduate early and decide to take an advanced class that’s required for your major, even though you haven’t taken the recommended prerequisites for the class. It’s only the first week, but you’ve only really understood 10% of what the professor’s been saying.

You put “Excel” under your list of skills on your resume because you once created a super simple table to chart your exercises. After you’re hired, your boss asks you to do some more advanced Excel functions, and you’ve been staring blankly at the screen for an hour.

A rich friend has invited you to a charity ball in which the guests make about 10 times as much as you do. You feel a little silly as you pull up and give the keys to your 95 Honda Civic to the valet.

You’re a high school sophomore, and your brother invites you out with him and his graduate student friends. As they talk about their favorite books, most of the conversation goes over your head.

You move to a foreign country and only know how to ask, “Where is the library?”

Every man will experience a scenario like those outlined above at least once in his life. It’s called being out of your depth, and it means that you find yourself in a situation where your skill or knowledge isn’t on par with what’s needed and/or with the rest of the people in the group.

Sometimes out of our depth situations are our own fault. We fudge a little and lead someone on to think we’re more comfortable or experienced with something than we actually are, and when they call on that expertise, our noob-ness is revealed. Those kinds of situations are avoidable with a little humility and honesty.

But oftentimes we’re just thrown into situations where we find ourselves out of our depth. Unforeseen problems at work or a friend’s invitation can put us there. They also often spring up on us while pursuing adventures (they wouldn’t be adventures if they didn’t push you outside your comfort zone after all).

Regardless of how you got into the jam, you’re going to want to make the most of it and minimize the damage.

Being out of your depth can be incredibly nerve-racking, as these kinds of situations are often ones where you cannot easily ask for help without compromising your position or missing out on an opportunity.

But it is possible to quell the stress, and handle an out of your depth situation like a pro. And so today we turn to a pro for advice on how to do that. A professional con man that is.

Frank Abagnale, whose autobiography, Catch Me If You Can, became a popular film, engaged in some of the most clever and literally high flying swindles of all time. Between the ages of 16 and 20, this high school dropout  traveled all over the world posing as a pilot for Pan Am, impersonated a chief resident pediatrician at a Georgia hospital, passed the bar and became a prosecutor for the Louisiana attorney general, taught sociology as a college professor, and forged two million dollars in checks.

Now, I’m by no means advocating that you should follow his path and become a con man! But a guy who can sit in the jump seat in a plane’s cockpit, pretending to be a pilot and chatting comfortably with the crew, knows a thing or two about fearlessly dealing with being out of your depth. The man had cojones of steel, and the techniques he used to get away with his elaborate capers can be utilized by any man who’s looking to get out of a very legal–but embarrassing–pickle. Here are 6 of them.

1. Relax and Project Confidence

“When the guard turned to confront me, I was combing my hair with my fingers, my hat in my left hand. I didn’t break stride. I smiled and said crisply, “Good evening.” He made no effort to stop me, although he returned my greeting. A moment later I was inside Hangar 14…I hesitated in the lobby, suddenly apprehensive. Abruptly I felt like a sixteen-year-old and I was sure that anyone who looked at me would realize I was too young to be a pilot and would summon the nearest cop. I didn’t turn a head. Those who did glance at me displayed no curiosity or interest.” -Frank Abagnale. Catch Me If You Can

When you’re in a situation where you feel like you’re out of your depth, nervousness and even panic can set in—your heart races; your palms get sweaty. The feeling of being out of place consumes your thoughts.  As you look around the room, it feels like your inner dialogue is being broadcasted from your forehead, and that everyone else is focusing in on you.

But as Abagnale discovered, people are far less observant and attentive than you’d think; folks aren’t tuned in to looking for differences, absences, and discrepancies.

There was a study done once on a college campus in which a researcher would stop and talk to a student. In the midst of the conversation, two workers would rudely walk between the pair while carrying a large door. As the workers passed in-between them and the door obscured the student’s view, the first researcher quickly and furtively ducked out, and a new researcher stepped in. When the door passed by, the student was standing in front of a brand new person, and yet the majority failed to realize it!

So the next time you’re at an event where you feel like everyone is staring at you, try to relax and realize that people probably aren’t paying attention to you. Abagnale found that if he strode confidently and purposefully wherever he wanted to go, people were unlikely to question him at all. He acted like he belonged, so people assumed that he did.

Of course, he also always made sure to…

2. Look the Part

“The transaction also verified a suspicion I had long entertained: it’s not how good a check looks, but how good the person behind the check looks that influences tellers and cashiers.”

“I was always accepted at par value. I wore the uniform of a Pan Am pilot, therefore I must be a Pan Am pilot.”

Abagnale found that there was great power in an uniform. This was back in the day when flying was quite glamorous, and wherever he went in his Pan Am pilot’s get-up, people instantly afforded him trust, respect, and admiration.

While not every job and situation calls for an actual uniform, every event does have a standard of dress, and by adhering to it, you’ll automatically seem more like a guy who knows what’s he’s doing. First impressions are crucially important and people use them to glean a lot of information about you. If you show up in jeans and a t-shirt to a swanky party, or a three piece suit to a casual workplace, people will immediately peg you as a guy who’s not quite on the level.

Additionally, when you’re dressed appropriately, and you feel like you look good, your confidence goes up, and this effect is only compounded as people treat you with more respect. Abagnale’s pilot’s uniform changed the way people treated him, which greatly increased how comfortable he felt with the role he was playing.

3. Play Catch-Up Like a Mad Man

“Obviously, I reflected as I left the building, I was going to need more than a uniform if I was to be successful in my role of Pan Am pilot. I would need an ID card and a great deal more knowledge of Pan Am’s operations than I possessed at the moment. I put the uniform away in my closet and started haunting the public library and canvassing bookstores, studying all the material available on pilots, flying and airlines.”

If you’ve been thrown into a situation where you don’t have the skills or knowledge to perform up to par, then you’re going to need to play catch-up every spare second you get. Use your lunch break and your evenings to research everything you need to know to perform your new role or pass the class. If there’s an event on the horizon where you worry you might be out of your depth, then you have the lucky opportunity to plan ahead and bone up before attending.

Abagnale didn’t go into his impersonations by the seat of his pants; rather, they were the result of meticulous and thorough planning and research. He used the same study-intense approach he took in learning about being a pilot with all of his impersonations. When he was pretending to be a pediatrician, he spent countless hours reading books and medical journals, and he carried around a pocket dictionary; whenever an intern or nurse used a term he wasn’t familiar with, he’d go hide in the linen closet, find the word, and memorize its meaning. When he became a college professor, he audited classes to see how other teachers practiced their craft and studied the textbook rigorously.

But there was always a lot of information Abagnale couldn’t find in books, such as the lingo and slang that pilots or doctors used. So he employed other methods of information gathering as well. For example, when learning the ins and outs of flying for Pan Am, he called up the airline, and posing as a high school newspaper reporter, asked to speak to a pilot, whom he then peppered with a myriad of questions about the job. You don’t have to make up an alias to fish for information, however. Just weave casual questions–questions that seem like the “I’m just curious variety”–into your conversations with others.

4. Take Notes

“I kept a notebook, a surreptitious journal in which I jotted down phrases, technical data, miscellaneous information, names, dates, places, telephone numbers, thoughts, and a collection of other data I thought was necessary or might prove helpful.

It was combination log, textbook, little black book, diary and airline bible, and the longer I operated the thicker it became with entries…The names of every flight crew I met, the type of equipment they flew, their routine, their airline and their base went into the book as some of the more useful data.

Like I’d be deadheading on a National flight.

‘Where you guys based out of?’

‘Oh, we’re Miami-based.’

A sneak look into my notebook, then: ‘Hey, how’s Red doing? One of you’s gotta know Red O’Day. How is that Irishman?’

All three knew Red O’Day. ‘Hey, you know Red, huh?’

Such exchanges reinforced my image as a pilot and usually averted the mild cross-examinations to which I’d been subjected at first.”

