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       EIGHT THINGS THIS BOOK WILL


              HELP YOU ACHIEVE

       1. Get out of a mental rut, think new thoughts, acquire
            new visions, discover new ambitions.
 
            2. Make friends quickly and easily.
 
            3. Increase your popularity.
 
            4. Win people to your way of thinking.
 
            5. Increase your influence, your prestige, your ability
            to get things done.
 
            6. Handle complaints, avoid arguments, keep your
            human contacts smooth and pleasant.
 
            7. Become a better speaker, a more entertaining
            conversationalist.
 
            8. Arouse enthusiasm among your associates.
 
            This book has done all these things for more than ten
            million readers in thirty-six languages.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
            This Book Is Dedicated to a Man
            Who Doesn’t Need to Read It:-
             My Cherished Friend
             HOMER CROY
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
        HOW TO
   Win Friends
AND
Influence
People
REVISED EDITION
 
Dale Carnegie
 
Editorial Consultant: Dorothy Carnegie
Editorial Assistance: Arthur R. Pell, Ph.D.
 
 

SIMON AND SCHUSTER

NEW YORK

 
Copyright 1936 by Dale Carnegie, copyright renewed © 1964
by Donna Dale Carnegie and Dorothy Carnegie
Revised Edition copyright © 1981

 by Donna Dale Carnegie andDorothy Carnegie
All rights reserved
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form
Published by Simon and Schuster
A Division of Gulf & Western Corporation
Simon & Schuster Building
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
SIMON AND SCHUSTER and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster
Designed by Stanley S. Drate
Manufactured in the United States of America

19 20 18Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Carnegie, Dale, 1888-1955.
How to win friends and influence people.
Includes index.
1. Success. I. Title.
BF637.S8C37         1981       158’. 1     80-28759
ISBN O-671-42517-X
;  
 
 
 
 
 
Preface
to Revised Edition
 
How to Win Friends and Influence People was first published
in 1937 in an edition of only five thousand copies.
Neither Dale Carnegie nor the publishers, Simon and
Schuster, anticipated more than this modest sale. To
their amazement, the book became an overnight sensation,
and edition after edition rolled off the presses to
keep up with the increasing public demand. Now to Win
Friends and InfEuence People took its place in publishing
 history as one of the all-time international best-sellers.
It touched a nerve and filled a human need that was
more than a faddish phenomenon of post-Depression
days, as evidenced by its continued and uninterrupted
sales into the eighties, almost half a century later.
 
Dale Carnegie used to say that it was easier to make a
million dollars than to put a phrase into the English language.
How to Win Friends and Influence People became
such a phrase, quoted, paraphrased, parodied,
used in innumerable contexts from political cartoon to
novels. The book itself was translated into almost every
known written language. Each generation has discovered
it anew and has found it relevant.
 
Which brings us to the logical question: Why revise a
book that has proven and continues to prove its vigorous 
and universal appeal? Why tamper with success?
 
To answer that, we must realize that Dale Carnegie
himself was a tireless reviser of his own work during his
lifetime. How to Win Friends and Influence People was
written to be used as a textbook for his courses in Effective
Speaking and Human Relations and is still used in
those courses today. Until his death in 1955 he constantly
improved and revised the course itself to make it
applicable to the evolving needs of an every-growing
public. No one was more sensitive to the changing currents
of present-day life than Dale Carnegie. He constantly
improved and refined his methods of teaching;
he updated his book on Effective Speaking several
times. Had he lived longer, he himself would have revised
How to Win Friends and Influence People to better
reflect the changes that have taken place in the world
since the thirties.
 
Many of the names of prominent people in the book,
well known at the time of first publication, are no longer
recognized by many of today’s readers. Certain examples
and phrases seem as quaint and dated in our social
climate as those in a Victorian novel. The important message
and overall impact of the book is weakened to that
extent.
 
Our purpose, therefore, in this revision is to clarify
and strengthen the book for a modern reader without
tampering with the content. We have not “changed”
How to Win Friends and Influence People except to
make a few excisions and add a few more contemporary
examples. The brash, breezy Carnegie style is intact-even
the thirties slang is still there. Dale Carnegie wrote
as he spoke, in an intensively exuberant, colloquial, 
conversational manner.
 
So his voice still speaks as forcefully as ever, in the
book and in his work. Thousands of people all over the
world are being trained in Carnegie courses in increasing
numbers each year. And other thousands are reading
 and studying How to Win Friends and lnfluence People
 and being inspired to use its principles to better their
 lives. To all of them, we offer this revision in the spirit
 of the honing and polishing of a finely made tool.
 
 Dorothy Carnegie
 (Mrs. Dale Carnegie)
 
 
 
 
How This Book Was
Written-And Why
 

Dale Carnegie 
During the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century,
the publishing houses of America printed more
than a fifth of a million different books. Most of them
were deadly dull, and many were financial failures.
“Many,” did I say? The president of one of the largest
publishing houses in the world confessed to me that his
company, after seventy-five years of publishing experience,
still lost money on seven out of every eight books
it published.
 
Why, then, did I have the temerity to write another
book? And, after I had written it, why should you bother
to read it?
 
Fair questions, both; and I'll try to answer them.
 
I have, since 1912, been conducting educational
courses for business and professional men and women
in New York. At first, I conducted courses in public
speaking only - courses designed to train adults, by actual
experience, to think on their feet and express their
ideas with more clarity, more effectiveness and more
poise, both in business interviews and before groups.
 
But gradually, as the seasons passed, I realized that as
sorely as these adults needed training in effective speaking,
they needed still more training in the fine art of
getting along with people in everyday business and social
contacts.
 
I also gradually realized that I was sorely in need of
such training myself. As I look back across the years, I
am appalled at my own frequent lack of finesse and 
understanding. How I wish a book such as this had been
placed in my hands twenty years ago! What a priceless
boon it would have been.
 
Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem
you face, especially if you are in business. Yes, and that
is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.
Research done a few years ago under the auspices of the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
uncovered a most important and significant fact - a fact
later confirmed by additional studies made at the Carnegie
Institute of Technology. These investigations revealed
that even in such technical lines as engineering,
about 15 percent of one's financial success is due to
one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due
to skill in human engineering-to personality and the
ability to lead people.
 
