Apartment Selling Quotes

Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.

The Kielburgers are extremely accomplished and educated people who have demonstrated that they know how to build an organization, sell a vision, and court powerful people. If they had wanted to make loads of money and eat caviar on a private yacht, they could have taken lucrative private-sector jobs and done just that. It is absurd to think that they instead decided to work sixteen-hour days for twenty-five years, spend hundreds of days per year apart from their families, and invest everything they had in building a global charity—all as a means to funnel money back to themselves.

How To Tell If Somebody Loves You: Somebody loves you if they pick an eyelash off of your face or wet a napkin and apply it to your dirty skin. You didn’t ask for these things, but this person went ahead and did it anyway. They don’t want to see you looking like a fool with eyelashes and crumbs on your face. They notice these things. They really look at you and are the first to notice if something is amiss with your beautiful visage! Somebody loves you if they assume the role of caretaker when you’re sick. Unsure if someone really gives a shit about you? Fake a case of food poisoning and text them being like, “Oh, my God, so sick. Need water.” Depending on their response, you’ll know whether or not they REALLY love you. “That’s terrible. Feel better!” earns you a stay in friendship jail; “Do you need anything? I can come over and bring you get well remedies!” gets you a cozy friendship suite. It’s easy to care about someone when they don’t need you. It’s easy to love them when they’re healthy and don’t ask you for anything beyond change for the parking meter. Being sick is different. Being sick means asking someone to hold your hair back when you vomit. Either love me with vomit in my hair or don’t love me at all. Somebody loves you if they call you out on your bullshit. They’re not passive, they don’t just let you get away with murder. They know you well enough and care about you enough to ask you to chill out, to bust your balls, to tell you to stop. They aren’t passive observers in your life, they are in the trenches. They have an opinion about your decisions and the things you say and do. They want to be a part of it; they want to be a part of you. Somebody loves you if they don’t mind the quiet. They don’t mind running errands with you or cleaning your apartment while blasting some annoying music. There’s no pressure, no need to fill the silences. You know how with some of your friends there needs to be some sort of activity for you to hang out? You don’t feel comfortable just shooting the shit and watching bad reality TV with them. You need something that will keep the both of you busy to ensure there won’t be a void. That’s not love. That’s “Hey, babe! I like you okay. Do you wanna grab lunch? I think we have enough to talk about to fill two hours!" It’s a damn dream when you find someone you can do nothing with. Whether you’re skydiving together or sitting at home and doing different things, it’s always comfortable. That is fucking love. Somebody loves you if they want you to be happy, even if that involves something that doesn’t benefit them. They realize the things you need to do in order to be content and come to terms with the fact that it might not include them. Never underestimate the gift of understanding. When there are so many people who are selfish and equate relationships as something that only must make them happy, having someone around who can take their needs out of any given situation if they need to. Somebody loves you if they can order you food without having to be told what you want. Somebody loves you if they rub your back at any given moment. Somebody loves you if they give you oral sex without expecting anything back. Somebody loves you if they don’t care about your job or how much money you make. It’s a relationship where no one is selling something to the other. No one is the prostitute. Somebody loves you if they’ll watch a movie starring Kate Hudson because you really really want to see it. Somebody loves you if they’re able to create their own separate world with you, away from the internet and your job and family and friends. Just you and them. Somebody will always love you. If you don’t think this is true, then you’re not paying close enough attention.

The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth.

The decision-making part of the brain of an individual who has been using crystal meth is very interesting. When Carly and Andy were in their apartment, they ran out of drugs. They sold every single thing they had except two things: a couch and a blow torch. They had to make a decision because something had to be sold to buy more drugs. A normal person would automatically think, Sell the blow torch. But Andy and Carly sat on the couch, looking at the couch and looking at the blow torch, and the choice brought intense confusion. The couch? The blow torch? I mean, we may not need the blow torch today, but what about tomorrow? If we sell the couch, we can still sit wherever we want. But the blow torch? A blow torch is a very specific item. If you’re doing a project and you need a blow torch, you can’t substitute something else for it. You would have to have a blow torch, right? In the end, they sold the couch.

How perverse! just when everything seems to be in order and as families gather round the table to have supper,the phantom of the superclass appears,selling impossible dreams:luxury,beauty,power.And the family falls apart

... those selling abortion don't want them to have [the facts]," Virginia said heatedly. "Besides the Supreme Court doesn't agree with you. They judges seem to think we poor women would fall apart if we knew the facts, so they decided women don't have the right to know the full truth." She shook her head. "They've made it legal to withhold vital information, even when a woman requests it, for heaven's sake!

Don’t let anyone sell you on the idea that anything (apart from the Lord Himself) is more important than your marriage. God means for your life and your marriage to be filled with passion and purpose.

Impossible to believe we need so much as the world wants us to buy. I have more clothes, lamps, dishes, paper clips than I could possibly use before I die. Oh, I would like to live in an empty house, with vines for walls, and a carpet of grass. No planks, no plastic, no fiberglass. And I suppose sometime I will. Old and cold I will lie apart from all this buying and selling, with only the beautiful earth in my heart.

Like you?” My face twisted in abhorrence, spitting the words like they were revolting. Her eyes widened. I shook my head, a dark chuckle on my lips. “You think I fucking like you? Are you kidding me here? I don’t like you. I love you. Even that’s an under-fucking-statement. I live for you. I breathe for you. I will die for you. It. Has. Always. Been. You. Ever since I saw your sorry ass for the first time on that threshold and you fucking poked me in the chest like I was a toy. We’ve been apart for ten years, Rose LeBlanc, and not even one day has passed without me thinking of you. And not just in passing. You know, the occasional she-could-have-been-a-g reat-fuck. I mean really taking my time to think about you. Wondering what you looked like. Where youwere. What you were doing. Who you were with. I stalked you on Facebook. And Twitter—which, by the way, you need to deactivate because you never once bothered to tweet—but you aren’t exactly a social media animal. I asked about you. Every time I was in town. And once I realized you were in New York with Millie…” “Rosie, I bought a new penthouse in TriBeca a few months before you moved into our building.” “Why are you telling me this?” She blinked away her tears, but fresh ones rolled down to replace them time. “Because I had to sell it and lost a shit-ton of money the moment I realized you were going to be my neighbor if I stayed in my current place. Real talk, Rosie, you are all I ever wanted. Even when you wanted me to be with your sister. She was a comforting candle. You were the dazzling sun. I’d lived in the dark—for your selfish ass. And if you think I’m going to settle for something , you’re dead wrong. I am taking everything . We will have kids, Rose LeBlanc. We will have a wedding. And we will have joy and vacations and days where we just fuck and days where we just fight and days where we just live. Because this is life, Baby LeBlanc, and I love the fuck out of you, so I’m going to give you the best one there is. Got it?

We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body -- what is authentic, what is archaic -- and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment -- these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body -- and that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded, exploring the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation. The hour is late; the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world. Now the challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to put their feet and a sky to walk under; and that's what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let's not sell it straight. Let's not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let's not give our control over to the least among us. Rather, you know, claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination. Thank you very, very much.

I wouldn't mind dispatching all 3 of my room mates vile felines in this apartment. Nasty beasts. I'm just afraid I wouldn't be able to sell "curiosity" as a serial killer.

The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.