No matter how much direct or indirect research you do, don’t rely on your memory alone to store all that information. Instead, jot down notes that might prove useful down the line. If there’s some duty at your new job that you should know how to do, but don’t, you can easily get away with saying to your boss, “You know I used to be great at this, but it’s been awhile since I did it. Could you refresh my memory?” He’ll be happy to do so the first time, but if you have to keep asking how to do it again and again, he’ll start to get annoyed. So when he shows you something, write it down so you can refer to it later without bothering anyone.

You can write down people’s names and their interests as well, so that when you know you’ll be attending an event with them, you can study the notes, get their name right, and have material to initiate conversation and build rapport with.

5. Turn on the Charm

“I learned early that class is universally admired. Almost any fault, sin or crime is considered more leniently if there’s a touch of class involved.”

Abagnale treated everyone he dealt with–the tellers, stewardesses, students, and interns–with generous amounts of politeness, charm, and class. His charm staved off suspicion that he wasn’t who he said he was, and made them very willing to help him.

“If I was going to fake out seven interns, forty nurses and literally dozens of support personnel, I was going to have to give the impression that I was something of a buffoon of the medical profession.

I decided I’d have to project the image of a happy-go-lucky, easygoing, always-joking, rascal who couldn’t care less whether the rules learned in medical school were kept or not.”

He also found that self-deprecation can be an important tool of charm. A little wink-wink bumbling. While he was pretending to be a doctor, he’d let his interns make all the decisions, which won them over. And when he made a mistake, they’d say, “Oh, stop joking doc!”

If you’re an irritating boor who’s messing up all the time, you’re going to get the boot. But if you’re polite and good-humored, people will give you the benefit of the doubt and lots of second-chances.

6. Close Your Yap and Observe

“I didn’t do a lot of talking initially. I usually let the conversations flow around me, monitoring the words and phrases and within a short time I was speaking airlinese like a native. La Guardia, for me, was the Berlitz of the air.”

The best thing you can do when you’re in a situation where you’re out of your depth is to be extremely conservative with both your actions and your words. Say little and listen a lot. This gives you a chance to observe how other people are doing and saying things. If you’re at swanky dinner with a full place setting, and aren’t sure which utensils to use, wait a few moments after each dish is served, and casually watch what other people pick up. Then follow suit.

Keeping your mouth shut while you observe has two advantages. As the famous saying goes: “It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” If you find yourself engaged in a conversation that is largely going over your head, it’s best not to throw out something like, “Oh, I loved the Great Gatsby! But I was so sad when they shot that rabid dog at the end.” That people will remember. On the other hand, if you don’t say much, there’s a chance they’ll think you’re not talking because you don’t know much about the subject, but there’s also a chance they’ll simply think you’re the smart, silent type. Given the fact that you’re likely to be dealing with a conversational narcissist these days, just ask him lots of questions (“Why do you think that?), and they’ll not only be bound to come to the latter conclusion, they’ll be rather charmed.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were out of your depth? How did you handle it? Share your stories and advice with us in the comments!

Related posts:

1. So You Want My Job: Air Force Pilot
2. Mayday! Mayday! How to Land a Plane in an Emergency
3. Toolmanship Basics: How to Handle a Hammer
4. So You Want My Job: Airline Pilot

D.O.A.

The Art of Manliness makes no secret of the fact that we draw inspiration from the past in order to help modern men live better lives. We particularly pick up tips from my grandfather’s generation, as thinking about his life was one of the catalysts for starting the site.

After four years of blogging, I’ve gathered that not everyone is particularly keen on that approach.

Whenever we do a post that lays out lessons from the lives of great men or from the so-called “Greatest Generation,” it invariably attracts comments like:

“X famous man wasn’t so great. He was a drunk/adulterer/slave owner…[fill in the blank with the perceived tragic flaw].”

Or-

“The Greatest Generation…pffft! Those racist/sexist/homophobes weren’t any better than anyone else.”

It seems that in our cynical age being inspired by men of the past has gone out of style along with having heroes or ideals of any sort.

But this wasn’t always so. And today we’d like to make a case for finding inspiration in those who have come before.

A Brief History of History

When you think about history, you may conjure up a memory of a boring class in high school or college in which you had to memorize a bunch of dates and names and battles. Thus, you likely feel that history is a rather straightforward business—a just the facts, ma’am subject.

But as its name suggests, history is simply a story, and who is telling that story and how they tell it makes all the difference in the world.

Thus the story that gets handed down to each generation and how we feel about that story is always changing. History is quite a malleable thing and can be, and indeed is, shaped and re-shaped all the time.

For many centuries, history was looked at as a subject that was important to learn, and its importance was derived from the way it could be used to teach young people vital lessons about who they were and how to live. For the ancient Greeks, history’s purpose was to teach morality. Plutarch, the famous Greek historian, explicitly stated that his intent in writing the Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans was to provide moral instruction to his reader.

This conception of history as moral instruction held firm in the West up through the 19th century. If you look at books for young folks from  the 1800′s, they’re packed with examples from the lives of great men on how to do great deeds, be successful, and become honorable citizens. Some historical figures were portrayed as heroes, men to emulate, and some were portrayed as villains–their lives served as lessons to the student of mistakes not to repeat.

This was also a time of great reverence and respect for the nation’s leaders. Take a look at the eulogies written after the death of George Washington, for example. They’re amazingly flowery and over-the-top, making him out to be a saint of unassailably sterling character.

But in the wake of disillusionment that arose after WWI, historians of the 1920s began to reexamine history and its dominating figures and events with a much more cynical eye. Writer William Woodward invented the word “debunk” during this time (riffing on the practice of “delousing” soldiers in WWI), and picked George Washington as the object of his de-bunkification. Woodward painted Washington not as a dashing hero, but as grossly incompetent, boorishly clumsy, and greedy for fame and money.

The trend of debunking the traditional view of history accelerated in the 1960s, when new historians sought to tell the stories of women, minorities, and other groups that had all but been ignored for centuries. As their untold stories emerged, some historians also took another look at the way traditional history had been portrayed, examining the standard narratives from a new angle, and arguing that what was once seen as good and heroic, really wasn’t so noble after all. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is the most popular example of this approach to history.

A good illustration of the transformation in how we view and use history can be found in a very interesting article about the ways in which the modern Boy Scout handbook has changed since it was first published in 1911. Author Kathleen Arnn describes how in the original handbook, the young reader learns about:

“America’s great moments through the heroes who lived them: George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Betsy Ross, Johnny Appleseed, and most of all, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is a hero among heroes, a central figure in the handbook’s discussions of patriotism and of virtue. He is “in heart, brain, and character, not only one of our greatest Americans, but one of the world’s greatest men.” The manual relays the whole story of his life, from his lowly beginnings that taught him the value of hard work, to his education, and to his presidency and untimely death.”

In the modern edition, references to great men of the past have almost entirely disappeared:

“There are, by my count, four heroes in the book. They are the founders of Scouting: British founder Robert Baden Powell, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, outdoorsman Daniel Carter Beard, and James E. West, who led the BSA through its first 30 years. Each gets a sentence and a picture. American heroes, so numerous and colorful in the original handbook, are almost absent. Washington and Lincoln are each mentioned one time. Here is their sentence: ‘We remember the sacrifices and achievements of Americans with federal holidays, including observances of the birthdays of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’”

While “revisionist history” gets a bad name, it’s a needed thing; the revision of history by each generation and storyteller has been going on since the beginning of time. Our views of history change, and should change, as we learn new facts and hear new perspectives.

However, as with most cultural movements, in a well-intentioned attempt to dislodge the pendulum from being stuck too far in one direction, the weight swung too far in the other.

These days the stuff of Zinn is standard fare in college classrooms, and history is rarely used as inspirational material. If you talk about a good aspect of a great man or generation, you are expected to immediately follow up with a list of their flaws and mistakes as well. If you don’t, you’re seen as a rube who has swallowed the traditional version of history and isn’t in on the new “secret” information that has been revealed. The self-satisfaction of those who consider themselves in the know and like to give you the “real scoop” is invariably palatable.