For many years, I conducted courses each season at
the Engineers’ Club of Philadelphia, and also courses
for the New York Chapter of the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers. A total of probably more than fifteen
hundred engineers have passed through my
classes. They came to me because they had finally realized,
after years of observation and experience, that the
highest-paid personnel in engineering are frequently
not those who know the most about engineering. One
can for example, hire mere technical ability in engineering,
accountancy, architecture or any other profession
at nominal salaries. But the person who has
technical knowledge plus the ability to express ideas, to
assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among
people-that person is headed for higher earning power.
 
In the heyday of his activity, John D. Rockefeller said
that “the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a
commodity as sugar or coffee.” “And I will pay more for
that ability,” said John D., “than for any other under the
sun.”
 
Wouldn’t you suppose that every college in the land
would conduct courses to develop the highest-priced
ability under the sun? But if there is just one practical,
common-sense course of that kind given for adults in
even one college in the land, it has escaped my attention
up to the present writing.
 
The University of Chicago and the United Y.M.C.A.
Schools conducted a survey to determine what adults
want to study.
 
That survey cost $25,000 and took two years. The last
part of the survey was made in Meriden, Connecticut. It
had been chosen as a typical American town. Every
adult in Meriden was interviewed and requested to answer
156 questions-questions such as “What is your
business or profession? Your education? How do you
spend your spare time? What is your income? Your hobbies?
Your ambitions? Your problems? What subjects are
you most interested in studying?” And so on. That survey
revealed that health is the prime interest of adults
and that their second interest is people; how to understand
and get along with people; how to make people
like you; and how to win others to your way of thinking.
 
So the committee conducting this survey resolved to
conduct such a course for adults in Meriden. They
searched diligently for a practical textbook on the subject
 and found-not one. Finally they approached one of
the world’s outstanding authorities on adult education
and asked him if he knew of any book that met the needs
of this group. “No,” he replied, "I know what those
adults want. But the book they need has never been
written.”
 
I knew from experience that this statement was true,
for I myself had been searching for years to discover a
practical, working handbook on human relations.
 
Since no such book existed, I have tried to write one
for use in my own courses. And here it is. I hope you
like it.
 
In preparation for this book, I read everything that I
could find on the subject- everything from newspaper
columns, magazine articles, records of the family courts,
the writings of the old philosophers and the new 
psychologists. In addition, I hired a trained researcher to
spend one and a half years in various libraries reading
everything I had missed, plowing through erudite tomes
on psychology, poring over hundreds of magazine articles,
searching through countless biographies, trying to
ascertain how the great leaders of all ages had dealt with
people. We read their biographies, We read the life stories
of all great leaders from Julius Caesar to Thomas Edison.
I recall that we read over one hundred biographies
of Theodore Roosevelt alone. We were determined
to spare no time, no expense, to discover every
practical idea that anyone had ever used throughout the
ages for winning friends and influencing people.
 
I personally interviewed scores of successful people,
some of them world-famous-inventors like Marconi
and Edison; political leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt
and James Farley; business leaders like Owen D.
Young; movie stars like Clark Gable and Mary Pickford;
and explorers like Martin Johnson-and tried to discover
the techniques they used in human relations.
 
From all this material, I prepared a short talk. I called
it “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” I say
“short.” It was short in the beginning, but it soon 
expanded to a lecture that consumed one hour and thirty
minutes. For years, I gave this talk each season to the
adults in the Carnegie Institute courses in New York.
 
I gave the talk and urged the listeners to go out and
test it in their business and social contacts, and then
come back to class and speak about their experiences
and the results they had achieved. What an interesting
assignment! These men and women, hungry for self-
improvement, were fascinated by the idea of working in a
new kind of laboratory - the first and only laboratory of
human relationships for adults that had ever existed.
 
This book wasn’t written in the usual sense of the
word. It grew as a child grows. It grew and developed
out of that laboratory, out of the experiences of thousands
of adults.
 
Years ago, we started with a set of rules printed on a
card no larger than a postcard. The next season we
printed a larger card, then a leaflet, then a series of booklets,
each one expanding in size and scope. After fifteen
years of experiment and research came this book.
 
The rules we have set down here are not mere theories
or guesswork. They work like magic. Incredible as
it sounds, I have seen the application of these principles
literally revolutionize the lives of many people.
 
To illustrate: A man with 314 employees joined one of
these courses. For years, he had driven and criticized
and condemned his employees without stint or discretion.
Kindness, words of appreciation and encouragement
were alien to his lips. After studying the principles
discussed in this book, this employer sharply altered his
philosophy of life. His organization is now inspired with
a new loyalty, a new enthusiasm, a new spirit of team-
work. Three hundred and fourteen enemies have been
turned into 314 friends. As he proudly said in a speech
before the class: “When I used to walk through my establishment,
no one greeted me. My employees actually
looked the other way when they saw me approaching.
But now they are all my friends and even the janitor
calls me by my first name.”
 
This employer gained more profit, more leisure and
-what is infinitely more important-he found far more
happiness in his business and in his home.
 
Countless numbers of salespeople have sharply increased
their sales by the use of these principles. Many
have opened up new accounts - accounts that they had
formerly solicited in vain. Executives have been given
increased authority, increased pay. One executive reported
a large increase in salary because he applied
these truths. Another, an executive in the Philadelphia
Gas Works Company, was slated for demotion when he
was sixty-five because of his belligerence, because of his
inability to lead people skillfully. This training not only
saved him from the demotion but brought him a promotion
with increased pay.
 
On innumerable occasions, spouses attending the banquet
given at the end of the course have told me that
their homes have been much happier since their husbands
or wives started this training.
 
People are frequently astonished at the new results
they achieve. It all seems like magic. In some cases, in
their enthusiasm, they have telephoned me at my home
on Sundays because they couldn’t wait forty-eight hours
to report their achievements at the regular session of the
course.
 