But even while Rome is burning, there’s somehow time for shopping at IKEA. Social imperatives are a merciless bitch. Everyone is attempting to buy what no one can sell.  See, when I moved out of the house earlier this week, trawling my many personal belongings in large bins and boxes and fifty-gallon garbage bags, my first inclination was, of course, to purchase the things I still “needed” for my new place. You know, the basics: food, hygiene products, a shower curtain, towels, a bed, and umm … oh, I need a couch and a matching leather chair and a love seat and a lamp and a desk and desk chair and another lamp for over there, and oh yeah don’t forget the sideboard that matches the desk and a dresser for the bedroom and oh I need a coffeetable and a couple end tables and a TV-stand for the TV I still need to buy, and don’t these look nice, whadda you call ’em, throat pillows? Oh, throw pillows. Well that makes more sense. And now that I think about it I’m going to want my apartment to be “my style,” you know: my own motif, so I need certain decoratives to spruce up the decor, but wait, what is my style exactly, and do these stainless-steel picture frames embody that particular style? Does this replica Matisse sketch accurately capture my edgy-but-professional vibe? Exactly how “edgy” am I? What espresso maker defines me as a man? Does the fact that I’m even asking these questions mean I lack the dangling brass pendulum that’d make me a “man’s man”? How many plates/cups/bowls/spoons should a man own? I guess I need a diningroom table too, right? And a rug for the entryway and bathroom rugs (bath mats?) and what about that one thing, that thing that’s like a rug but longer? Yeah, a runner; I need one of those, and I’m also going to need…

The high standard of living in the domain of the great corporations is restrictive in a concrete sociological sense: the goods and services that the individuals buy control their needs and petrify their faculties. In exchange for the commodities that enrich their life, the individuals sell not only their labor but also their free time. The better living is offset by the all-pervasive control over living. People dwell in apartment concentrations- and have private automobiles with which they can no longer escape into a different world. They have huge refrigerators filled with frozen foods. They have dozens of newspapers and magazines that espouse the same ideals. They have innumerable choices, innumerable gadgets which are all of the same sort and keep them occupied and divert their attention from the real issue- which is the awareness that they could both work less and determine their own needs and satisfactions.

As my wife saw it—as most people would see it, I imagine—an unwritten book was hardly a financial plan. “In other words,” she said, “you’ve got some magic beans in your pocket. That’s what you’re telling me. You have some magic beans, and you’re going to plant them, and overnight a huge beanstalk is going to grow high into the sky, and you’ll climb up the beanstalk, kill the giant who lives in the clouds, and then bring home a goose that lays golden eggs. Is that it?” “Something like that,” I said. Michelle shook her head and looked out the window. We both knew what I was asking for. Another disruption. Another gamble. Another step in the direction of something I wanted and she truly didn’t. “This is it, Barack,” Michelle said. “One last time. But don’t expect me to do any campaigning. In fact, you shouldn’t even count on my vote.” — AS A KID, I had sometimes watched as my salesman grandfather tried to sell life insurance policies over the phone, his face registering misery as he made cold calls in the evening from our tenth-floor apartment in a Honolulu high-rise. During the early months of 2003, I found myself thinking of him often as I sat at my desk in the sparsely furnished headquarters of my newly launched Senate campaign

Many years later after the sell-outs, betrayals, and hatred which would tear us apart, when our brotherhood had been destroyed, I’d always look back and remember that night. That fucking wild night at the KeyClub, when the smoke stung my eyes but my world was full of nothing but blind hope. When life was not a mockery, but a very real fire which flamed through my veins like the most incredible drug... the night when Kelly-Lee Obann, drunk, high and barely 20 the time, looked out through his hair with a terrible nakedness and said to me; “We’re not gonna make it out of this alive. You know that, right?

Back in Georgia everybody we knew had an automobile." A bu, don't tell stories. That is not possible." Well, not everybody. I don't mean babies and children. But every single family." Not possible." Yes, it is! Some families even have two!" What is the purpose of so many automobiles at the same time?" Well, because everybody has someplace to go every day. To work or to the store or something." And why is nobody walking?" It's not like here, Anatole. Everything's farther apart. People live in big towns and cities. Bigger cities than Leopoldville, even." Beene, you are lying to me. If everyone lived in a city they could never grow enough food." Oh, they do that in the country. In big, big fields. Peanuts and soybeans and corn, all that. The farmers grow it, then they put it on big trucks and take it all to the city, where people buy it from the store." From the market." No, it isn't a bit like the big market. It's a great big house kind of thing, with bright lights and all these shelves inside. It's open every day, and just one person sells all the different things." One farmer has so many things?" No, not a farmer. A storekeeper buys it all from the farmers, and sells it to the city people." And so you don't even know whose fields this food came from? That sounds terrible. It could be poisoned!" It's not bad, really. It works out." How can there be enough food, Beene? If everyone lives in a city?" There just is. Things are different from here.

A kind of bogan embodiment of Eastern philosophy, Prue swears prolifically, sells organic vegetables out the front of her house, is a strict vegan, chemical-free ('apart from toothpaste') and determined to live alone.

But how can you condemn someone with the power to make rain, to make plants grow, to fly! How could you condemn them to a life of complete boredom in a rat race?” pleaded Eliza. “To belong in a society that teaches them their only value is selling their time. That all they contribute is nothing more than earning and spending money. That they exist apart from that fantastic force that turns the earth and breathes life. I knew there had to be more. How could you wish a deprived life for anyone?

Everything will need selling, or moving, or rearranging. But there's no right place for any of it, including the most awkward piece of furniture: me. I'm too empty to sell. I'm too replaceable to stay in Wellsford, and I'm too big for Celeste's apartment.

Before I opened my computer in the parking lot today, I relived one of my favorite memories. It's the one with Woody and me sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum after it's closed. We're watching people parade out of the museum in summer shorts and sandals. The trees to the south are planted in parallel lines. The water in the fountain shoots up with a mist that almost reaches the steps we sit on. We look at silver-haired ladies in red-and-white-print dresses. We separate the mice from the men, the tourists from the New Yorkers, the Upper East Siders from the West Siders. The hot-pretzel vendor sells us a wad of dough in knots with clumps of salt stuck on top. We make our usual remarks about the crazies and wonder what it would be like to live in a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met. We laugh and say the same things we always say. We hold hands and keep sitting, just sitting, as the sun beings to set. It's a perfect afternoon.

My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.” Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.

He had lived in an apartment with books touching the ceilings, and rugs thick enough to hide dice; then in a room and a half with dirt floors; on forest floors, under unconcerned stars; under the floorboards of a Christian who, half a world and three-quarters of a century away, would have a tree planted to commemorate his righteousness; in a hole for so many days his knees would never wholly unbend; among Gypsies and partisans and half-decent Poles; in transit, refugee, and displaced persons camps; on a boat with a bottle with a boat that an insomniac agnostic had miraculously constructed inside it; on the other side of an ocean he would never wholly cross; above half a dozen grocery stores he killed himself fixing up and selling for small profits; beside a woman who rechecked the locks until she broke them, and died of old age at forty-two without a syllable of praise in her throat but the cells of her murdered mother still dividing in her brain; and finally, for the last quarter century, in a snow-globe-quiet Silver Spring split-level: ten pounds of Roman Vishniac bleaching on the coffee table; Enemies, A Love Story demagnetizing in the world’s last functional VCR; egg salad becoming bird flu in a refrigerator mummified with photographs of gorgeous, genius, tumorless great-grandchildren.

People used to call me an attention whore, it’s like, is that what you call authors who try to sell their book? Do you call a movie star that when they walk the red carpet? Would you ever call a man that?’ I was trying to get people to read my columns so I could pay rent on my $2,500 studio apartment. Even that word, ‘whore,’ everyone uses it so much about me. She’s an attention whore.

She closed her eyes to suppress tears. Rejection based on her religion. She was facing it for the second time in six months. Earlier, someone had rejected her love for the same reason. Now, this old man was refusing to sell one of his apartments to her. Earning money and earning respect were two different things, it appeared. Being a member of a minority community was, after all, not easy.

And yet that performance has a method. Trump's artlessness, like Mark Antony's, is only apparent. Listen, for example, as he performs one of his favorite riffs. He begins by saying something critical of Mexicans and Chinese. Then he turns around and says, 'I love the Mexican and Chinese people, especially the rich ones who buy my apartments or stay at my hotels or play on my golf courses.' It's their leaders I criticize, he explains, but then in a millisecond he pulls the sting from the criticism: 'they are smarter and stronger than our leaders; they're beating us.' And then the payoff all this has been leading up to, the making explicit of what has been implied all along. 'If I can sell them condominiums, rent space to them in my building at my price, and outfox them in deals, I could certainly outmaneuver them when it came to trade negotiations and immigration.' (And besides, they love me.) Here is the real message, the message that makes sense of the disparate pieces of what looks like mere disjointed fumbling: I am Donald Trump; nobody owns me. I don't pander to you. I don't pretend to be nice and polite; I am rich and that's what you would like to be; I'm a winner; I beat people at their own game, and if you vote for me I will beat our adversaries; if you want wonky policy details, go with those losers who offer you ten-point plans; if you want to feel good about yourselves and your country, stick with me. So despite the lack of a formal center or an orderly presentation, Trump was always on point because the point was always the same. He couldn't get off message because the one message was all he had.