Thus the fact that we present the good bits about the lives of great men without cataloging their failings is a source of irritation for some who read the blog. (And this isn’t a liberal vs. conservative thing by the way: we get “Theodore Roosevelt was a socialist and Lincoln was a tyrant!” along with “Churchill was a racist and Hemingway was a misogynist!” in equal measure.)

But we don’t concentrate on the achievements and wisdom of history’s great men because we are ignorant of their blemishes, or of history as a whole. Kate taught college history, and I studied classical history as an undergrad, and we read many history books each year. We’re by no means professional historians, but we’re hardly uneducated dolts either.

In actuality, the more we read about history, the more it inspires us. Because we approach our studies with a certain frame of mind.

A Mature Mindset

When you’re a kid, you tend to see things in black and white. Heroes are super good. Bad people are rotten to the core.

As you get older, you start to see things in shades of gray. You learn that people are more complicated and complex than you once knew. This maturing perspective has its drawbacks—it’s harder to be passionate about things and have heroes when you know they’re not perfect, but it’s also essential to learning, growing, progressing, and being effective in the world.

Men who cannot be inspired by history are stuck in the black and white children’s view of the world. A famous man can have a multitude of great traits, but if he also had a big flaw, then nothing can be learned from him. Out goes the baby with the bathwater.

But we’re big believers in holding onto to that slippery baby. The reason we focus on the good aspects of the lives of great men on the site is not because we are unaware of their flaws, but because the purpose of the articles is not to provide a full biographical sketch, but to discover what these men did right and explore what honorable manliness looks like. They’re specifically about the good bits. Maturity means knowing the time and place for things; you don’t enumerate a man’s failings when giving his eulogy, for example. Again, it does not mean you’re ignorant of those failings, but that you choose to focus on certain aspects at certain times for certain purposes

A mature mindset also involves the ability to be inspired by the good bits despite the bad bits and realizing that one does not necessarily negate the other. The mature man does not turn his eyes from a historical figure’s flaws, but he does not let those flaws eclipse the lessons to be learned from the person’s life. He is able to sift the wheat from the chaff.

How does a man gain this sifting ability? He is able to view historical figures just as he views himself. He himself has a great many flaws—and yet he loves himself all the same! When he thinks about himself, he thinks of his good qualities, and would never say that the mistakes he’s made blot out his redeeming characteristics. This is also how men see those they love. A man’s father might have made some mistakes, but he still speaks of him as a great man and seeks to emulate the things he did right.

The reason we can be so generous with ourselves is that we seek to understand our mistakes with rationalizations like, “Well, that was my view then, but it’s changed now.” “Everyone was doing that at the time.” “I just got caught up with what was happening.” “I was depressed then.” “I couldn’t have gotten the job if I hadn’t said that.” “I didn’t know all the facts at that time.” And yet all these mitigating factors apply not just to you, but to all the men of history!

But…But!

Ironically, those who are unable to see the flaws of great men more generously through the prism of the person’s circumstances, tend to be those who also disparage their accomplishments, chalking them merely up to, well, circumstances.

For example, if you praise the frugality of my grandfather’s generation, someone will retort that Gramps was only able to avoid debt because of things like the GI Bill and low housing prices. They argue that the Greatest Generation was only great because of the advantages they enjoyed that we are no longer privy to.

But greatness is not begotten from circumstances, but from how those circumstances are used and turned to a man’s favor. Or in other words, while Gramps may have enjoyed lower housing costs, he was also quite happy about living in a 750 square foot house in Levittown as opposed to a 4,000 square foot McMansion (the average home size has more than doubled since the 1950s).

As Frederick Douglass put it:

“I do not think much of the good luck theory of self-made men. It is worth but little attention and has no practical value. An apple carelessly flung into a crowd may hit one person, or it may hit another, or it may hit nobody. The probabilities are precisely the same in this accident theory of self-made men. It divorces a man from his own achievements, contemplates him as a being of chance and leaves him without will, motive, ambition and aspiration. Yet the accident theory is among the most popular theories of individual success. It has about it the air of mystery which the multitudes so well like, and withal, it does something to mar the complacency of the successful.”

And of course it isn’t hard to see in hindsight the advantages others enjoyed that led to their success. And yet I can easily see how my grandchildren could point to numerous advantages that we have…and yet how little we turned those advantages to our favor and let things go to pot.

And this really gets to the crux of my generation’s tendency to disparage the past–we don’t feel like we’re doing too hot, and we want to believe that our lack of accomplishments is due to circumstances entirely outside of our control. Douglass again:

“It is one of the easiest and commonest things in the world for a successful man to be followed in his career through life and to have constantly pointed out this or that particular stroke of good fortune which fixed his destiny and made him successful. If not ourselves great, we like to explain why others are so. We are stingy in our praise to merit, but generous in our praise to chance. Besides, a man feels himself measurably great when he can point out the precise moment and circumstance which made his neighbor great. He easily fancies that the slight difference between himself and his friend is simply one of luck. It was his friend who was lucky, but it might easily have been himself. Then too, the next best thing to success is a valid apology for non-success. Detraction is, to many, a delicious morsel.”

A man can be showered with numerous opportunities, and yet squander them all away. Circumstances help, but personal responsibility and agency determine our fate.

And this is why a man should study and let himself be inspired by history! It can teach him how to turn his own opportunities into success and character.

My generation tends to believe that everyone is special and that no one is better than anyone else. “Every generation is just the same,” they say. But while it’s true that every generation has its own strengths and weaknesses, what those particular strengths and weaknesses consist of is unique. And if we humble ourselves, we can work on our weaknesses by learning from the strengths of the men of the past, just as we hope that our grandchildren will learn from the things that we’re doing right.

Related posts:

1. Becoming a Better Man in 2009
2. Manvotional: Difficulties
3. The Best of The Art of Manliness: August 2008
4. Manvotional: The Kingship of Self-Control

Facebook recently changed its layout, no longer allowing you to choose between "top stories" and "most recent" stories. Due to user outcry, however, they announced today that they'll be changing it back, though you might not notice it at first. Here's how it works.

The news feed is keeping its divided news feed, with one category of stories on top and another on the bottom, though with this new update, you can choose which stores show up at the top of your feed. If you want to see more recent stores rather than what Facebook considers "top" stories, just hit the teeny tiny "Sort" button in the upper right-hand corner of your news feed and choose "Recent Stories First".

The changes are rolling out gradually, as they always do, so if you don't see the new button yet, keep an eye on Facebook every few days. Hit the link to read more.

Interesting News, Any Time You Visit | Facebook Blog

Staring at a pair of monitors for 10+ hours a day can get rather taxing. That's why I pepper in small breaks throughout the day, like most people. When I need five minutes to untangle my brain I reach for my pile of art pens and the closest post it note (the back of a print out will also suffice).

Compared to the things I used to do on breaks, like surfing the web or secretly playing a iOS game, sketching has a defined end point. Once you put the pen down, nothing jumps up on my monitor or flashes on my desk to tempt me to resume. By doing something nontechnical, it's very unlikely the break will stretch on for too long because once I'm done doodling, I'm not thinking about it at all. The inverse is also true, once I'm doodling my mind couldn't be farther from my daily work, which is more therapeutic than getting caught up in any digital distraction.

You don't have to be Picasso either. By no means am I an artist, nor do I do much doodling in my spare time. I just grab a pen let my mind wander for a few minutes a day to clear my head. I don't plan on framing these half-hearted gems or having a self-indulgent showing at some gallery because that's just ludicrous. Point is, doodling only works if you don't take it too seriously.

Above are some examples of how I don't let my artistic ineptitude hinder my hobby.

I implore you give it a shot sometime!

Sketch Breaks | Glen Elkins

Glen Elkin's is a web designer & front end developer for the ecommerce and web publishing company Juggle.com and writer for the music blog PlaybackSTL.com. When he is not scribbling wireframes, tweaking CSS, or slingin' words, he doodles, plays guitar, and kills zombies.

Milstein Hall, the new 25,000 sqf flexible studio space at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) in upstate New York, was opened last month for students.  The first new building in over 100 years for the AAP, the design by OMA was led by partners Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with associate Ziad Shehab.