One man was so stirred by a talk on these principles
that he sat far into the night discussing them with other
members of the class. At three o’clock in the morning,
the others went home. But he was so shaken by a realization
of his own mistakes, so inspired by the vista of a
new and richer world opening before him, that he was
unable to sleep. He didn’t sleep that night or the next
day or the next night.
 
Who was he? A naive, untrained individual ready to
gush over any new theory that came along? No, Far from
it. He was a sophisticated, blasé dealer in art, very much
the man about town, who spoke three languages fluently
and was a graduate of two European universities.
 
While writing this chapter, I received a letter from a
German of the old school, an aristocrat whose forebears
had served for generations as professional army officers
under the Hohenzollerns. His letter, written from a
transatlantic steamer, telling about the application of
these principles, rose almost to a religious fervor.
 
Another man, an old New Yorker, a Harvard graduate,
a wealthy man, the owner of a large carpet factory, declared
he had learned more in fourteen weeks through
this system of training about the fine art of influencing
people than he had learned about the same subject during
his four years in college. Absurd? Laughable? Fantastic?
Of course, you are privileged to dismiss this
statement with whatever adjective you wish. I am
merely reporting, without comment, a declaration made
by a conservative and eminently successful Harvard
graduate in a public address to approximately six
hundred people at the Yale Club in New York on the
evening of Thursday, February 23, 1933.
 
“Compared to what we ought to be,” said the famous
Professor William James of Harvard, “compared to what
we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making
use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources.
Stating the thing broadly, the human individual
thus lives far within his limits. He possesses powers of
various sorts which he habitually fails to use,”
 
Those powers which you “habitually fail to use”! The
sole purpose of this book is to help you discover, develop
and profit by those dormant and unused assets,
 
“Education,” said Dr. John G. Hibben, former president
of Princeton University, “is the ability to meet life’s
situations,”
 
If by the time you have finished reading the first three
chapters of this book- if you aren’t then a little better
equipped to meet life’s situations, then I shall consider
this book to be a total failure so far as you are concerned.
For “the great aim of education,” said Herbert Spencer,
“is not knowledge but action.”
 
And this is an action book.
 

DALE CARNEGIE

 
Nine Suggestions
on How to Get the Most
Out of This Book
 
1. If you wish to get the most out of this book, there is
one indispensable requirement, one essential infinitely
more important than any rule or technique. Unless you
have this one fundamental requisite, a thousand rules on
how to study will avail little, And if you do have this
cardinal endowment, then you can achieve wonders
without reading any suggestions for getting the most out
of a book.
 
What is this magic requirement? Just this: a deep,
driving desire to learn, a vigorous determination to increase
your ability to deal with people.
 
How can you develop such an urge? By constantly
reminding yourself how important these principles are
to you. Picture to yourself how their mastery will aid you
in leading a richer, fuller, happier and more fulfilling
life. Say to yourself over and over: "My popularity, my
happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent
upon my skill in dealing with people.”
 
2. Read each chapter rapidly at first to get a bird's-eye
view of it. You will probably be tempted then to rush on
to the next one. But don’t - unless you are reading
merely for entertainment. But if you are reading because
you want to increase your skill in human relations, then
go back and reread each chapter thoroughly. In the long
run, this will mean saving time and getting results.
 
3. Stop frequently in your reading to think over what
you are reading. Ask yourself just how and when you can
apply each suggestion.
 
4. Read with a crayon, pencil, pen, magic marker or
highlighter in your hand. When you come across a suggestion
that you feel you can use, draw a line beside it.
If it is a four-star suggestion, then underscore every sentence
or highlight it, or mark it with “****.” Marking and
underscoring a book makes it more interesting, and far
easier to review rapidly.
 
5. I knew a woman who had been office manager for
a large insurance concern for fifteen years. Every month,
she read all the insurance contracts her company had
issued that month. Yes, she read many of the same contracts
over month after month, year after year. Why? Because
experience had taught her that that was the only
way she could keep their provisions clearly in mind.
I once spent almost two years writing a book on public
speaking and yet I found I had to keep going back over
it from time to time in order to remember what I had
written in my own book. The rapidity with which we
forget is astonishing.
 
So, if you want to get a real, lasting benefit out of this
book, don’t imagine that skimming through it once will
suffice. After reading it thoroughly, you ought to spend
a few hours reviewing it every month, Keep it on your
desk in front of you every day. Glance through it often.
Keep constantly impressing yourself with the rich possibilities
for improvement that still lie in the offing. Remember
that the use of these principles can be made
habitual only by a constant and vigorous campaign of
review and application. There is no other way.
 
6. Bernard Shaw once remarked: “If you teach a man
anything, he will never learn.” Shaw was right. Learning
is an active process. We learn by doing. So, if you desire
to master the principles you are studying in this
book, do something about them. Apply these rules at
every opportunity. If you don’t you will forget them
quickly. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your
mind.
 
You will probably find it difficult to apply these suggestions
all the time. I know because I wrote the book,
and yet frequently I found it difficult to apply everything
I advocated. For example, when you are displeased, it is
much easier to criticize and condemn than it is to try to
understand the other person’s viewpoint. It is frequently
easier to find fault than to find praise. It is more natural
to talk about what vou want than to talk about what the
other person wants. And so on, So, as you read this book,
remember that you are not merely trying to acquire information.
You are attempting to form new habits. Ah
yes, you are attempting a new way of life. That will require
time and persistence and daily application.
 
So refer to these pages often. Regard this as a working
handbook on human relations; and whenever you are
confronted with some specific problem - such as handling
a child, winning your spouse to your way of thinking,
or satisfying an irritated customer - hesitate about
doing the natural thing, the impulsive thing. This is usually
wrong. Instead, turn to these pages and review the
paragraphs you have underscored. Then try these new
ways and watch them achieve magic for you.
 
7. Offer your spouse, your child or some business 
associate a dime or a dollar every time he or she catches
you violating a certain principle. Make a lively game out
of mastering these rules.
 