It was at that moment that Markisha decided to apply for CalWORKs. She’d rented a room in an apartment she shared with a barber in her neighborhood, and she needed some help paying for it. CalWORKs meant three hundred dollars a month, plus food stamps. So she went to the local welfare office—a “Family Resource Center,” known as an FRC—and walked inside. She was barely sober, emotionally a wreck, literally penniless, and her entire ambition in life was to keep and maintain a room and a half in a rundown section of west San Diego without having to sell her body to pay the rent. This is the kind of person at whom the weight of the state’s financial fraud prosecution apparatus tends to be trained in America. Markisha entered the financial fraud patrol zone when she walked through those doors at the FRC. For three hundred dollars a month, she was about to become more heavily scrutinized by the state than any twelve Wall Street bankers put together. The amounts of money spent in these kinds of welfare programs are very small, but the levels of political capital involved are mountainous. You can always score political points banging on black welfare moms on meth. And the bureaucracy she was about to enter reflects that intense, bitterly contemptuous interest.

I wish I could answer your question. All I can say is that all of us, humans, witches, bears, are engaged in a war already, although not all of us know it. Whether you find danger on Svalbard or whether you fly off unharmed, you are a recruit, under arms, a soldier." "Well, that seems kinda precipitate. Seems to me a man should have a choice whether to take up arms or not." "We have no more choice in that than in whether or not to be born." "Oh, I like choice, though," he said. "I like choosing the jobs I take and the places I go and the food I eat and the companions I sit and yarn with. Don't you wish for a choice once in a while ?" She considered, and then said, "Perhaps we don't mean the same thing by choice, Mr. Scoresby. Witches own nothing, so we're not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs. You have to repair your balloon and keep it in good condition, and that takes time and trouble, I see that; but for us to fly, all we have to do is tear off a branch of cloud-pine; any will do, and there are plenty more. We don't feel cold, so we need no warm clothes. We have no means of exchange apart from mutual aid. If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is a war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor, as bears do, for instance. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us... inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?" "Well, I'm kinda with you on that. Sticks and stones, I'll break yer bones, but names ain't worth a quarrel. But ma'am, you see my dilemma, I hope. I'm a simple aeronaut, and I'd like to end my days in comfort. Buy a little farm, a few head of cattle, some horses...Nothing grand, you notice. No palace or slaves or heaps of gold. Just the evening wind over the sage, and a ceegar, and a glass of bourbon whiskey. Now the trouble is, that costs money. So I do my flying in exchange for cash, and after every job I send some gold back to the Wells Fargo Bank, and when I've got enough, ma'am, I'm gonna sell this balloon and book me a passage on a steamer to Port Galveston, and I'll never leave the ground again." "There's another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves." "I see that, ma'am, and I envy you; but I ain't got your sources of satisfaction. Flying is just a job to me, and I'm just a technician. I might as well be adjusting valves in a gas engine or wiring up anbaric circuits. But I chose it, you see. It was my own free choice. Which is why I find this notion of a war I ain't been told nothing about kinda troubling." "lorek Byrnison's quarrel with his king is part of it too," said the witch. "This child is destined to play a part in that." "You speak of destiny," he said, "as if it was fixed. And I ain't sure I like that any more than a war I'm enlisted in without knowing about it. Where's my free will, if you please? And this child seems to me to have more free will than anyone I ever met. Are you telling me that she's just some kind of clockwork toy wound up and set going on a course she can't change?" "We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair. There is a curious prophecy about this child: she is destined to bring about the end of destiny. But she must do so without knowing what she is doing, as if it were her nature and not her destiny to do it. If she's told what she must do, it will all fail; death will sweep through all the worlds; it will be the triumph of despair, forever. The universes will all become nothing more than interlocking machines, blind and empty of thought, feeling, life...

Communist Romania almost everything was owned by the state. Democratic Romania quickly privatised its assets, selling them at bargain prices to the ex-communists, who alone grasped what was happening and collaborated to feather each other’s nests. Government companies that controlled national infrastructure and natural resources were sold to former communist officials at end-of-season prices while the party’s foot soldiers bought houses and apartments for pennies. Ion Iliescu was elected president of Romania, while his colleagues became ministers, parliament members, bank directors and multimillionaires. The new Romanian elite that controls the country to this day is composed mostly of former communists and their families. The masses who risked their necks in Timişoara and Bucharest settled for scraps, because they did not know how to cooperate and how to create an efficient organisation to look after their own interests.21

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Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skillfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432-A, want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

I spoke to the couple who own the neighboring apartment on the phone a little while ago. They're splitting up. Because one of them likes coriander, and the other also likes coriander, but not quite as much, but apparently that's enough of a reason if you're young and are on the internet.... No one wants to be bored anymore. No, that's just it! Everything has to be like the first flush of infatuation for youngsters, nothing can be mundane, they've got the attention span of a kitten with a glittery rubber ball, Jim agreed, suddenly excited, and went on: So they're separating and selling the apartment.

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The portrait was stolen on 21 August 1911 and the Louvre was closed for an entire week to aid the investigation of the theft. French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once called for the Louvre to be burnt down, was arrested and put in jail. Apollinaire tried to implicate his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later released and exonerated. At the time, the painting was believed to be lost forever, and it was two years before the real thief was discovered. Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia had stolen it by entering the building during regular hours, concealing himself in a broom closet and walking out with it hidden under his coat after the museum had closed. Peruggia was an Italian patriot, who believed Leonardo’s painting should be returned to Italy for display in an Italian museum. Peruggia may have also been motivated by a friend who sold copies of the painting, which would skyrocket in value after the theft of the original. After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to the directors of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The painting was exhibited all over Italy and returned to the Louvre in 1913. Peruggia was hailed for his patriotism in Italy and served only six months in jail for the crime.

Chiropractic: There are obviously a lot of different niches you could serve in this industry. But, let’s say for a moment that you serve the elderly demographic. You might think that they just want to be able to play a little more golf or keep up with their grandkids. Those things might be true and they’ll certainly admit to them. But if you go deeper, you’ll find that they want to be the envy of all of their friends who are falling apart. That’s the secret ego motivation that inspires them to find you. And further, they do NOT want to be put into a nursing home. That’s the secret fear that has them searching for you. Sell them abilities their friends don’t have and you’ll have them eating out of your hand.

month allowance—that is, almost $5.5 million a year for having failed miserably. That money was just for personal expenses: the Trump Tower triplex apartment, the private jet, the mortgage on Mar-a-Lago. In order to sell his image, Donald needed to be able to continue living the lifestyle that bolstered it. In order for the banks to keep tabs on him, Donald had to meet with them every Friday to report on his expenditures as well as progress he’d made selling assets such as the yacht. In May 1990, there was no denying how dire the situation was. As much as Donald complained to Robert that the banks were “killing” him, the truth was that he was beholden to them in a way he had never been to his father: he had never been on a leash before, let alone a short one, and it

Just down the street from his apartment, Allen discovered the perfect independent bookstore. It was the first in the country to sell nothing but paperbacks. Until that time, cheap paperback books were not sold in “real” bookstores, but instead were relegated to spinning racks in drugstores and bus stations. They were usually stocked without any regard for the quality of the literature, and finding a good book was hit or miss. This particular bookstore had been founded in 1953 by Peter Martin, the publisher of a little magazine christened City Lights in honor of the Charlie Chaplin film of the same name. Martin had decided to open a store to subsidize the magazine, and while he was putting the sign over the door, a thirty-four-year-old man passed by and struck up a conversation.

Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, which again, from the point of view of the Earther, happily has them built in from the start), it is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals. Thus, while it takes Soviet Russia a vast amount of time and hard work to produce one inspired lunatic like Lysenko, the West can so arrange things that even the dullest farmer can see it makes more sense to burn his grain, melt his butter and wash away the remains of his pulped vegetables with his tanks of unused wine than it does to actually sell the stuff to be consumed.

