You Only Have Ten Seconds to Show You’re a Somebody

The exact moment that two humans lay eyes on each other has
awesome potency. The first sight of you is a brilliant holograph.
It burns its way into your new acquaintance’s eyes and can stay
emblazoned in his or her memory forever.
Artists are sometimes able to capture this quicksilver, fleeting
emotional response. My friend Robert Grossman is an accomplished
caricature artist who draws regularly for Forbes, Newsweek,
Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, and other popular publications.
Bob has a unique gift for capturing not only the physical appearance
of his subjects, but for zeroing in on the essence of their personalities.
The bodies and souls of hundreds of luminaries radiate
from his sketch pad. One glance at his caricatures of famous people
and you can actually “see” their personalities.
Sometimes at a party, Bob will do a quick sketch on a cocktail
napkin of a guest. Hovering over Bob’s shoulder, the onlookers
gasp as they watch their friend’s image and essence materialize
before their eyes. When he’s finished drawing, he puts his pen
down and hands the napkin to the subject. Often a puzzled look
comes over the subject’s face. He or she usually mumbles some
politeness like, “Well, er, that’s great. But it really isn’t me.”
The crowd’s convincing crescendo of “Oh yes it is!” drowns
the subject out and squelches any lingering doubt. The confused
subject is left to stare back at the world’s view of himself or herself
in the napkin.
Once when I was visiting Bob’s studio, I asked him how he
could capture people’s personalities so well. He said, “It’s simple.
I just look at them.”
“No,” I asked, “How do you capture their personalities? Don’t
you have to do a lot of research about their lifestyle, their history?”
“No, I told you, Leil, I just look at them.”
“Huh?”
He went on to explain, “Almost every facet of people’s personalities
is evident from their appearance, their posture, the way
they move. For instance . . .” he said, calling me over to a file where
he kept his caricatures of political figures.
“See,” Bob said, pointing to angles on various presidential body
parts, “here’s the boyishness of Clinton,” showing me his half smile;
“the awkwardness of the elder George Bush,” pointing to his shoulder
angle; “the charm of Reagan,” noting the ex-president’s smiling
eyes; “the shiftiness of Nixon,” pointing to the furtive tilt of his
head. Digging a little deeper into his file, he pulled out Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and, pointing to the nose high in the air, “Here’s
the pride of FDR.” It’s all in the face and the body.
First impressions are indelible. Why? Because in our fastpaced,
information-overload world of multiple stimuli bombarding
us every second, people’s heads are spinning. They must form
2 How to Talk to Anyone
quick judgments to make sense of the world and get on with what
they have to do. So, whenever people meet you, they take an
instant mental snapshot. That image of you becomes the data they
deal with for a very long time.