8. The president of an important Wall Street bank
once described, in a talk before one of my classes, a
highly efficient system he used for self-improvement.
This man had little formal schooling; yet he had become
one of the most important financiers in America, and he
confessed that he owed most of his success to the constant
application of his homemade system. This is what
he does, I’ll put it in his own words as accurately as I
can remember.
 
“For years I have kept an engagement book showing
all the appointments I had during the day. My family
never made any plans for me on Saturday night, for the
family knew that I devoted a part of each Saturday evening
to the illuminating process of self-examination and
review and appraisal. After dinner I went off by myself,
opened my engagement book, and thought over all the
interviews, discussions and meetings that had taken
place during the week. I asked myself:
 
‘What mistakes did I make that time?’
‘What did I do that was right-and in what way
could I have improved my performance?’
‘What lessons can I learn from that experience?’
 
“I often found that this weekly review made me very
unhappy. I was frequently astonished at my own blunders.
Of course, as the years passed, these blunders became
less frequent. Sometimes I was inclined to pat
myself on the back a little after one of these sessions.
This system of self-analysis, self-education, continued
year after year, did more for me than any other one thing
I have ever attempted.
 
“It helped me improve my ability to make decisions
 - and it aided me enormously in all my contacts with
people. I cannot recommend it too highly.”
 
Why not use a similar system to check up on your
application of the principles discussed in this book? If
you do, two things will result.
 
First, you will find yourself engaged in an educational
process that is both intriguing and priceless.
 
Second, you will find that your ability to meet and
deal with people will grow enormously.
 
9. You will find at the end of this book several blank
pages on which you should record your triumphs in the
application of these principles. Be specific. Give names,
dates, results. Keeping such a record will inspire you to
greater efforts; and how fascinating these entries will be
when you chance upon them some evening years from
now!
 
In order to get the most out of this book:
 
a. Develop a deep, driving desire to master the principles
of human relations,
 
b. Read each chapter twice before going on to the next
one.
 
c. As you read, stop frequently to ask yourself how
you can apply each suggestion.
 
d. Underscore each important idea.
 
e. Review this book each month.
 
f . Apply these principles at every opportunity. Use
this volume as a working handbook to help you
solve your daily problems.
 
g. Make a lively game out of your learning by offering
some friend a dime or a dollar every time he or she
catches you violating one of these principles.
 
h. Check up each week on the progress you are mak-ing.
Ask yourself what mistakes you have made,
what improvement, what lessons you have learned
for the future.
 
i. Keep notes in the back of this book showing how
and when you have applied these principles.
 
 
 
 
PART O N E
Fundamental Techniques in
Handling People
 

“IF YOU WANT TO GATHER

HONEY, DON’T KICK OVER THE

BEEHIVE”

 
On May 7, 1931, the most sensational manhunt New
York City had ever known had come to its climax. After
weeks of search, “Two Gun” Crowley - the killer, the
gunman who didn’t smoke or drink - was at bay, trapped
in his sweetheart’s apartment on West End Avenue.
 
One hundred and fifty policemen and detectives laid
siege to his top-floor hideway. They chopped holes in
the roof; they tried to smoke out Crowley, the “cop
killer,” with teargas. Then they mounted their machine
guns on surrounding buildings, and for more than an
hour one of New York’s fine residential areas reverberated
with the crack of pistol fire and the rut-tat-tat of
machine guns. Crowley, crouching behind an over-
stuffed chair, fired incessantly at the police. Ten thousand
excited people watched the battle. Nothing like it
ever been seen before on the sidewalks of New
York.
 
When Crowley was captured, Police Commissioner
E. P. Mulrooney declared that the two-gun desperado
was one of the most dangerous criminals ever encountered
in the history of New York. “He will kill,” said the
Commissioner, “at the drop of a feather.”
 
But how did “Two Gun” Crowley regard himself? We
know, because while the police were firing into his
apartment, he wrote a letter addressed “To whom it may
concern, ” And, as he wrote, the blood flowing from his
wounds left a crimson trail on the paper. In this letter
Crowley said: “Under my coat is a weary heart, but a
kind one - one that would do nobody any harm.”
 
A short time before this, Crowley had been having a
necking party with his girl friend on a country road out
on Long Island. Suddenly a policeman walked up to the
car and said: “Let me see your license.”
 
Without saying a word, Crowley drew his gun and cut
the policeman down with a shower of lead. As the dying
officer fell, Crowley leaped out of the car, grabbed the
officer’s revolver, and fired another bullet into the prostrate
body. And that was the killer who said: “Under my
coat is a weary heart, but a kind one - one that would do
nobody any harm.’
 
Crowley was sentenced to the electric chair. When he
arrived at the death house in Sing Sing, did he say, “This
is what I get for killing people”? No, he said: “This is
what I get for defending myself.”
 
The point of the story is this: “Two Gun” Crowley
didn’t blame himself for anything.
 
Is that an unusual attitude among criminals? If you
think so, listen to this:
 
“I have spent the best years of my life giving people
the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time,
and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.”
 
That’s Al Capone speaking. Yes, America’s most notorious
Public Enemy- the most sinister gang leader who
ever shot up Chicago. Capone didn’t condemn himself.
He actually regarded himself as a public benefactor - an
unappreciated and misunderstood public benefactor.
 
And so did Dutch Schultz before he crumpled up
under gangster bullets in Newark. Dutch Schultz, one of
New York’s most notorious rats, said in a newspaper interview
that he was a public benefactor. And he believed
it.
 
I have had some interesting correspondence with
Lewis Lawes, who was warden of New York’s infamous
Sing Sing prison for many years, on this subject, and he
declared that “few of the criminals in Sing Sing regard
themselves as bad men. They are just as human as you
and I. So they rationalize, they explain. They can tell
you why they had to crack a safe or be quick on the
trigger finger. Most of them attempt by a form of reasoning,
fallacious or logical, to justify their antisocial acts
even to themselves, consequently stoutly maintaining
that they should never have been imprisoned at all.”
 
If Al Capone, “Two Gun” Crowley, Dutch Schultz,
and the desperate men and women behind prison walls
don’t blame themselves for anything - what about the
people with whom you and I come in contact?
 