“Not only is this going to be our new home, but everyone has a new attitude,” AAP student Ben Waters told the Cornell Sun. “Everyone has this new-found sense of pride for the program.”  The excitement from students and the AAP surrounding the new hall comes with no surprise considering the danger that the program faced in early 2009 – threatening both their accreditation and the hopes of a new OMA designed building eliminated from the campus.

Featuring a unique hybrid truss system of 1,200 tons of steel to support two dramatic cantilevers Milstein Hall provides a must needed connection between the existing Sibley and Rand Hall.  Professor Mark Cruvellier shared, “We have a couple of buildings here on campus that were always divided, and we’d always have to run back and forth in the middle of winter.  Here, we have a building that not only connects Rand Hall and Sibley Hall together, but one that also embodies architecture and design ideas.”

Enclosed by floor-to-ceiling glass and a green roof with 41 skylights, this “upper plate” cantilevers almost 50 feet over University Avenue to establish a relationship with the Foundry, a third existing AAP facility.  The truss system allows for a wide-open upper plate that will house sixteen design studios.

“The upper plate of the box was a direct response to the need for interaction that the art field entails, though we realize this cannot be perfectly achieved or designed by architecture,” Shigematsu commented. “Our ambition for the upper plate was for it to serve as a pedagogical platform for the architecture, art and planning departments – an open condition that could trigger interaction and discussion. I am sure the students and faculty will generate unexpected uses and conditions that go beyond what we have planned for it.”

Thanks to architectural photographer Matthew Carbone for the amazing photos of this project!

Architects: OMA
Location: Ithaca, New York, USA
Client: Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP)
Project Area: 47,000 sqf addition to the College of Architecture, Art and Planning – Studios, Crit spaces, Auditorium, Exhibition, Exterior Workspace and Plaza.
Project Year: 2009-2011
Photographs: Matthew Carbone

Milstein Hall is the first new building in over 100 years for the renowned College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The new building is situated between Cornell’s historic Arts Quad and the natural Falls Creek Gorge redefining the entry for the northern end of the campus.

Currently the AAP is housed in four separate buildings, distinct in architectural style and programmatic use but similar in typology. Rather than creating a new free-standing building Milstein Hall is an addition to the AAP buildings creating a unified complex with continuous levels of indoor and outdoor interconnected spaces. Milstein Hall provides 47,000 additional square feet for the AAP, adding much-needed space for studios, gallery space, critique space and a 253-seat auditorium. The additional space enabled a new master plan of the College’s facilities creating extraordinary new spatial relationships between internal programmatic elements.

A large horizontal plate is lifted off the and connected to the second levels of the AAP’s Sibley Hall and Rand Hall to provide 25,000 square feet of studio space with panoramic views of the surrounding environment. Enclosed by floor-to-ceiling glass and a green roof with 41 skylights, this “upper plate” cantilevers almost 50 feet over University Avenue to establish a relationship with the Foundry, a third existing AAP facility. The wide-open expanse of the plate — structurally supported by a hybrid truss system — stimulates interaction and allows flexible use over time.

The exposed hybrid trusses were designed to balance structural efficiency at the cantilevers and maintain open circulation within the large open plan. A field of custom designed lights and chilled beams were carefully coordinated with the structural and mechanical systems using normally hidden functional elements to define the ceiling plane. The lighting is programmed by a highly customizable and efficient Lutron control system connected to daylight sensors to maintain constant light levels that balance the daylight with artificial light.

The studio comfort environment is maintained by the ceiling’s chilled beams that provide cooling by utilizing local lake source chilled water, reducing the need for large traditional HVAC mechanical systems. The heating is distributed through the concrete radiant heated slab. The efficient mechanical systems and abundance of natural daylight are possible through the use of high performance insulated glass units with Low-E coating on all the exterior glass walls. The building is expected to receive a Silver LEED certification with the possibility of achieving Gold.

The south-east cantilevered area of the studios, named the AAP Forum, is considered a unique space within the upper plate as it is most visible from the pedestrian walkways to and from the Arts Quad beneath as well as the transparency seen from East Avenue that is approximately the same elevation as the studio floor. Given the east and south exposure a specific solution to moderate the daylight was required. OMA looked to Petra Blaisse and her firm, Inside Outside, to design a custom curtain for this prominent corner of the building. The goal was to preserve views out from the studios towards the Arts Quad, maintain natural daylight without the glare and present a striking image at this northeast entry to the Quad. Inside Outside’s concept for this curtain is considered together with the auditorium curtain design using architectural drawings from the Dutch artist/architect Hans Vredeman de Vries to suggest another space outside of the Milstein Hall. The enlarged perspectival drawings are digitally printed onto white vinyl mesh and perforated with holes along the perspective lines.

The exterior of the upper plate responds with different materials to the performative demands of their position on the building. The 26,000 square foot roof is a sedum covered green roof punctuated by a cluster of northern facing skylights which gradually increase in size towards the darker center of the plate further from the exterior façade. Two different types of sedum create a gradient pattern of dots that transition from articulated small circles near the manmade Arts Quad on the south to a dense, larger pattern of dots towards the natural landscape of the gorge on the north.

The continuous twelve foot high band of glass façade makes the long hours of studio activity transparent to the public. Above and below the glass two simple thin bands of Turkish marble define the extents of the upper plate. The naturally occurring vertical bands of grey and white enrich the exterior with a specific scale and material that is unique and yet unites the different buildings despite the proliferation of architectural styles in this area of campus. The uniqueness of the naturally striated marble directly influenced 2×4, Inc.’s design of the custom Milstein Hall building ID located on the south cantilever’s east façade. The vertical line text is engraved directly into the full height of the lower fascia marble panels.

Underneath the upper plate a continuous ceiling of custom stamped perforated aluminum panels extend through both the interior and exterior spaces deemphasizing the boundary between. The enlarged metal panels fabricated on an automotive stamping machine define a scale that is at once perceivable to the traffic passing under the cantilever along University Avenue as well as the pedestrians occupying the spaces below. The vernacular reference to New York stamped metal ceilings creates an urban room-like space below the upper plate surrounded by the existing historic facades of Rand, Sibley and the Foundry. Above the grid of perforated metal panels acoustic blankets tune specific zones such as the road area to absorb noises from passing vehicles, the auditorium to improve audible performance and the covered plaza to reduce noise transmittance to the adjacent offices, classrooms and auditorium.

Beneath the hovering studio plate, the ground level accommodates major program elements including the 253-seat auditorium and a dome that encloses a 5,000 square foot circular critique space. The materiality of the lower level, constructed of exposed cast-in-place concrete, is adds a contrast to the upper plate’s glass and steel character. However both spaces create frameworks of raw spaces to serve as a pedagogical platform for the AAP to generate new interaction driven by the students’ and faculty’s ambitions and explorations.

The dome is a double layered concrete system. The exposed underside is a cast-in-place structural slab spanning the main critique space beneath the dome. The dome was formed using two layers of 3/8” plywood with a finish layer of 3/8” MDO board and poured in a single 12 hour period. The strip light pockets were cast into the dome together with the electrical and sprinkler systems forming a clearly defined central space out of a complex construction process. Above the structural dome slab a concrete topping slab forms the exterior surface of the dome. The dome serves multiple functions: it supports the raked auditorium seating, it becomes the stairs leading up to the studio plate above, and it is the artificial ground for an array of exterior seating pods custom fabricated in Brooklyn, NY by Fabrice Covelli of Fproduct Inc.

From the main entry, a concrete bridge spanning 70 feet across the dome space draws people into the auditorium or brings them down the sculptural stairs to the lower level of Milstein Hall. The bridge’s structural concrete truss railing and stair allow the bridge to span across the dome column free.

Connecting the three levels of Milstein Hall a vertical moving room (12’-3” x 6’-4”) serves as the elevator. Large enough to facilitate the transport of models between the studios and the dome critique space it can also accommodate a chair and reading lamp. Custom designed by OMA and fabricated by Global Tardif and Schindler, the moving room, built from standard plywood panels, was fully assembled near Quebec City, dismantled and reassembled on site in Ithaca.