That treacherous old bleeder!” Ron panted, emerging from beneath the Invisibility Cloak and throwing it to Harry. “Hermione, you’re a genius, a total genius, I can’t believe we got out of that!” “Cave Inimicum…Didn’t I say it was an Erumpent horn, didn’t I tell him? And now his house has been blown apart!” “Serves him right,” said Ron, examining his torn jeans and the cuts to his legs. “What d’you reckon they’ll do to him?” “Oh, I hope they don’t kill him!” groaned Hermione. “That’s why I wanted the Death Eaters to get a glimpse of Harry before we left, so they knew Xenophilius hadn’t been lying!” “Why hide me, though?” asked Ron. “You’re supposed to be in bed with spattergroit, Ron! They’ve kidnapped Luna because her father supported Harry! What would happen to your family if they knew you’re with him?” “But what about your mum and dad?” “They’re in Australia,” said Hermione. “They should be all right. They don’t know anything.” “You’re a genius,” Ron repeated, looking awed. “Yeah, you are, Hermione,” agreed Harry fervently. “I don’t know what we’d do without you.” She beamed, but became solemn at once. “What about Luna?” “Well, if they’re telling the truth and she’s still alive--” began Ron. “Don’t say that, don’t say it!” squealed Hermione. “She must be alive, she must!” “Then she’ll be in Azkaban, I expect,” said Ron. “Whether she survives the place, though…Loads don’t…” “She will,” said Harry. He could not bear to contemplate the alternative. “She’s tough, Luna, much tougher than you’d think. She’s probably teaching all the inmates about Wrackspurts and Nargles.” “I hope you’re right,” said Hermione. She passed a hand over her eyes. “I’d feel so sorry for Xenophilius if--” “--if he hadn’t just tried to sell us to the Death Eaters, yeah,” said Ron.

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On the third day after all hell broke loose, I come upstairs to the apartment, finished with my shift and so looking forward to a hot shower. Well, lukewarm—but I’ll pretend it’s hot. But when I pass Ellie’s room, I hear cursing—Linda Blair-Exorcist-head-spinning-around kind of cursing. I push open her door and spot my sister at her little desk, yelling at her laptop. Even Bosco barks from the bed. “What’s going on?” I ask. “I just came up but Marty’s down there on his own—he won’t last longer than ten minutes.” “I know, I know.” She waves her hand. “I’m in a flame war with a toxic bitch on Twitter. Let me just huff and puff and burn her motherfucking house down…and then I’ll go sell some coffee.” “What happened?” I ask sarcastically. “Did she insult your makeup video?” Ellie sighs, long and tortured. “That’s Instagram, Liv—I seriously think you were born in the wrong century. And anyway, she didn’t insult me—she insulted you.” Her words pour over me like the ice-bucket challenge. “Me? I have like two followers on Twitter.” Ellie finishes typing. “Boo-ya. Take that, skank-a-licious!” Then she turns slowly my way. “You haven’t been online lately, have you?” This isn’t going to end well, I know it. My stomach knows it too—it whines and grumbles. “Ah, no?” Ellie nods and stands, gesturing to her computer. “You might want to check it out. Or not—ignorance is bliss, after all. If you do decide to take a peek, you might want to have some grain alcohol nearby.” Then she pats my shoulder and heads downstairs, her blond ponytail swaying behind her. I glance at the screen and my breath comes in quick, semi-panicked bursts and my blood rushes like a runaway train in my veins. I’ve never been in a fight, not in my whole life. The closest I came was sophomore year in high school, when Kimberly Willis told everyone she was going to kick the crap out of me. So I told my gym teacher, Coach Brewster—a giant lumberjack of a man—that I got my period unexpectedly and had to go home. He spent the rest of the school year avoiding eye contact with me. But it worked—by the next day, Kimberly found out Tara Hoffman was the one talking shit about her and kicked the crap out of her instead

When I finally calmed down, I saw how disappointed he was and how bad he felt. I decided to take a deep breath and try to think this thing through. “Maybe it’s not that bad,” I said. (I think I was trying to cheer myself up as much as I was trying to console Chip.) “If we fix up the interior and just get it to the point where we can get it onto the water, at least maybe then we can turn around, sell it, and get our money back.” Over the course of the next hour or so, I really started to come around. I took another walk through the boat and started to picture how we could make it livable--maybe even kind of cool. After all, we’d conquered worse. We tore a few things apart right then and there, and I grabbed some paper and sketched out a new layout for the tiny kitchen. I talked to him about potentially finishing an accent wall with shiplap--a kind of rough-textured pine paneling that fans of our show now know all too well. “Shiplap?” Chip laughed. “That seems a little ironic to use on a ship, doesn’t it?” “Ha-ha,” I replied. I was still not in the mood for his jokes, but this is how Chip backs me off the ledge--with his humor.

Old Hubert must have had a premonition of his squalid demise. In October he said to me, ‘Forty-two years I’ve had this place. I’d really like to go back home, but I ain’t got the energy since my old girl died. And I can’t sell it the way it is now. But anyway before I hang my hat up I’d be curious to know what’s in that third cellar of mine.’ The third cellar has been walled up by order of the civil defence authorities after the floods of 1910. A double barrier of cemented bricks prevents the rising waters from invading the upper floors when flooding occurs. In the event of storms or blocked drains, the cellar acts as a regulatory overflow. The weather was fine: no risk of drowning or any sudden emergency. There were five of us: Hubert, Gerard the painter, two regulars and myself. Old Marteau, the local builder, was upstairs with his gear, ready to repair the damage. We made a hole. Our exploration took us sixty metres down a laboriously-faced vaulted corridor (it must have been an old thoroughfare). We were wading through a disgusting sludge. At the far end, an impassable barrier of iron bars. The corridor continued beyond it, plunging downwards. In short, it was a kind of drain-trap. That’s all. Nothing else. Disappointed, we retraced our steps. Old Hubert scanned the walls with his electric torch. Look! An opening. No, an alcove, with some wooden object that looks like a black statuette. I pick the thing up: it’s easily removable. I stick it under my arm. I told Hubert, ‘It’s of no interest. . .’ and kept this treasure for myself. I gazed at it for hours on end, in private. So my deductions, my hunches were not mistaken: the Bièvre-Seine confluence was once the site where sorcerers and satanists must surely have gathered. And this kind of primitive magic, which the blacks of Central Africa practise today, was known here several centuries ago. The statuette had miraculously survived the onslaught of time: the well-known virtues of the waters of the Bièvre, so rich in tannin, had protected the wood from rotting, actually hardened, almost fossilized it. The object answered a purpose that was anything but aesthetic. Crudely carved, probably from heart of oak. The legs were slightly set apart, the arms detached from the body. No indication of gender. Four nails set in a triangle were planted in its chest. Two of them, corroded with rust, broke off at the wood’s surface all on their own. There was a spike sunk in each eye. The skull, like a salt cellar, had twenty-four holes in which little tufts of brown hair had been planted, fixed in place with wax, of which there were still some vestiges. I’ve kept quiet about my find. I’m biding my time.

Twenty years? No kidding: twenty years? It’s hard to believe. Twenty years ago, I was—well, I was much younger. My parents were still alive. Two of my grandchildren had not yet been born, and another one, now in college, was an infant. Twenty years ago I didn’t own a cell phone. I didn’t know what quinoa was and I doubt if I had ever tasted kale. There had recently been a war. Now we refer to that one as the First Gulf War, but back then, mercifully, we didn’t know there would be another. Maybe a lot of us weren’t even thinking about the future then. But I was. And I’m a writer. I wrote The Giver on a big machine that had recently taken the place of my much-loved typewriter, and after I printed the pages, very noisily, I had to tear them apart, one by one, at the perforated edges. (When I referred to it as my computer, someone more knowledgeable pointed out that my machine was not a computer. It was a dedicated word processor. “Oh, okay then,” I said, as if I understood the difference.) As I carefully separated those two hundred or so pages, I glanced again at the words on them. I could see that I had written a complete book. It had all the elements of the seventeen or so books I had written before, the same things students of writing list on school quizzes: characters, plot, setting, tension, climax. (Though I didn’t reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me some years later with the request “Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver,” I’m sure it contained those as well.) I had typed THE END after the intentionally ambiguous final paragraphs. But I was aware that this book was different from the many I had already written. My editor, when I gave him the manuscript, realized the same thing. If I had drawn a cartoon of him reading those pages, it would have had a text balloon over his head. The text would have said, simply: Gulp. But that was twenty years ago. If I had written The Giver this year, there would have been no gulp. Maybe a yawn, at most. Ho-hum. In so many recent dystopian novels (and there are exactly that: so many), societies battle and characters die hideously and whole civilizations crumble. None of that in The Giver. It was introspective. Quiet. Short on action. “Introspective, quiet, and short on action” translates to “tough to film.” Katniss Everdeen gets to kill off countless adolescent competitors in various ways during The Hunger Games; that’s exciting movie fare. It sells popcorn. Jonas, riding a bike and musing about his future? Not so much. Although the film rights to The Giver were snapped up early on, it moved forward in spurts and stops for years, as screenplay after screenplay—none of them by me—was