John Wanamaker, founder of the stores that bear his
name, once confessed: “I learned thirty years ago that it
is foolish to scold. I have enough trouble overcoming my
own limitations without fretting over the fact that God
has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence.”
 
Wanamaker learned this lesson early, but I personally
had to blunder through this old world for a third of a
century before it even began to dawn upon me that
ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize
themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it
may be.
 
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive
and usually makes him strive to justify himself.
Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s
precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and
arouses resentment.
 
B. F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved
through his experiments that an animal rewarded for
good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain
what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished
for bad behavior. Later studies have shown that
the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not
make lasting changes and often incur resentment.
 
Hans Selye, another great psychologist, said, “As
much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation,”
 
The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize
employees, family members and friends, and still
not correct the situation that has been condemned.
 
George B. Johnston of Enid, Oklahoma, is the safety
coordinator for an engineering company, One of his re-sponsibilities
is to see that employees wear their hard
hats whenever they are on the job in the field. He reported
that whenever he came across workers who were
not wearing hard hats, he would tell them with a lot of
authority of the regulation and that they must comply.
As a result he would get sullen acceptance, and often
after he left, the workers would remove the hats.
 
He decided to try a different approach. The next time
he found some of the workers not wearing their hard hat,
he asked if the hats were uncomfortable or did not fit
properly. Then he reminded the men in a pleasant tone
of voice that the hat was designed to protect them from
injury and suggested that it always be worn on the job.
The result was increased compliance with the regulation
with no resentment or emotional upset.
 
You will find examples of the futility of criticism bristling
on a thousand pages of history, Take, for example,
the famous quarrel between Theodore Roosevelt and
President Taft - a quarrel that split the Republican
party, put Woodrow Wilson in the White House, and
wrote bold, luminous lines across the First World War
and altered the flow of history. Let’s review the facts
quickly. When Theodore Roosevelt stepped out of the
White House in 1908, he supported Taft, who was
elected President. Then Theodore Roosevelt went off to
Africa to shoot lions. When he returned, he exploded.
He denounced Taft for his conservatism, tried to secure
the nomination for a third term himself, formed the Bull
Moose party, and all but demolished the G.O.P. In the
election that followed, William Howard Taft and the Republican
party carried only two states - Vermont and
Utah. The most disastrous defeat the party had ever
known.
 
Theodore Roosevelt blamed Taft, but did President
Taft blame himself? Of course not, With tears in his
eyes, Taft said: “I don’t see how I could have done any
differently from what I have.”
 
Who was to blame? Roosevelt or Taft? Frankly, I don’t
know, and I don’t care. The point I am trying to make is
that all of Theodore Roosevelt’s criticism didn’t persuade
Taft that he was wrong. It merely made Taft strive
to justify himself and to reiterate with tears in his eyes:
“I don’t see how I could have done any differently from
what I have.”
 
Or, take the Teapot Dome oil scandal. It kept the
newspapers ringing with indignation in the early 1920s.
It rocked the nation! Within the memory of living men,
nothing like it had ever happened before in American
public life. Here are the bare facts of the scandal: Albert
B. Fall, secretary of the interior in Harding’s cabinet,
was entrusted with the leasing of government oil reserves
at Elk Hill and Teapot Dome - oil reserves that
had been set aside for the future use of the Navy. Did
secretary Fall permit competitive bidding? No sir. He
handed the fat, juicy contract outright to his friend Edward
L. Doheny. And what did Doheny do? He gave
Secretary Fall what he was pleased to call a “loan” of
one hundred thousand dollars. Then, in a high-handed
manner, Secretary Fall ordered United States Marines
into the district to drive off competitors whose adjacent
wells were sapping oil out of the Elk Hill reserves.
These competitors, driven off their ground at the ends of
guns and bayonets, rushed into court - and blew the lid
off the Teapot Dome scandal. A stench arose so vile that
it ruined the Harding Administration, nauseated an entire
nation, threatened to wreck the Republican party,
and put Albert B. Fall behind prison bars.
 
Fall was condemned viciously - condemned as few
men in public life have ever been. Did he repent?
Never! Years later Herbert Hoover intimated in a public
speech that President Harding’s death had been due to
mental anxiety and worry because a friend had betrayed
him. When Mrs. Fall heard that, she sprang from her
chair, she wept, she shook her fists at fate and screamed:
"What! Harding betrayed by Fall? No! My husband
never betrayed anyone. This whole house full of gold
would not tempt my husband to do wrong. He is the one
who has been betrayed and led to the slaughter and crucified.”
 
There you are; human nature in action, wrongdoers,
blaming everybody but themselves. We are all like that.
So when you and I are tempted to criticize someone
tomorrow, let’s remember Al Capone, “Two Gun”
Crowley and Albert Fall. Let’s realize that criticisms are
like homing pigeons. They always return home. Let’s
realize that the person we are going to correct and condemn
will probably justify himself or herself, and condemn
us in return; or, like the gentle Taft, will say: “I
don’t see how I could have done any differently from
what I have.”
 
On the morning of April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln
lay dying in a hall bedroom of a cheap lodging house
directly across the street from Ford’s Theater, where
John Wilkes Booth had shot him. Lincoln’s long body
lay stretched diagonally across a sagging bed that was
too short for him. A cheap reproduction of Rosa Bonheur’s
famous painting The Horse Fair hung above the
bed, and a dismal gas jet flickered yellow light.
 
As Lincoln lay dying, Secretary of War Stanton said,
“There lies the most perfect ruler of men that the world
has ever seen.”
 
What was the secret of Lincoln’s success in dealing
with people? I studied the life of Abraham Lincoln for
ten years and devoted all of three years to writing and
rewriting a book entitled Lincoln the Unknown. I believe
I have made as detailed and exhaustive a study of
Lincoln’s personality and home life as it is possible for
any being to make. I made a special study of Lincoln’s
method of dealing with people. Did he indulge in criticism?
Oh, yes. As a young man in the Pigeon Creek
Valley of Indiana, he not only criticized but he wrote
letters and poems ridiculing people and dropped these
letters on the country roads where they were sure to be
found. One of these letters aroused resentments that
burned for a lifetime.
 