Milstein Hall provides the AAP its first auditorium and large scale lecture hall within its own facilities. The auditorium was designed to provide maximum flexibility to allow a multiplicity of programs and functions to occur. The auditorium is divided into two halves of fixed seats on the raked section of the dome and loose seats on the level section. When the auditorium is not used at its full capacity of 300 people, the lower level can be used for studio critiques and smaller meetings. The fixed and loose seats were custom designed by OMA and developed and manufactured by Martela Oy of Finland. Their unique design reinforces the flexibility of the auditorium as the cantilevered fixed seat backs fold down to form a continuous bench for higher capacity seating. The bench configuration can also be used for exhibition and display, or create a side table out of unoccupied adjacent seat. The simple rectangular form of the loose seats with the seat backs folded flat and grouped together can serve as tables for models display or exhibitions.

The auditorium can further be transformed into the Boardroom for University Trustee meetings. The Boardroom is assembled at the touch of a button which deploys 61 seats by automatically raising them from below the raised floor of the level floor section. OMA custom designed the solution to integrate the Boardroom into the auditorium and was developed and manufactured by Figueras International of Spain. Each of the 61 individual seats can be raised or lowered independently and is integrated with power, an oversized tablet, a storage bin and is attached to a post that allows 360 degree rotation with locking positions every 7.5 degrees.

The glass-enclosed auditorium provides a permeable boundary between academic space and the public. When privacy or blackout is required, a custom designed curtain unfurls from the auditorium balcony in one continuous form. The curtain is digitally printed on both surfaces with a different Hans Vredeman de Vries enlarged perspective print. Prints of classical columns are countered by the modern design of Milstein Hall suggesting a classical landscape on the interior and exterior of the building.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The insertion of Milstein Hall amongst the existing AAP buildings forms a new gateway for the northern end of Cornell’s campus and transforms together with the recently completed addition to the Johnson Arts Museum an underutilized area into a new corridor for the arts, planning and design.

All photos © Matthew Carbone

Architecture as pie charts

The Tree of Life Chapel - Braga, Portugal

Miller’s Miniature Manhattan, in Union City, New Jersey

“A single-minded youth makes a miniature Manhattan.” So LIFE magazine wrote in 1956 of Guy Miller, a 20-something who had taken it upon himself to rebuild every one of New York’s skyscrapers in model form. These photos, discovered by Gothamist, attests to Miller’s painstaking detail and heroic patience with which he constructed his colossal model. At that time, he had completed all of Midtown and Wall Street before eventually abandoning the project, which had, by then, been shown all over the city, from behind window displays all along Fifth Avenue to exhibitions at Coney Island. When LIFE interviewed Miller, he estimated that he still had 3 years of work ahead of him before he would complete his magnum opus. Read on.

Miller claimed to have little artistic talent but a profound gift for memory and the “unusual ability to look at a building and then walk away and reproduce it exactly.”  The model maker built his city using a rough scale of ’1/2″ to a floor’; the Empire State Building reached nearly seven feet in height, while the Port Authority was low enough that a toddler once climbed on top of it when Miller’s work was exhibited in show. The entire model when completed, with replicas of Manhattan’s 62,000 total buildings, was projected to have spanned a city block in length.

Of all those buildings, Miller claimed that the Waldorf-Astoria was the most difficult to model because it was “completely different all the way around…nothing the same.” He spent three months constructing the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and two months on St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on which he gleefully yet carefully applied minuscule flying buttresses to walls covered with paint mixed with sand to give the impression of weathered masonry. Perhaps most impressively, Miller, following a rendering by Mies van der Rohe, modeled the Seagram Building before its full-scale counterpart had even been constructed.

The model of Manhattan would consume Miller’s preoccupations for most of his adult life. After a sojourn to the West Coast, where he, unsuccessfully, vied for his chance at fortune, Miller returned to New York in 1974 to rescue the remnants of his great model, which had been collecting dust in the bottom floor of a shoe shop in Queens. The landlord evicted the model, and Miller, without cash or prospects, was forced to seek help from former friends and patrons to save his life’s work.

Upon returning to Manhattan, Miller told a local newspaper that he was “lame from walking around and looking at the changes in the city.” Much like Caden Cotard in Charlie Kauffman’s “Synecdoche, New York”–a playwright who dedicates his life to the Promethean project of building and re-building an alternative city inside a New York soundstage–Miller wanted his model to reflect the changes effected within the city over time, having lamented the fact that his miniature Manhattan was “500 buildings out of date.”

Manhattan, the model

Manhattan, the reality

Miller compulsively crafted his own city, a copy to be sure, but an expression of himself nonetheless. As his city changed, he changed along with it, further inscribing the city’s spaces and experiences in three dimensions and in his own memory. In this way, Miller is the imaginative avatar of every urbanite, each of whom–as Paul Auster wrote of the inhabitants of another model-city of another similar model-making eccentric–”carries the entire city within himself.”

[via Gothamist]

Zaha Hadid has been popping up everywhere these days, taking home the Stirling Prize for the second year in a row and becoming the first woman to serve on the Pritzker Prize jury, all while leaving an international trail of sumptuously contoured buildings to house Olympic pools, government officials and just about everything that might require a building.

But when we were alerted by Plus Mood to her most recent completed project in London, the Roca London Gallery, it seemed as if Zaha’s signature curving forms had truly found their calling. Inspired by the elemental power of water, Hadid and her team have carved out another fiercely dynamic space for a flagship store showcasing high-end bathroom products. Was this an architect-client match made in heaven? More after the break.

Roca’s newest product gallery celebrates the brand with an aptly functional, cutting-edge store design. On a single floor measuring 1,100 square meters, Zaha Hadid Architects have crafted a flexible interior with spaces that seem to flow naturally into one another. Portals, rooms, benches and light fixtures appear as if sculpted by water, all contributing to the sense of an organic, cavernous interior. Roca’s bathtubs, toilets, faucets and sinks seem completely at home in the elastic curves of Zaha’s architecture.

The Roca London Gallery is not only a showroom for the latest in bathroom design, but it will also serve as an open space for London’s design lovers to gather for a wide range of events and activities. The year of Zaha continues!

[All photos via Plus Mood]

In 1997, Arthur Ziegler, founder and head of Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, was vigorously leading the opposition to a plan by then-Mayor Tom Murphy to demolish 64 historic buildings in five square blocks of the city’s downtown in order to build a standard enclosed shopping mall.

Eventually, the proposed mall fell under the weight of its own ill-conceived vision when Nordstrom pulled out as a potential anchor. Ziegler’s PHLF had offered an alternative proposal that would have demolished three blocks of mostly nondescript buildings, leaving the rest to be restored by individual owners with retail on the ground floor and apartments or offices above. Murphy rejected this idea.

Now, two mayors, two governors and 15 years later, Ziegler and PHLF have been hired by the city to oversee the redevelopment of those 64 buildings in an effort to advance economic revitalization of the downtown.

One corner before and after development. Courtesy Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation

Before the mall proposal, the stores in these buildings were occupied and people were showing interest in converting the upstairs to dwellings. But by the time the battle was over, most buildings were empty and badly deteriorated.

Nothing happened for years but the city, under Murphy’s successor, the late Mayor Bob O’Connor, sold PHLF three of the deteriorated buildings, which it then set out to rescue and rehabilitate. "No one would support us," Ziegler says, referring to public agencies and private foundations alike. But restore they did.

The results were the needed catalyst for a downtown turnaround. A longtime men’s store that had moved out of downtown in the 1970s came back to occupy one renovated store. An old shoe store, not doing well in another part of downtown, moved nearby. Both were an immediate success. Now other men’s stores are moving in, and Ziegler is hopeful some women’s clothing stores will follow.

Courtesy Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation

Seven new apartments were created in the upstairs, now occupied mostly by office workers but also two students and a retiree. A waiting list has 51 applicants for future apartments. The project is one of six federal rehabilitation tax credit projects nationwide to earn LEED gold certification. The right people were convinced this strategy had merit and so the city turned to Ziegler to continue the momentum.