The mythical ‘butterfly effect’ does exist, but we don’t spend enough time butterfly hunting. Here are some recent butterfly effect discoveries, from my own experience: A website adds a single extra option to its checkout procedure – and increases sales by $300m per year. An airline changes the way in which flights are presented – and sells £8m more of premium seating per year. A software company makes a seemingly inconsequential change to call-centre procedure – and retains business worth several million pounds. A publisher adds four trivial words to a call-centre script – and doubles the rate of conversion to sales. A fast-food outlet increases sales of a product by putting the price . . . up. All these disproportionate successes were, to an economist, entirely illogical. All of them worked. And all of them, apart from the first, were produced by a division of my advertising agency, Ogilvy, which I founded to look for counter-intuitive solutions to problems. We discovered that problems almost always have a plethora of seemingly irrational solutions waiting to be discovered, but that nobody is looking for them; everyone is too preoccupied with logic to look anywhere else. We also found, rather annoyingly, that the success of this approach did not always guarantee repeat business; it is difficult for a company, or indeed a government, to request a budget for the pursuit of such magical solutions, because a business case has to look logical.

It is often said that Vietnam was the first television war. By the same token, Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media. By the summer of 1987 Cleveland had become above all, a hot media story. The Daily Mail, for example, had seven reporters, plus its northern editor, based in Middlesbrough full time. Most other news papers and television news teams followed suit. What were all the reporters looking for? Not children at risk. Not abusing adults. Aggrieved parents were the mother lode sought by these prospecting journalists. Many of these parents were only too happy to tell — and in some cases, it would appear, sell— their stories. Those stories are truly extraordinary. In many cases they bore almost no relation to the facts. Parents were allowed - encouraged to portray themselves as the innocent victims of a runaway witch-hunt and these accounts were duly fed to the public. Nowhere in any of the reporting is there any sign of counterbalancing information from child protection workers or the organisations that employed them. Throughout the summer of 1987 newspapers ‘reported’ what they termed a national scandal of innocent families torn apart. The claims were repeated in Parliament and then recycled as established ‘facts’ by the media. The result was that the courts themselves began to be paralysed by the power of this juggernaut of press reporting — ‘journalism’ which created and painstakingly fed a public mood which brooked no other version of the story. (p21)

A depachika is like nothing else. It is the endless bounty of a hawker's bazaar, but with Japanese civility. It is Japanese food and foreign food, sweet and savory. The best depachika have more than a hundred specialized stands and cannot be understood on a single visit. I felt as though I had a handle on Life Supermarket the first time I shopped there, but I never felt entirely comfortable in a depachika. They are the food equivalent of Borges's "The Library of Babel": if it's edible, someone is probably selling it, but how do you find it? How do you resist the cakes and spices and Chinese delis and bento boxes you'll pass on the way? At the Isetan depachika, in Shinjuku, French pastry god Pierre Hermé sells his signature cakes and macarons. Not to be outdone, Franco-Japanese pastry god Sadaharu Aoki sells his own nearby. Tokyo is the best place in the world to eat French pastry. The quality and selection are as good as or better than in Paris, and the snootiness factor is zero. I wandered by a collection of things on sticks: yakitori at one stand, kushiage at another. Kushiage are panko-breaded and fried foods on sticks. At any depachika, you can buy kushiage either golden and cooked, or pale and raw to fry at home. Neither option is terribly appetizing: the fried stuff is losing crispness by the second, and who wants to deep-fry in a poorly ventilated Tokyo apartment in the summer? But the overall effect of the display is mesmerizing: look at all the different foods they've put on sticks! Pork, peppers, mushrooms, squash, taro, and two dozen other little cubes.

Hong Kong became a British colony after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the result of the Opium War. This was a particularly shameful episode, even by the standards of 19th-century imperialism. The growing British taste for tea had created a huge trade deficit with China. In a desperate attempt to plug the gap, Britain started exporting opium produced in India to China. The mere detail that selling opium was illegal in China could not possibly be allowed to obstruct the noble cause of balancing the books. When a Chinese official seized an illicit cargo of opium in 1841, the British government used it as an excuse to fix the problem once and for all by declaring war. China was heavily defeated in the war and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking, which made China 'lease' Hong Kong to Britain and give up its right to set its own tariffs. So there it was-the self-proclaimed leader of the 'liberal' world declaring war on another country because the latter was getting in the way of its illegal trade in narcotics. The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913-the first episode of globalization-was made possible, in large part, by military might, rather than market forces. Apart from Britain itself, the practitioners of free trade during this period were mostly weaker countries that had been forced into, rather than had voluntarily adopted, it as a result of colonial rule or 'unequal treaties' (like the Nanking Treaty), which, among other things, deprived them of the right to set tariffs and imposed externally determined low, flat-rate tariffs (3-5%) on them.

It is the beginning of the year of our Lord 1963. I see a young Negro boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a family on Long Island. I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in Birmingham. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress, are scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother. She can no longer attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood because her mother died only recently after a car accident. Neighbors say if the ambulance hadn't come so late to take her to the all-Negro hospital the mother might still be alive. The girl's father is a porter in a downtown department store. He will always be a porter, for there are no promotions for the Negro in this store, where every counter serves him except the one that sells hot dogs and orange juice. This boy and this girl, separated by stretching miles, are wondering: Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro? In some distant past, had their forebears done some tragic injury to the nation, and was the curse of punishment upon the black race? Had they shirked in their duty as patriots, betrayed their country, denied their national birthright? Had they refused to defend their land against a foreign foe?

Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions. -LUKE 12:15 One of our universal problems is the overcrowding of our homes. Whether we have an apartment or a six bedroom home, every closet, cupboard, refrigerator, and garage are all crammed with abundance. Some of us have so much that we go out and rent additional storage spaces for our possessions. Bob and I are no different than you. We buy new clothes and cram them into our wardrobes. A new antique goes in the corner, a new quilt hangs over the bed, a new potted plant gathers sunlight by the window. On and on it goes. Pretty soon we feel as though we are closed in with no room to breathe. We continually struggle to keep a balance in our attitudes regarding possessions. It is simpler to manage if you are single and live alone-it's just you. Life becomes more complicated with a spouse and children. You soon get that "bunched in" feeling. This creates more stress, and you can lose your cool and blow relationships when your calm is broken. We have made a rule in our home about abundance. Simply stated, it says, "One comes in and one goes out." After every purchase we give away or sell a like item. (We have an annual garage sale.) With a new blouse, out goes an older blouse; with a new table, out goes a table; and so on. Naturally if you're a newlywed this rule is not for you because you probably don't have an abundance of possessions. There's another strategy that's very effective. We have informed our loved ones that we don't want any more gifts that take up space or that have to be dusted; we prefer receiving consumable items. Remember-your life is not based on your possessions. Share with others what you aren't using.