Even after Lincoln had become a practicing lawyer in
Springfield, Illinois, he attacked his opponents openly
in letters published in the newspapers. But he did this
just once too often.
 
In the autumn of 1842 he ridiculed a vain, pugnacious
politician by the name of James Shields. Lincoln lamned
him through an anonymous letter published in
Springfield Journal. The town roared with laughter.
Shields, sensitive and proud, boiled with indignation.
He found out who wrote the letter, leaped on his horse,
started after Lincoln, and challenged him to fight a duel.
Lincoln didn’t want to fight. He was opposed to dueling,
but he couldn’t get out of it and save his honor. He was
given the choice of weapons. Since he had very long
arms, he chose cavalry broadswords and took lessons in
sword fighting from a West Point graduate; and, on the
appointed day, he and Shields met on a sandbar in the
Mississippi River, prepared to fight to the death; but, at
the last minute, their seconds interrupted and stopped
the duel.
 
That was the most lurid personal incident in Lincoln’s
life. It taught him an invaluable lesson in the art of dealing
with people. Never again did he write an insulting
letter. Never again did he ridicule anyone. And from that
time on, he almost never criticized anybody for anything.
 
Time after time, during the Civil War, Lincoln put a
new general at the head of the Army of the Potomac, and
each one in turn - McClellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker,
Meade - blundered tragically and drove Lincoln to pacing
the floor in despair. Half the nation savagely condemned
these incompetent generals, but Lincoln, “with
malice toward none, with charity for all,” held his peace.
One of his favorite quotations was “Judge not, that ye be
not judged.”
 
And when Mrs. Lincoln and others spoke harshly of
the southern people, Lincoln replied: “Don’t criticize
them; they are just what we would be under similar
circumstances.”
 
Yet if any man ever had occasion to criticize, surely it
was Lincoln. Let’s take just one illustration:
 
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought during the first
three days of July 1863. During the night of July 4, Lee
began to retreat southward while storm clouds deluged
the country with rain. When Lee reached the Potomac
with his defeated army, he found a swollen, impassable
river in front of him, and a victorious Union Army behind
him. Lee was in a trap. He couldn’t escape. Lincoln
saw that. Here was a golden, heaven-sent opportunity-
the opportunity to capture Lee’s army and end the war
immediately. So, with a surge of high hope, Lincoln ordered
Meade not to call a council of war but to attack
Lee immediately. Lincoln telegraphed his orders and
then sent a special messenger to Meade demanding immediate
action.
 
And what did General Meade do? He did the very
opposite of what he was told to do. He called a council
of war in direct violation of Lincoln’s orders. He hesitated.
He procrastinated. He telegraphed all manner of
excuses. He refused point-blank to attack Lee. Finally
the waters receded and Lee escaped over the Potomac
with his forces.
 
Lincoln was furious, “ What does this mean?” Lincoln
cried to his son Robert. “Great God! What does this
mean? We had them within our grasp, and had only to
stretch forth our hands and they were ours; yet nothing
that I could say or do could make the army move. Under
the circumstances, almost any general could have defeated
Lee. If I had gone up there, I could have whipped
him myself.”
 
In bitter disappointment, Lincoln sat down and wrote
Meade this letter. And remember, at this period of his
life Lincoln was extremely conservative and restrained
in his phraseology. So this letter coming from Lincoln in
1863 was tantamount to the severest rebuke.
 
My dear General,
 
I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune
involved in Lee’s escape. He was within our easy
grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection
With our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is,
the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not
safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so
south of the river, when you can take with you very few-
no more than two-thirds of the force you then had in hand?
It would be unreasonable to expect and I do not expect that
you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone,
and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.
 
What do you suppose Meade did when he read the
letter?
 
Meade never saw that letter. Lincoln never mailed it.
It was found among his papers after his death.
 
My guess is - and this is only a guess - that after writing
that letter, Lincoln looked out of the window and
said to himself, “Just a minute. Maybe I ought not to be
so hasty. It is easy enough for me to sit here in the quiet
of the White House and order Meade to attack; but if I
had been up at Gettysburg, and if I had seen as much
blood as Meade has seen during the last week, and if my
ears had been pierced with the screams and shrieks of
the wounded and dying, maybe I wouldn’t be so anxious
to attack either. If I had Meade’s timid temperament,
perhaps I would have done just what he had done. Anyhow,
it is water under the bridge now. If I send this
letter, it will relieve my feelings, but it will make Meade
try to justify himself. It will make him condemn me. It
will arouse hard feelings, impair all his further usefulness
as a commander, and perhaps force him to resign
from the army.”
 
So, as I have already said, Lincoln put the letter aside,
for he had learned by bitter experience that sharp criticisms
and rebukes almost invariably end in futility.
 
Theodore Roosevelt said that when he, as President,
was confronted with a perplexing problem, he used to
lean back and look up at a large painting of Lincoln
which hung above his desk in the White House and ask
himself, “What would Lincoln do if he were in my
shoes? How would he solve this problem?”
 
The next time we are tempted to admonish somebody,
/let’s pull a five-dollar bill out of our pocket, look at Lincoln’s
picture on the bill, and ask. “How would Lincoln
handle this problem if he had it?”
 
Mark Twain lost his temper occasionally and wrote
letters that turned the Paper brown. For example, he
once wrote to a man who had aroused his ire: “The thing
for you is a burial permit. You have only to speak and I
will see that you get it.” On another occasion he wrote
to an editor about a proofreader’s attempts to “improve
my spelling and punctuation.” He ordered: “Set the
matter according to my copy hereafter and see that the
proofreader retains his suggestions in the mush of his
decayed brain.”
 
The writing of these stinging letters made Mark Twain
feel better. They allowed him to blow off steam, and the
letters didn’t do any real harm, because Mark’s wife
secretly lifted them out of the mail. They were never
sent.
 