"We showed by example what could be done and so the city came to us to do this next phase," says Ziegler.

Founded in 1964 at the height of urban renewal demolition, PHLF has been a national leader in restoring historic housing for low-income tenants and historic commercial buildings for mixed use.

Pittsburgh should have escaped the elusive draw of the mall. More than most other cities, Pittsburgh saw its urbanism reinforced with historic preservation as the primary tool, following an active demolition phase. This classic industrial city had started early on the urban renewal path, ruthlessly ripping apart its urban fabric, clearing neighborhoods and a vast portion of its commercial heart at the tip of the city, known as the Golden Triangle, to create a large, underutilized park and series of dull and dreary buildings.

Ziegler, then an English professor at Carnegie-Mellon, and architectural historian Jamie Van Trump were both outraged by the city’s "Renaissance Master Plan," which targeted beautiful but rundown neighborhoods for demolition. Forming the Pittsburgh History and Landmark Foundation, they set out to prove that historic preservation was an effective tool for community revitalization and urban rebirth. They targeted otherwise doomed neighborhoods, combining foundation grants and available government funding that had to be refashioned to meet renovations needs. They bought, restored and resold their first building and established a revolving fund to continue the process.

Under pressure, city officials reconfigured their urban renewal plan to include a renovation strategy for several architecturally rich neighborhoods, one of which author Jane Jacobs called "the working man’s Georgetown." This effort turned into the country’s first historic preservation program for low-income residents, combining both homeowner assistance and affordable rentals. "We saved taxpayers $30 to $40 million through our investment and, more importantly, we saved neighborhoods," says Ziegler.

They analyzed each neighborhood on its own terms, studied its history and demography as well as the architectural quality of the buildings. "In making presentations to the residents," Ziegler says, "we emphasized the uniqueness and goodness of the neighborhoods – not the deterioration – and the need to save buildings as a significant housing and cultural resource for the city." The local urban redevelopment authority stressed how bad the neighborhoods were, how strategic it would be to clear them and stave off the decay. But Ziegler’s approach was about adding the positive to diminish the negative, not erasing the negative and expecting a positive to emerge.

In the end, the PHLF approach has been enormously successful. A variety of strategies, as opposed to a master plan, were established that could be applied according to different local conditions. Residents were involved in the process from the beginning. The worst vacant properties were purchased from absentee landlords and restored.

The three downtown blocks that Ziegler’s original 1997 plan focused on are now being developed, including a new hotel complex. In all, 64 historic buildings will be restored.

Pittsburgh, as a city, is still struggling along with many Rustbelt locations. Yet, 98 percent of its Class A buildings are leased and 70 percent of the Class B. Some of the Class B could be candidates for residential conversion.

"Historic preservation becomes a modest tool for growth," Ziegler observes when asked what the lesson of this success is for other cities. "There’s too much focus today on shrinking and greening over our cities," he adds. "If you make it appealing, they will come." And so they are in Pittsburgh.

You’ve finally gotten a meeting with the people who can turn your dream into a reality. You can’t wait to walk into that room and sell them your idea. You’ve read up on the first part of this two-part series which covered the nuts and bolts of making a pitch, and you feel pretty prepared.

Awesome. But here’s one of the most important things you need to know: The buyer is not looking to say yes. They’re looking to say no.

This is hard for the seller to understand. You feel like the buyer is just waiting to hear your world-changing idea.  You’re one guy, with one idea, and you’ve been working on that idea for years. It’s all you think about.

But the buyer sees dozens, hundreds, even thousands of guys just like you every year. You’re a dime a dozen. For them, saying no is the easiest option. Saying yes involves risk—of their money and reputation–and it involves time, hassle, and responsibility. Saying no simplifies their life and lets them get on with their day. Basically, buyers are looking for any reason to turn you down.

Because of the number of pitches they get, all buyers develop ways of slotting sellers into yes and no categories. Your train can be chugging right along, but if you raise a deal breaker red flag—they’ll throw the switch and put you on the no track. These flags can be really small things, but they’ve probably found that 8 out of 10 people who exhibit those traits end up being a nightmare to work with. And they’re not willing to gamble that you’re one of the two who are exceptions to the rule.

Sure, buyers’ deal breakers aren’t fair—not at all. Your idea might be truly fantastic, but you’re having a terrible day and thus blow the pitch. But buyers can’t give every pitch the same attention and thus develop a sorting system by necessity.

Even though buyers’ deal breakers aren’t fair, they are happily pretty easy to avoid.  Here are 15 pitching pitfalls to avoid stepping into, as gleaned from Stephanie Palmer’s Good in Room (as an executive at MGM, she ruined many a screenwriter’s day) and my personal experience on both sides of the desk.

1. Arriving late. Showing up late demonstrates that you don’t respect the buyers’ time. Here’s a good maxim to live by: “If you’re on time, you’re late.” There are always going to be unexpected obstacles to getting into that meeting room—there’s surprisingly heavy traffic on the way there, you have to park a few blocks away, you have to go through a security check in the lobby, the office is on the 50^th floor, and all the elevators are full. So you should plan on pulling into the general vicinity of the meeting place 15 minutes ahead of time. If you don’t encounter any of the obstacles just mentioned, then when you get to the office early, tell the receptionist you’re there, but that there’s no need to announce you until 5 minutes prior to the meeting time. Then just take a seat in the waiting area and review your notes.

2. Dressing inappropriately. Dress in line with the standard of the company you’re pitching to. If they’re a traditional, conservative business, wear a suit. If they’re a modern and casual business, wear khakis and a sport coat.  Consider wearing something blue as this color engenders a feeling of trust.

3. Taking the wrong seat. People are strangely territorial about their seats. Just try sitting in the wrong pew at a small church (families actually used to “rent” a pew back in the 18^th century for the privilege of having their name emblazoned on it).

Sit in the wrong seat at a pitch meeting, and someone may have to awkwardly say, “That’s my seat.” Or they may say nothing, but sit through the meeting feeling a bit put out by your perceived presumptuousness.

Where they’d like you to plant your kiester may be obvious—but if it’s not, then simply ask, “Where would you like me to sit?” when you walk in.

4. Getting their name wrong. Everyone loves the sound of their own name, which is why using someone’s name is one of the easiest ways to build rapport. Conversely, getting someone’s name wrong is one of the quickest ways to stop rapport-building dead in its tracks.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but I can’t tell you how many emails we get addressed to “Brent and Kay.”

When you get someone’s name wrong, you show you really don’t know much about the company you’re pitching to or that you’re inattentive to details. It can also make you seem highly disingenuous if you follow your name-blunder with, “I’m such a big fan of yours!”

5. Not addressing the pitch to everyone in the room. If both the president and the VP are sitting in on the meeting, don’t only address your remarks to the president, and slight the veep. Talk and make eye contact with everyone in the room, from the lowliest note taker to the head honcho.

6. Acting nervous. Maybe your idea is great, you prepared for the presentation like a champ, and the nervousness you’re exhibiting is simply from a fear of public speaking. But there’s no way around it: nervousness translates as incompetence and weakness. The buyer will wonder if you didn’t prep enough or if your idea is so risky that even you don’t have full confidence in it. Either way, you’ve just made your job ten times harder. And you’ve made their job more difficult as well; they might like your idea, but feel like they can’t introduce you to the higher-ups.

Nervousness can be manifested through fumbling with materials, technical glitches, excessive “ummms” and “uhhhs,” and super sweaty pits. If the latter is a problem for you, wear a jacket and/or wear a clinical strength deodorant.

7. Starting with an apology. Whether for your lateness, your nervousness, or something, else, this is quite possibly the weakest opening you can give your pitch. Let the first words out of your mouth be a show of strength and confidence.

8. Giving your own opinion of your work. Don’t say, “This is an awesome idea that is going to change the world.” Let the idea speak for itself.

9. Telling the buyer how they’re going to feel. Don’t say, “You’re going to love this” or “I have an idea that’s perfect for you.” People hate being told what they think or how they’re going to feel.