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a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

Regret can improve decisions. To begin understanding regret’s ameliorative properties, imagine the following scenario. During the pandemic of 2020–21, you hastily purchased a guitar, but you never got around to playing it. Now it’s taking up space in your apartment—and you could use a little cash. So, you decide to sell it. As luck would have it, your neighbor Maria is in the market for a used guitar. She asks how much you want for your instrument. Suppose you bought the guitar for $500. (It’s acoustic.) No way you can charge Maria that much for a used item. It would be great to get $300, but that seems steep. So, you suggest $225 with the plan to settle for $200. When Maria hears your $225 price, she accepts instantly, then hands you your money. Are you feeling regret? Probably. Many people do, even more so in situations with stakes greater than the sale of a used guitar. When others accept our first offer without hesitation or pushback, we often kick ourselves for not asking for more.[2] However, acknowledging one’s regrets in such situations—inviting, rather than repelling, this aversive emotion—can improve our decisions in the future. For example, in 2002, Adam Galinsky, now at Columbia University, and three other social psychologists studied negotiators who’d had their first offer accepted. They asked these negotiators to rate how much better they could have done if only they’d made a higher offer. The more they regretted their decision, the more time they spent preparing for a subsequent negotiation.[3] A related study by Galinsky, University of California, Berkeley’s, Laura Kray, and Ohio University’s Keith Markman found that when people look back at previous negotiations and think about what they regretted not doing—for example, not extending a strong first offer—they made better decisions in later negotiations. What’s more, these regret-enhanced decisions spread the benefits widely. During their subsequent encounters, regretful negotiators expanded the size of the pie and secured themselves a larger slice. The very act of contemplating what they hadn’t done previously widened the possibilities of what they could do next and provided a script for future interactions.[4]

When I finally calmed down, I saw how disappointed he was and how bad he felt. I decided to take a deep breath and try to think this thing through. “Maybe it’s not that bad,” I said. (I think I was trying to cheer myself up as much as I was trying to console Chip.) “If we fix up the interior and just get it to the point where we can get it onto the water, at least maybe then we can turn around, sell it, and get our money back.” Over the course of the next hour or so, I really started to come around. I took another walk through the boat and started to picture how we could make it livable--maybe even kind of cool. After all, we’d conquered worse. We tore a few things apart right then and there, and I grabbed some paper and sketched out a new layout for the tiny kitchen. I talked to him about potentially finishing an accent wall with shiplap--a kind of rough-textured pine paneling that fans of our show now know all too well. “Shiplap?” Chip laughed. “That seems a little ironic to use on a ship, doesn’t it?” “Ha-ha,” I replied. I was still not in the mood for his jokes, but this is how Chip backs me off the ledge--with his humor. Then I asked him to help me lift something on the deck, and he said, “Aye, aye, matey!” in his best pirate voice, and slowly but surely I came around. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but by the end of that afternoon I was actually a little bit excited about taking on such a big challenge. Chip was still deflated that he’d allowed himself to get duped, but he put his arm around me as we started walking back to the truck. I put my head on his shoulder. And the camera captured the whole thing--just an average, roller-coaster afternoon in the lives of Chip and Joanna Gaines. The head cameraman came jogging over to us before we drove away. Chip rolled down his window and said sarcastically, “How’s that for reality TV?” We were both feeling embarrassed that this is how we had spent our last day of trying to get this stinkin’ television show. “Well,” the guy said, breaking into a great big smile, “if I do my job, you two just landed yourself a reality TV show.” What? We were floored. We couldn’t believe it. How was that a show? But lo and behold, he was right. That rotten houseboat turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Witches own nothing, so we’re not interested in preserving value or making profits, and as for the choice between one thing and another, when you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again. We have different needs. You have to repair your balloon and keep it in good condition, and that takes time and trouble, I see that; but for us to fly, all we have to do is tear off a branch of cloud-pine; any will do, and there are plenty more. We don’t feel cold, so we need no warm clothes. We have no means of exchange apart from mutual aid. If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is a war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor, as bears do, for instance. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us... inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?” “Well, I’m kinda with you on that. Sticks and stones, I’ll break yer bones, but names ain’t worth a quarrel. But ma’am, you see my dilemma, I hope. I’m a simple aeronaut, and I’d like to end my days in comfort. Buy a little farm, a few head of cattle, some horses...Nothing grand, you notice. No palace or slaves or heaps of gold. Just the evening wind over the sage, and a ceegar, and a glass of bourbon whiskey. Now the trouble is, that costs money. So I do my flying in exchange for cash, and after every job I send some gold back to the Wells Fargo Bank, and when I’ve got enough, ma’am, I’m gonna sell this balloon and book me a passage on a steamer to Port Galveston, and I’ll never leave the ground again.” “There’s another difference between us, Mr. Scoresby. A witch would no sooner give up flying than give up breathing. To fly is to be perfectly ourselves.” “I see that, ma’am, and I envy you; but I ain’t got your sources of satisfaction. Flying is just a job to me, and I’m just a technician. I might as well be adjusting valves in a gas engine or wiring up anbaric circuits. But I chose it, you see. It was my own free choice. Which is why I find this notion of a war I ain’t been told nothing about kinda troubling.” “Iorek Byrnison’s quarrel with his king is part of it too,” said the witch. “This child is destined to play a part in that.” “You speak of destiny,” he said, “as if it was fixed. And I ain’t sure I like that any more than a war I’m enlisted in without knowing about it. Where’s my free will, if you please?

We've been here three days already, and I've yet to cook a single meal. The night we arrived, my dad ordered Chinese takeout from the old Cantonese restaurant around the corner, where they still serve the best egg foo yung, light and fluffy and swimming in rich, brown gravy. Then there had been Mineo's pizza and corned beef sandwiches from the kosher deli on Murray, all my childhood favorites. But last night I'd fallen asleep reading Arthur Schwartz's Naples at Table and had dreamed of pizza rustica, so when I awoke early on Saturday morning with a powerful craving for Italian peasant food, I decided to go shopping. Besides, I don't ever really feel at home anywhere until I've cooked a meal. The Strip is down by the Allegheny River, a five- or six-block stretch filled with produce markets, old-fashioned butcher shops, fishmongers, cheese shops, flower stalls, and a shop that sells coffee that's been roasted on the premises. It used to be, and perhaps still is, where chefs pick up their produce and order cheeses, meats, and fish. The side streets and alleys are littered with moldering vegetables, fruits, and discarded lettuce leaves, and the smell in places is vaguely unpleasant. There are lots of beautiful, old warehouse buildings, brick with lovely arched windows, some of which are now, to my surprise, being converted into trendy loft apartments. If you're a restaurateur you get here early, four or five in the morning. Around seven or eight o'clock, home cooks, tourists, and various passers-through begin to clog the Strip, aggressively vying for the precious few available parking spaces, not to mention tables at Pamela's, a retro diner that serves the best hotcakes in Pittsburgh. On weekends, street vendors crowd the sidewalks, selling beaded necklaces, used CDs, bandanas in exotic colors, cheap, plastic running shoes, and Steelers paraphernalia by the ton. It's a loud, jostling, carnivalesque experience and one of the best things about Pittsburgh. There's even a bakery called Bruno's that sells only biscotti- at least fifteen different varieties daily. Bruno used to be an accountant until he retired from Mellon Bank at the age of sixty-five to bake biscotti full-time. There's a little hand-scrawled sign in the front of window that says, GET IN HERE! You can't pass it without smiling. It's a little after eight when Chloe and I finish up at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company where, in addition to the prosciutto, soppressata, both hot and sweet sausages, fresh ricotta, mozzarella, and imported Parmigiano Reggiano, all essential ingredients for pizza rustica, I've also picked up a couple of cans of San Marzano tomatoes, which I happily note are thirty-nine cents cheaper here than in New York.