Do you know someone you would like to change and
regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in
favor of it, But why not begin on yourself? From a purely
selfish standpoint, that is a lot more profitable than
trying to improve others - yes, and a lot less dangerous.
 “Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s
roof,” said Confucius, “when your own doorstep is unclean.”
 
When I was still young and trying hard to impress
people, I wrote a foolish letter to Richard Harding
Davis, an author who once loomed large on the literary
horizon of America. I was preparing a magazine article
about authors, and I asked Davis to tell me about his
method of work. A few weeks earlier, I had received a
letter from someone with this notation at the bottom:
“Dictated but not read.” I was quite impressed. I felt
that the writer must be very big and busy and important.
I wasn’t the slightest bit busy, but I was eager to make
an impression on Richard Harding Davis, so I ended my
short note with the words: “Dictated but not read.”
 
He never troubled to answer the letter. He simply
returned it to me with this scribbled across the bottom:
“Your bad manners are exceeded only by your bad manners.”
True, I had blundered, and perhaps I deserved
this rebuke. But, being human, I resented it. I resented
it so sharply that when I read of the death of Richard
Harding Davis ten years later, the one thought that still
persisted in my mind - I am ashamed to admit - was the
hurt he had given me.
 
If you and I want to stir up a resentment tomorrow
that may rankle across the decades and endure until
death, just let us indulge in a little stinging criticism-
no matter how certain we are that it is justified.
 
When dealing with people, let us remember we are
not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with
creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices
and motivated by pride and vanity.
 
Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy,
one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature,
to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism
drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide.
 
Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so
diplomatic, so adroit at handling people, that he was
made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his
success? “I will speak ill of no man,” he said, " . . and
speak all the good I know of everybody.”
 
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and
most fools do.
 
But it takes character and self-control to be under-standing
and forgiving.
 
“A great man shows his greatness,” said Carlyle, “by
the way he treats little men.”
 
Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent per-former
at air shows, was returning to his home in Los
Angeles from an air show in San Diego. As described in
the magazine Flight Operations, at three hundred feet
in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft maneuvering
he managed to land the plane, but it was
badly damaged although nobody was hurt.
 
Hoover’s first act after the emergency landing was to
inspect the airplane’s fuel. Just as he suspected, the
World War II propeller plane he had been flying had
been fueled with jet fuel rather than gasoline.
 
Upon returning to the airport, he asked to see the mechanic
who had serviced his airplane. The young man
was sick with the agony of his mistake. Tears streamed
down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused
the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused
the loss of three lives as well.
 
You can imagine Hoover’s anger. One could anticipate
the tongue-lashing that this proud and precise pilot
would unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didn’t
scold the mechanic; he didn’t even criticize him. Instead,
he put his big arm around the man’s shoulder and
said, “To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this
again, I want you to service my F-51 tomorrow.”
 
Often parents are tempted to criticize their children.
You would expect me to say “don’t.” But I will not, I am
merely going to say, “Before you criticize them, read
one of the classics of American journalism, ‘Father Forgets.’ ”
It originally appeared as an editorial in the People's 
Home Journnl. We are reprinting it here with the 
author’s permission, as condensed in the Reader’s Digest:
 
“Father Forgets” is one of those little pieces which-
dashed of in a moment of sincere feeling - strikes an
echoing chord in so many readers as to become a perenial
reprint favorite. Since its first appearance, “Father
Forgets" has been reproduced, writes the author,
W, Livingston Larned, “in hundreds of magazines and
house organs, and in newspapers the country over. It has
been reprinted almost as extensively in many foreign
languages. I have given personal permission to thousands
who wished to read it from school, church, and
lecture platforms. It has been ‘on the air’ on countless
occasions and programs. Oddly enough, college periodicals
have used it, and high-school magazines. Sometimes
a little piece seems mysteriously to ‘click.’ This
one certainly did.”
 
FATHER FORGETS
W. Livingston Larned
 
Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little
paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily
wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room
alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper
in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me.
Guiltily I came to your bedside.
 
There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross
to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because
you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took
you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily
when you threw some of your things on the floor.
 
At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You
gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table.
You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you
started off to play and I made for my train, you turned
and waved a hand and called, “Goodbye, Daddy!” and
I frowned, and said in reply, “Hold your shoulders
back!”
 
Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I
came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing
marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated
you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to
the house. Stockings were expensive - and if you had to
 
buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son,
from a father!
 
Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library,
how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in
your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at
the interruption, you hesitated at the door. “What is it you
want?” I snapped.
 
You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous
plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed
me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that
God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect
could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the
stairs.
 
Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped
from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me.
What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault,
of reprimanding - this was my reward to you for being a
boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected
too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of
my own years.
 
And there was so much that was good and fine and true in
your character. The little heart of you was as big as the
dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your
spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night.
Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bed-side
in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed!
 
It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand
these things if I told them to you during your waking
hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum
with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you
laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I
will keep saying as if it were a ritual: “He is nothing but a
boy - a little boy!”
 
I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see
you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that
you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s
arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much,
too much.
 
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand
them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do.
That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism;
and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. “To
know all is to forgive all.”
 
As Dr. Johnson said: “God himself, sir, does not propose
to judge man until the end of his days.”
 
Why should you and I?
 
 

PRINCIPLE 1

Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

THE BIG SECRET OF DEALING WITH

PEOPLE

 
 
There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody
to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes,
just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
 
Remember, there is no other way.
 
Of course, you can make someone want to give you his
watch by sticking a revolver in his ribs. YOU can make
your employees give you cooperation - until your back
is turned - by threatening to fire them. You can make a
child do what you want it to do by a whip or a threat. But
these crude methods have sharply undesirable repercussions.
 
The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving
you what you want.
 
What do you want?
 
Sigmund Freud said that everything you and I do
springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to
be great.
 
John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers,
phrased it a bit differently. Dr. Dewey said that
the deepest urge in human nature is “the desire to be
important." Remember that phrase: “the desire to be
important." It is significant. You are going to hear a lot
about it in this book.
 