10. Jumping into your pitch too soon. The first thing you want to do is build rapport with the buyer. Jumping into your pitch before you build that rapport is like trying to dive down a Slip ‘n Slide before you’ve turned on the water.

11. Talking money too soon. If you’re looking for a big investment, and you talk about that nut too soon, the buyer is going to feel immediate trepidation and view the rest of your presentation through the lens of, “This better be good to warrant that amount of money!” It heightens their expectations considerably. But if you dazzle them with your presentation, by the time you get to talking money, they’ll see the number through the lens of, “Whatever it is, we’ll make it work. We have to make this happen.”

12. Offering phony flattery.  A company recently made me a pitch. They began their Powerpoint presentation with a slide that said, “The Art of Manliness: World’s Best Online Magazine for Men.” A spreadsheet they sent us was entitled: “Art of Manliness World’s Best Data.” Did I mention that the meeting reminder they sent called the meeting “Art of Manliness+World’s Best” and the password was “TheBest?”

To me this came off as desperate and over-the-top. A little flattery is good and builds rapport. But too much comes off as insincere and desperate—as it will make the buyer feel like what you’re selling needs to be unduly padded.

To flatter with class, compliment the buyer on something specific they’ve done that you liked, especially something that the average joe who doesn’t know a lot about the company wouldn’t be aware of.

13. Not giving enough context. In the book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath discuss what they call “The Curse of Knowledge.” The Curse of Knowledge describes the fact that when you’re steeped in a subject, you can easily forget that others are not as familiar with it as you are. Something may seem so basic to you that it doesn’t even warrant mentioning, but for someone else, it can be a brand new idea. By assuming that the buyers know things that they don’t, you may omit key facts from your presentation. The buyers’ resulting confusion will then lead to writing you off.

If there are spots in your pitch where you’re not sure if you and the buyer are on the same page, simply say, “Are you familiar with X?” before launching into your next point. This also keeps you from boring the buyer with information they already know.

14. Using terminology the buyer isn’t familiar with. This is related to the point above. We had a television/film agent who would talk to us with lots of Hollywood lingo that a couple of Oklahomans could not follow. And that’s part of the reason we switched to another agent.

15. Saying just “I don’t know.” Instead say, “I don’t know. But I will find that out for you and send you an email with the information later today.”

Related posts:

1. Selling Your Idea: How to Give an Effective Pitch
2. Manvotional: Robert E. Lee’s Chivalry
3. So You Want My Job: Coffee Buyer
4. How to Run a Meeting

We've mentioned a few ways to detect liars, but Pamela Meyer has discovered just about all of them. She's taken a look at the most common behaviors of liars, scientifically, and shares her expertise on how to detect them.

Meyer believes that lying is often a cooperative act. We willingly let others deceive us because we want to avoid conflict. We may tell each other an email didn't receive a response because it ended up in the spam folder or that dinner was delicious (or at least tolerable). This is okay to some extent because we're all okay with it, but studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times per day. Many of those are white lies, but studies have also discovered that strangers lie three times within the first ten minutes of meeting each other. Meyer sees lying as what we do to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality. When we want something to be true, we lie so that it at least appears to be true in the hopes that we may be able to make it that way before any truth is uncovered. We hope it will be true, and so our lies are essentially loans of a desired future.

We all do this on occasion, but some lies are worse than others. Fortunately, science points to plenty of indicators to help us detect when we're being told a lie, many of which are contrary to what most people believe:

• Liars like to distance themselves from the subject. Taking Bill Clinton as an example, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," has the two giveaways of "did not" and "that woman" help point out that it's a lie.
• Liars use qualifying language, like "to tell you the truth."
• Repeating the question before answering it dishonestly is a common indicator of a lie.
• Liars look you in the eyes too much. They don't fidget, but rather freeze their upper body.
• Liars will fake smiles. Here's how to tell the difference.
• Liars like to offer details.
• When liars are the culprits and trying to avoid punishment for what they did, they're more likely to suggest strict punishments for the "real culprit."
• Liars are terrible at telling their stories backwards.
• Liars will often point their feet towards an exit.
• Liars will often put barrier objects between themselves and the person asking them about their lie.

Meyer's talk demonstrates several other lie detection methods, such as head shakes and asymmetrical expressions, that you really need to watch the video to understand. It's fascinating and worth the 15 minutes it'll take to watch—especially because, with a little practice, you should be able to point out lies in your everyday life pretty easily.

How to Spot a Liar | TED via Swissmiss

All images courtesy of the artist

Halloween is in the air, and before we bring you a pop-up Halloween costume store contest or the top ten houses built over Indian burial grounds, we present these incredible photos of spooky Victorian mansions built entirely out of Legos. More after the jump.

Artist Mike Doyle has been constructing and photographing abandoned houses forged out of nothing but tiny, unaltered, plastic Lego bricks. He describes his work as a “textual exploration of decay,” using black, white, gray and translucent Lego pieces to produce crumbling foundations overcome by nature. His most recent work, Victorian on Mud Heap (shown above in detail), uses nearly 130,000 pieces and took 600 hours to complete.

By using Legos, which are manufactured as stiff, perfect geometric pieces, Doyle brings attention to their crooked assemblage, the gaps in the finished structure, and the swelling, entropic piles that defy the Lego bricks’ traditional calling to be neatly stacked. The result is a critique of the material world. Doyle compares his work to “a little dollhouse, a seemingly secure home…plucked up and set on a new path.” Rather than construct a detailed, falsified image of a charming home, he prefers to embrace the fragility of life.

[via Colossal]

Your daily commute costs a lot more than what you pay each trip to the gas station. Personal finance blogger Mr. Money Mustache details the true cost of commuting, walking through how to calculate the time and financial burden of a "not too bad" commute, breaking down some of the most common misconceptions about what you sign on for with your daily drive to the office.

It was a beautiful evening in my neighborhood, and I was enjoying one of my giant homebrews on a deck chair I had placed in the middle of the street, as part of a nearby block's Annual Street Party.

I was talking to a couple I had just met, and the topic turned to the beauty of the neighborhood. "Wow, I didn't even realize this area was here", the guy said, "It's beautiful and old and the trees are giant and all the adults and kids hang out together outside as if it were still 1950!". "Yeah", said his wife, "We should really move here!".

Then the discussion turned to the comparatively affordable housing, and the other benefits of living in my particular town. By the end of it, these people were verbally working out the details of a potential move within just a few months.

Except their plan was absurd.

Because these two full-time professional workers currently happen to live and work in "Broomfield", a city that is about 19 miles and 40 minutes of mixed high-traffic driving away from here. They brushed off the potential commute, saying "Oh, 40 minutes, that's not too bad."

Yes, actually it IS too bad! … But this misconception about what is a reasonable commute is probably the biggest thing that is keeping most people in the US and Canada poor.

Let's take a typical day's drive for this self-destructive couple. Adding 38 miles of round-trip driving at the IRS's estimate of total driving cost of $0.51 per mile, there's $19 per day of direct driving and car ownership costs. It is possible to drive for less, but these people happen to have fairly new cars, bought on credit, so they are wasting the full amount.

Next is the actual human time wasted. At 80 minutes per day, the self-imposed driving would be adding the equivalent of almost an entire work day to each work week – so they would now effectively be working 6 workdays per week.

After 10 years, multiplied across two cars since they have different work schedules, this decision would cost them about $125,000 in wealth (if they had for example chosen to put the $19/day into extra payments on their mortgage), and 1.3 working years worth of time, EACH, spent risking their lives daily behind the wheel*.

That's EVERY ten years. And that's with a commute that most Americans claim is "not too bad".

You'll note that most 30-year-old couples today, about 10 years into adulthood, don't even have $125,000 in net worth. And they probably drive around quite a bit in expensive financed cars, mostly as part of a self-imposed commute. These facts are directly related!