Show me." He looks at her, his eyes darker than the air. "If you draw me a map I think I'll understand better." "Do you have paper?" She looks over the empty sweep of the car's interior. "I don't have anything to write with." He holds up his hands, side to side as if they were hinged. "That's okay. You can just use my hands." She smiles, a little confused. He leans forward and the streetlight gives him yellow-brown cat eyes. A car rolling down the street toward them fills the interior with light, then an aftermath of prickling black waves. "All right." She takes his hands, runs her finger along one edge. "Is this what you mean? Like, if the ocean was here on the side and these knuckles are mountains and here on the back it's Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West L.A., West Hollywood, and X marks the spot." She traces her fingertips over the backs of his hands, her other hand pressing into the soft pads of his palm. "This is where we are- X." "Right now? In this car?" He leans back; his eyes are black marble, dark lamps. She holds his gaze a moment, hears a rush of pulse in her ears like ocean surf. Her breath goes high and tight and shallow; she hopes he can't see her clearly in the car- her translucent skin so vulnerable to the slightest emotion. He turns her hands over, palms up, and says, "Now you." He draws one finger down one side of her palm and says, "This is the Tigris River Valley. In this section there's the desert, and in this point it's plains. The Euphrates runs along there. This is Baghdad here. And here is Tahrir Square." He touches the center of her palm. "At the foot of the Jumhurriya Bridge. The center of everything. All the main streets run out from this spot. In this direction and that direction, there are wide busy sidewalks and apartments piled up on top of shops, men in business suits, women with strollers, street vendors selling kabobs, eggs, fruit drinks. There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier. And there's this one street...." He holds her palm cradled in one hand and traces his finger up along the inside of her arm to the inner crease of her elbow, then up to her shoulder. Everywhere he touches her it feels like it must be glowing, as if he were drawing warm butter all over her skin. "It just goes and goes, all the way from Baghdad to Paris." He circles her shoulder. "And here"- he touches the inner crease of her elbow-"is the home of the Nile crocodile with the beautiful speaking voice. And here"- his fingers return to her shoulder, dip along their clavicle-"is the dangerous singing forest." "The dangerous singing forest?" she whispers. He frowns and looks thoughtful. "Or is that in Madagascar?" His hand slips behind her neck and he inches toward her on the seat. "There's a savanna. Chameleons like emeralds and limes and saffron and rubies. Red cinnamon trees filled with lemurs." "I've always wanted to see Madagascar," she murmurs: his breath is on her face. Their foreheads touch. His hand rises to her face and she can feel that he's trembling and she realizes that she's trembling too. "I'll take you," he whispers.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London—so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King’s Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand. Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, tropical disease... all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King... So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who’d been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it. The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types... and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn’t even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help? There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves... and all that rich land lying fallow. The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold—and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in... hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown’s grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new “Progressive Amnesty” program for hardened criminals.... Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King’s popularity... then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale. That’s how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather—a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out. With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky little bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London jail, urging them on to revolt: “Lissen here, you poor fools! There’s not much time! Even now—up there in the tower—they’re cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots! “We won’t go! It’s asinine! We’ll tear this place apart before we’ll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans! “How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you’re fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes— pure misery! And I’m tellin’ you, we don’t have to stand for it!...

The list goes on, and the only thing I’ve said NO to was having a live tiger at an open house—that’s just going too far. But it was that first big deal with Mr. X that showed me the true power of YES when it comes to making volume sales. I sell more because I say YES when other people would say no, and I can keep moving a client forward until that deal is done. Saying yes to every opportunity was my way of believing in myself and showing everyone I was the best—even when I wasn’t. I’ve also learned that quickly flipping negatives into positives will help you close deals faster and more frequently. Sometimes this is as simple as asking yourself, “Is this negative really even a negative?” For example, if I’m selling an apartment with no light I’ll push this as a positive to a client who is almost never home, or only home at night. Why pay for a view you won’t even see? Take the time to think about the usual objections you have in your area of sales; it’s likely you’ll hear the same objections over and over. How can you show clients that this isn’t really a negative? How can you turn this around? Anticipating objections and immediately turning them into positives will result in you selling more. Get ready to juggle more balls and cash bigger checks! AN UNEXPECTED SALES WEAPON: IMPROV If you visited my office on a random Monday morning during our team meeting, you might think you had mistakenly walked into a circus or a lunatic asylum.

fit for them. Steve Jobs said it best: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Linus wanted an apartment in Murray Hill, but I sold him a townhouse in Park Slope. This didn’t happen because I just told him where it was, when it was built, and what the square footage was; based on what I knew about Linus I believed it was the best choice for him—and that he would love it. Closing a deal is about tapping into emotions. The sooner you can learn to take off the “salesman’s hat” and get in tune with your client’s emotions and desires, the better you’ll become at working the deal. If you’re not sure how to do that, remember what makes an exceptional salesperson: a salesperson who works for The Deal.

Case #6 Sandy and Bob Bob is a successful dentist in his community. In the 15 years since he established his own practice, he has established a reliable base of patients and has built a thriving business in a great location. A couple years ago, he brought his wife, Sandy, a business expert with an MBA, on board to help him oversee the business end of the dental practice. She had recently left her job at a financial services firm, and Bob knew that Sandy’s business acumen would be helpful in getting his administrative house in order. She brought on new employees, developed effective new processes, and enhanced the office’s marketing efforts. Within a few months, Sandy’s improvements had managed to make the dental practice a well-oiled machine. Now she could turn her attention to their real estate portfolio. Bob and Sandy owned three small apartment buildings around town, as well as one small commercial center that was home to a nail salon, a chiropractor’s office, a coffee house and a wine shop. Fortunately, Bob’s dental practice was a success and their investments earned a nice passive income for them. Unfortunately, because Bob earned on average $250,000 per year, the couple couldn’t use passive loss, which in their case came to about $100,000, from their investments to offset his high earned income. Eventually, they would be earning sheltered profits—when the mortgages on their properties were paid off and the rentals made pure profit, or if they were to sell a property. When those things eventually happened, they could use their losses to shelter those profits. But until that time, the losses were going unused. Sandy made an appointment with their CPA to discuss the situation and see how they might improve their tax situation. The CPA asked, “What about becoming a real estate professional?” He explained to Sandy that if she spent 750 hours per year, or about 15 hours a week, on the couple’s real estate investments, she would be considered a real estate professional by the IRS. This would enable the couple to write off 100 percent of their passive losses against Bob’s high income, which would bring his taxable income down to $100,000. This $100,000 deduction brought Bob and Sandy into a lower tax bracket, saving them roughly $31,000 in taxes. Sandy already devoted a large percentage of her time to overseeing their investments, and when she saw the tax advantages, her decision became clear: She would file the Section 469(c)(7) and become a real estate professional.

Doer work can be everything and anything. Turning on lights, sending emails, answering the phones, opening mail, placing ads, licking stamps, putting postcards in mailboxes—whatever work has to be done to get the deal made. I did everything from ordering Twizzlers in bulk to showing apartments, to painting apartments, staging apartments, and measuring apartments to make sure a couch would fit, and taking out the garbage when a seller forgot to. For you it might mean paperwork and contracts—whatever work it takes to support the deal.

Do I guide clients toward one decision over another? Possibly. Do I push a little when someone is nervous about making a decision? Of course. When I sell someone an apartment they love, it’s because I listened carefully to their wants, needs, and concerns, and I am able to assure them that they’re making the right choice. I always make a point of keeping my eye on the target, and my bulls-eye is always a closed deal.

I told her, but before she got upset, I said, “Don’t worry, I know that’s too much for you, and who really needs a terrace? I have this same apartment one floor down, for $3,850 without a terrace. Want to see it?” She signed a lease that night.

I decided I would follow up every three weeks, religiously, until they bought an apartment or I was dead (tragically young), or I read that they’d perished in a fiery car chase in Monte Carlo. I was going to implement the first F, follow-up, by sending them emails about new developments, listings I thought they would like, and highlights from The Serhant Team newsletter.

When you incorporate follow-up into your regular sales practice, jotting off a quick and friendly email is practically effortless—and it’s free. It’s free! It costs you nothing to send an email, and it takes less time than it does to make yourself a donut-shop-flavored Keurig coffee. If there was any chance the Lockes were going to buy an apartment—ever—it was going to be from me. Let the follow-up parade continue! When you follow up with a lead, don’t just

message. Include information about a sale, or a new product. You just came across an article that says, “People who have hot tubs are so relaxed that they outlive poor slobs who do not have hot tubs.” Include that along with a friendly message about how you’re offering free delivery this week only! I follow all my clients on social media. I also save all of their birthdays in my calendar. The other day I noticed that Greta Lambert’s son James had just celebrated his tenth birthday. It was an opportunity for an easy, friendly follow-up message. I shot her an email, “Wow. James is growing up so quickly, your apartment must be feeling small.” Greta responded, “Ryan, good to hear from you, it does feel small!” Now she’s a warm lead and I’ll follow up next week with some listings in her area.

He said I was relentless with my outreach, and that’s the kind of broker he needs selling his apartments.

was mostly still doing rentals at the time, so I decided I would create relationships with some landlords. I cold-called them to introduce myself as someone who would do a great job renting out their apartments. Fueled by my new role as the Finder, I also cold-called some For Sale by Owner ads, even though it was as terrifying as that time I asked Liz Jose to the prom.

With my Keeper hat on, I decided that I could afford to spend $200 on advertising and taxis. And I could dedicate about 10 hours each week showing the apartment. This helped ensure that if I sold it I would make a good profit.

Deep in my core I believed I could sell this apartment. I was positive I could. Ready, set, GO! I called everyone. I spent the entire day emailing and calling people, trying to find a buyer. I never stopped believing I could pull this off. And it worked—I found one! After two weeks of negotiations, contracts were signed. Sold!

ribbons were the icing on top of the cake that was the right-sized three-bedroom apartment with perfect light in a great neighborhood. It was the ribbons that made the cake irresistible to Patty. Since making deals for Sarah and Patty, I’m always on the lookout for creative things I can do to get people comfortable with the purchase they are about to make.

My number one rule at the beginning of any negotiation is to always counter. Clients so often feel there is no point in doing so—they’ll say, “We’re too far apart, there’s no point!” But I’ve seen time and time again how coaxing two parties to make counters can result in a mutually beneficial transaction where both sides feel they got a good deal (and the broker is happy because he got the sale done).

Yes! I reminded my buyer this was an off-market deal. She was getting in early, and P.S. her daughter had been searching for an apartment for four years! Wouldn’t she like to see her happily settled? She agreed to come up $250,000 for “a quick sale.” Just like that, the million-mile distance was slashed in half. I know I’m talking about big numbers here, but what you should understand is that I’m making the gap relative. Whether you’re trying to close a million-dollar gap or a $10 one, break it down. I basically asked each side to come up, relatively speaking, $2.50. That doesn’t sound nearly as bad as bridging a million-dollar gap, now does it?

Left unchecked, the brain's reward system for moral indignation leads to the Spanish Inquisition, to witch trials--and to what goes on daily on Facebook and Twitter. Outrage keeps us engaged better than almost anything. This engagement allows social media apps to sell more ads, fueling their bottom line. IN priming our natural outrage, an impulse that evolved to keep us alive, social media apps have us tearing each other apart. Like dope dealers--just peddling outrage.

In 1947 Levitt & Sons, led by Bill, gambled on 1,200 flat, less-than-verdant acres of farmland set in the center of the island. Set about thirty miles from the Empire State Building, beyond the dense boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, stood this parcel of land, seemingly a world apart from the vibrant, dense urban street life filled with trolleys, vendors, and pedestrians. Levitt viewed this prospective transition in evangelical terms: “You marvel at the rebirth of man, man with his own piece of the good earth, his own share of light and air and sunshine.” To this reborn man, Levitt planned to sell single-family, detached houses in the suburbs.

Price Waterhouse boasted a great variety of clients, a mix of interesting start-ups and established companies, all selling everything imaginable-lumber, water, power, food. While auditing these companies, digging into their guts, taking them apart and putting them back together, I was also learning how they survived, or didn't. How they sold things, or didn't. How they got into trouble, how they got out. I took careful notes about what made companies tick, what made them fail.

what I enjoy doing as much as anything in the business. I really love to pick an item—maybe the most basic merchandise—and then call attention to it. We used to say you could sell anything if you hung it from the ceiling. So we would buy huge quantities of something and dramatize it. We would blow it out of there when everybody knew we would have only sold a few had we just left it in the normal store position. It is one of the things that has set our company apart from the very beginning and really made us difficult to compete with. And, man, in the early days of Wal-Mart it really got crazy sometimes.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

Poor collection of rents may provide you with an opportunity to create value, but remember: the price you pay for the apartment complex should reflect the value of the property as it is currently operating, not what it would be if all of the rents were being collected. The value is created only after you have acquired the property and made the necessary changes to improve collections.

Say you have located a 50-unit apartment building that is charging on average $600 per month. Your research indicates the market will bear $640 per month. Using a capitalization rate of 10 percent, a bump in rental rates over a 12-month period of $40 per month would create $240,000 in additional value.

Five ratios are required in multifamily property analysis: • The capitalization rate • The cash return on investment • The total return on investment • The debt service coverage ratio • The gross rent multiplier

Five Essential Components of an Income Statement 1. Operating revenues. 2. Operating expenses. 3. Net operating income. 4. Debt service. 5. Reserve requirements.

Net operating income is derived as follows: Gross income − total operating expenses = net operating income

Another good source is the Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM) . Each year it publishes a comprehensive book entitled Income and Expense Analysis: Conventional Apartments (Chicago: IREM/National Realtors Association), which provides data on more than 3,700 apartment buildings in over 150 different major metropolitan areas.

The One-Minute Assessment in Three Easy Steps 1. Divide gross income by 2; the result is an estimate of NOI. 2. Calculate the cap rate by dividing NOI by the asking price. 3. Determine whether the resulting cap rate is in line with the market.

Ruben had started using heroin in El Paso, and he took his habit with him to Los Angeles. To support his addiction, he worked odd jobs, stole cars, and burglarized homes. Ruben was tall, thin, and lanky, and he had the fluid grace of the natural athlete. With stealth, rarely seen or heard, he got in and out of peoples’ homes. When Ruben was twenty, he and his wife, an El Paso woman named Suzanna, jumped on a Greyhound Bus and took the sixteen-hour ride to the Los Angeles Greyhound Bus Terminal. In 1972, as now, there was much crime and the selling of drugs and sex around the terminal. Julian and Suzanna wanted to get away from the downtown area, and they took an apartment in Watts, where it was even cheaper to live than downtown L.A.

In his writing about communism’s insidiousness, Miłosz referenced a 1932 novel, Insatiability. In it, Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz wrote of a near-future dystopia in which the people were culturally exhausted and had fallen into decadence. A Mongol army from the East threatened to overrun them. As part of the plan to take over the nation, people began turning up in the streets selling “the pill of Murti-Bing,” named after a Mongolian philosopher who found a way to embody his “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy in a tablet. Those who took the Pill of Murti-Bing quit worrying about life, even though things were falling apart around them. When the Eastern army arrived, it surrendered happily, its soldiers relieved to have found deliverance from their internal tension and struggles. Only the peace didn’t last. “But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities,” writes Miłosz, “they became schizophrenics.”7 What do you do when the Pill of Murti-Bing stops working and you find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail? You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense. What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society. Miłosz identified eight different types of ketman under communism. For example, “professional ketman” is when you convince yourself that it’s okay to live a lie in the workplace, because that’s what you have to do to have the freedom to do good work. “Metaphysical ketman” is the deepest form of the strategy, a defense against “total degradation.” It consists of convincing yourself that it really is possible for you to be a loyal opponent of the new regime while working with it. Christians who collaborated with communist regimes were guilty of metaphysical ketman. In fact, says Miłosz, it represents the ultimate victory of the Big Lie over the individual’s soul.

There are four crucial factors to consider: 1. The resources available to work with. 2. The size of the property. 3. The age of the property. 4. Your holding period.

Among the most important factors to consider when determining your optimum holding period are the tax implications and how they will impact your bottom line.

Examples of like-kind exchanges cited by the Money Income Tax Handbook (Sections 26.711-26.715) include the following: • An office building for an apartment building. • A rental building for land on which a rental building is constructed within 180 days. • Business automobile for a business computer. • Real property you own for a real estate lease with a term of 30 years or more. • Used business truck for a new business truck. • Oil leasehold for a ranch. • A remainder interest for a complete ownership interest.

Six Ways to Locate Properties 1. Real estate brokers. 2. Classified advertisements. 3. Industry-specific real estate publications. 4. Local and national Web sites. 5. Associations and real estate investment clubs. 6. Banks.

Single-family property appraisals are largely based on comparable sales, while multifamily property valuations are driven primarily by income.

The Complete Guide to Real Estate Finance: How to Analyze Any Single-Family, Multifamily, or Commercial Property (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004),

To be truly successful, you must be willing to assume risk.

The 10 Ways to Create Value 1. Increase rents. 2. Convert a master-metered property to a submetered property. 3. Add vending services including laundry, pay phones, and soft drinks. 4. Offer exclusive rights to cable TV service with revenue sharing. 5. Offer exclusive rights to satellite service with revenue sharing. 6. Provide access to building rooftops for cellular companies. 7. Consolidate two or more apartment complexes to achieve synergies. 8. Convert excess storage space into rentable living area. 9. Install water-saving devices in showers and bathrooms. 10. Protest assessed tax valuations to have them lowered.