The alternative I would have recommended to this couple, if they had asked my opinion, would be to make sure their house is within biking distance of both jobs, immediately sell both borrowed cars and replace them with a single ten-year-old manual transmission hatchback, and finally, let the good times roll. Setting aside $10k to keep the new car on the road, they will certainly enjoy their $115,000 of extra cash after ten short years, and if they combine this trick with a few of the other MMM classics, they'll be able to move to historic old-town Longmont as EARLY RETIREES within ten years, instead of being broke wage slaves still commuting out of here each morning when the year 2021 rolls around.

Now, I will admit that it is of course possible to bring your cost per mile down somewhat. That's one of my own specialties, which is why I still keep a car of my own around for affordable family roadtrips. If you buy the right car for $5,000, you might be able to squeeze 100,000 miles out of it with no major repairs. In this case the car depreciation is 5 cents per mile.

• Gas, at $3.50 per 35 miles (assuming 35MPG), is 10 cents/mile
• Tires, at $300 per 50,000 miles are 0.6 cents
• Oil, at $25 per 5,000 miles is 0.5 cents
• Miscellaneous things like wipers and occasional maintenance visits: $200 per 20,000 miles = 1 cent

And there are also ways to live in the town of your dreams without signing up for a commute – get a new job! (There are plenty of them here in my own city, many being worked by people who commute from other towns).

But despite the availability of both of these options, the idea of living close to work still seems to be completely alien to most people I've met. While I would personally consider it far more important than even the salary or the work performed, most people put commute distance below house price, perceived school quality, and neighborhood preference.

To put things back on par, let's whip up a couple of quick commuting equations. Let's assume the average person's marginal driving cost is halfway between the Ultra-Mustachian driver figure of 17 cents per mile, and Uncle Sam's generous 51 cent allowance. So, 34 cents. Let's also assume the value of a person's time is $25 per hour, since this is close to a median wage for a suburban commuter. (If you don't think you'd use your newfound leisure time that productively, you need to think more like an Early Retiree. I used mine for plenty of learning and domestic insourcing).

For each mile you drive across two times on your round trip to work daily, it multiplies to 500 miles per year, or a $170 annual fee
For each of these miles, you waste about 6 minutes in the round trip, adding to 25 hours per year ($625 of your time).

So each mile you live from work steals $795 per year from you in commuting costs.

$795 per year will pay the interest on $15,900 of house borrowed at a 5% interest rate.

In other words, a logical person should be willing to pay about $15,900 more for a house that is one mile closer to work, and $477,000 more for a house that is 30 miles closer to work. For a double-commuting couple, these numbers are $31,800 and $954,000.

Adapting the numbers for a $7.50 minimum wage earner, each mile of car commuting cuts $1.43 from your workday. If you drive 10 miles to go work a 5-hour shift at the Outback Steakhouse, your effective hourly wage is more like $5 per hour after subtracting car costs and adding drive time.

And these are all numbers for the United States, where cars and gasoline are much, much cheaper than they are in almost any other country. In Canada, you can add 30% to the gas prices and 50% to the car prices. In the UK, still more.

If these numbers sound ridiculous, it's because they are. It is ridiculous to commute by car to work if you realize how expensive it is to drive, and if you value your time at anything close to what you get paid. I did these calculations long before getting my first job, and because of them I have never been willing to live anywhere that required me to drive myself to work**. It's just too expensive, and there is always another option when choosing a job and a house if you make it a priority.

And making that easy choice is probably the biggest single boost that will get the average person from poverty to financial independence over a reasonable period of time. I would say that biking more and driving less was the trigger in my own life that started a chain reaction of savings and happy lifestyle changes that led my wife and I to retirement in our early 30s.

Now, all this doesn't mean you have to set up a tent on your employer's front lawn to avoid going broke. Public transit, although an afterthought in most of the US, is great if it's available to you, because you get your brain and your hands back for the purpose of getting some of your day's work done while enroute.

But if you can walk or bike to work, it will cost you virtually nothing. And it also doesn't count as using up your personal time because it is adding something that nobody except Olympic athletes is doing enough of anyway – exercise. You can take your time spent riding your bike ride directly out of time you would have otherwise spent in the gym, or waiting in the doctor's office for prescription medication.

So there's my answer for this potential new set of neighbors. I'll see you in ten years!

And now that the truth has at last been revealed about the foolishness of commuting, I'm looking forward to reading about the empty interstates and bicycle-filled streets tomorrow morning.

* Note that I wrote this whole rant without bringing up that whole pesky "destroying the entire Earth" issue, since that part is controversial in the United States, so I figured it's best just to focus on making you rich.

** For the Record, I grew up in the Great Lakes area, on the Canadian side just a 30 minute drive North of Buffalo, NY. Then I spent a few years in an area much colder – Ottawa, Canada, with a climate just a bit worse than Minneapolis. Biking year-round in these conditions was completely feasible (and even fun), and I'll do a post on how to enjoy winter bike commuting later this fall!

*** Also for the record, my wife and I still bike year-round, including for grocery shopping and dropping our Kindergartener off at school – thanks to the magic of a bike trailers. Do a search on your local Craigslist and change your biking life. Photo by epSos.de

The True Cost of Commuting | Mr. Money Mustache

Mr. Money Mustache is a family man living in the United States who retired from work, relatively wealthy, at about age 30. After several years of retirement, he noticed that his still-working peers were envious of his lifestyle. They were making more money than he ever had, yet they were somehow still broke. So he decided to educate the world on how it is done.

Man walked on the moon for the first time in 1969, but it wasn’t long before we began seriously conceptualizing permanent life in space. In the summer of 1975, NASA’s Ames Research Center together with Stanford University conducted a seminar which posited the sustainability of organic systems in huge self-sufficient cities orbiting the earth. The team of scientists, engineers, and artists envisioned vast galactic megastructures which would harvest sunlight to be used by the space colonies for industry or transmitted to earth by microwave beam. They then concluded that these solar stations could be built by the year 2000. Oh, how we’ve failed. More images after the jump!

Working from the conceptual work of the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, the NASA team designed a giant toroidal structure spanning a mile wide and hovering 250,000 miles above the earth. It could be entirely built from glass and steel made from ore mined on the moon, which, given the lack of gravity, could be easily hauled to the construction site. The structure would spin continuously to create gravitational conditions within its shell so as to sustain life in an earth-like state.

It would house up to 10,000 people and would be equipped with an agricultural system to feed them. Sunlight would flood the interiors at all times would be collected and used to power to station. NASA hoped that the colony “could be wonderful places to live; about the size of a California beach town and endowed with weightless recreation, fantastic views, freedom, elbow-room in spades and great wealth.”

The researchers also developed two alternative designs for even more complex space colonies. The first, the Cylindrical Colonies, features two cylinders, each 20 miles long and 4 miles in diameter, with lush interior landscapes, complete with geographic nuaunces, like mountains, rivers, and flora, and space for millions of people. The second, the Bernal Sphere, is smaller, with a spherical living area 500-meters in diameter whose surface is lined with soil, trees, and single family homes over which a colossal structural apparatus whirred in a perpetual hum.

Interesting (note: hilarious) is the juxtaposition of visionary engineering and singular structural presence with the minutia of suburban life, from the fraudulence of the verdant hills and artificial rivers to the perversity of revivalist mini-mansions and polo-wearing inhabitants, who live in utter ignorance of the marvels at hand. Despite these conspicuous aberrations, the designs are a testament to the formation of creative work under the strain of historical pressures. The oil crisis of the 1970s provoked considerable amounts of research and experiments aimed not only at finding alternative sources of energy, but also fostering new ways of living. What will we do in our own time, when our lives have been colored by recession blues, thrust into turmoil by sociocultural inequalities, and destabilized by the gasps of a dying planet?

The Cylindrical Colonies

The Bernal Sphere

Facebook’s new Timeline gives users a large “cover photo” space at the top of the page. As we’ve already shown, this is a great opportunity to get creative with your profile presentation.

We had so much fun with the last gallery, we’ve collected 10 more awesome profiles, this time focusing on creations that may be simple, but make for stunning designs.

Take a look through the image gallery. Spread the word and keep sharing your designs in the comments. We’re particularly interested in any Halloween-themed designs for a forthcoming Mashable gallery, so get those pumpkins carved!