What do you want? Not many things, but the few
that you do wish, you crave with an insistence
that will not be denied. Some of the things most people
want include:
 
1. Health and the preservation of life.
2. Food.
3. Sleep.
4. Money and the things money will buy.
5. Life in the hereafter.
6. Sexual gratification.
7. The well-being of our children.
8. A feeling of importance.
 
Almost all these wants are usually gratified-all except
one. But there is one longing - almost as deep, almost
as imperious, as the desire for food or sleep - which
is seldom gratified. It is what Freud calls “the
desire to be great.” It is what Dewey calls the “desire to
be important.”
 
Lincoln once began a letter saying: “Everybody likes
a compliment.” William James said: "The deepest principle
in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."
He didn’t speak, mind you, of the “wish” or the “desire”
or the “longing” to be appreciated. He said the "craving”
to be appreciated.
 
Here is a gnawing and unfaltering human hunger, and
the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger
will hold people in the palm of his or her hand and
“even the undertaker will be sorry when he dies.”
 
The desire for a feeling of importance is one of the
chief distinguishing differences between mankind and
the animals. To illustrate: When I was a farm boy out in
Missouri, my father bred fine Duroc-Jersey hogs and .
pedigreed white - faced cattle. We used to exhibit our
hogs and white-faced cattle at the country fairs and live-stock
shows throughout the Middle West. We won first
prizes by the score. My father pinned his blue ribbons
on a sheet of white muslin, and when friends or visitors
came to the house, he would get out the long sheet of
muslin. He would hold one end and I would hold the
other while he exhibited the blue ribbons.
 
The hogs didn’t care about the ribbons they had won.
But Father did. These prizes gave him a feeling of importance.
 
If our ancestors hadn’t had this flaming urge for a feeling
of importance, civilization would have been impossible.
Without it, we should have been just about like
animals.
 
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led
an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study
some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of
household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents.
You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name
was Lincoln.
 
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that inspired
Dickens to write his immortal novels. This desire
inspired Sir Christoper Wren to design his symphonies
in stone. This desire made Rockefeller amass millions
that he never spent! And this same desire made the richest
family in your town build a house far too large for its
requirements.
 
This desire makes you want to wear the latest styles,
drive the latest cars, and talk about your brilliant children.
 
It is this desire that lures many boys and girls into
joining gangs and engaging in criminal activities. The
average young criminal, according to E. P. Mulrooney,
onetime police commissioner of New York, is filled with
ego, and his first request after arrest is for those lurid
newspapers that make him out a hero. The disagreeable
prospect of serving time seems remote so long as he can
gloat over his likeness sharing space with pictures of
sports figures, movie and TV stars and politicians.
 
If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance,
I’ll tell you what you are. That determines your character.
That is the most significant thing about you. For
example, John D. Rockefeller got his feeling of importance
by giving money to erect a modern hospital in
Peking, China, to care for millions of poor people whom
he had never seen and never would see. Dillinger, on
the other hand, got his feeling of importance by being a
bandit, a bank robber and killer. When the FBI agents
were hunting him, he dashed into a farmhouse up in
Minnesota and said, “I’m Dillinger!” He was proud of
the fact that he was Public Enemy Number One. “I’m
not going to hurt you, but I’m Dillinger!” he said.
 
Yes, the one significant difference between Dillinger
and Rockefeller is how they got their feeling of importance.
 
History sparkles with amusing examples of famous
people struggling for a feeling of importance. Even
George Washington wanted to be called “His Mightiness,
the President of the United States”; and Columbus
pleaded for the title “Admiral of the Ocean and Viceroy
of India.” Catherine the Great refused to open letters
that were not addressed to “Her Imperial Majesty”; and
Mrs. Lincoln, in the White House, turned upon Mrs.
Grant like a tigress and shouted, “How dare you be
seated in my presence until I invite you!”
 
Our millionaires helped finance Admiral Byrd’s expedition
to the Antarctic in 1928 with the understanding
that ranges of icy mountains would be named after them;
and Victor Hugo aspired to have nothing less than the
city of Paris renamed in his honor. Even Shakespeare,
mightiest of the mighty, tried to add luster to his name
by procuring a coat of arms for his family.
 
People sometimes became invalids in order to win
sympathy and attention, and get a feeling of importance.
For example, take Mrs. McKinley. She got a feeling of
importance by forcing her husband, the President of the
United States, to neglect important affairs of state while
he reclined on the bed beside her for hours at a time, his
arm about her, soothing her to sleep. She fed her gnawing
desire for attention by insisting that he remain with
her while she was having her teeth fixed, and once created
a stormy scene when he had to leave her alone with
the dentist while he kept an appointment with John
Hay, his secretary of state.
 
The writer Mary Roberts Rinehart once told me of a
bright, vigorous young woman who became an invalid
in order to get a feeling of importance. “One day,” said
Mrs. Rinehart, “this woman had been obliged to face
something, her age perhaps. The lonely years were
stretching ahead and there was little left for her to anticipate.
 
“She took to her bed; and for ten years her old mother
traveled to the third floor and back, carrying trays, nursing
her. Then one day the old mother, weary with service,
lay down and died. For some weeks, the invalid
languished; then she got up, put on her clothing, and
resumed living again.”
 
Some authorities declare that people may actually go
insane in order to find, in the dreamland of insanity, the
feeling of importance that has been denied them in the
harsh world of reality. There are more patients suffering
from mental diseases in the United States than from all
other diseases combined.
 
What is the cause of insanity?
 
Nobody can answer such a sweeping question, but we
know that certain diseases, such as syphilis, break down
and destroy the brain cells and result in insanity. In fact,
about one-half of all mental diseases can be attributed to
such physical causes as brain lesions, alcohol, toxins and
injuries. But the other half - and this is the appalling
part of the story - the other half of the people who go
insane apparently have nothing organically wrong with
their brain cells. In post-mortem examinations, when
their brain tissues are studied under the highest-powered
microscopes, these tissues are found to be apparently
just as healthy as yours and mine.
 
Why do these people go insane?
 
I put that question to the head physician of one of our
most important psychiatric hospitals. This doctor, who
has received the highest honors and the most coveted
awards for his knowledge of this subject, told me frankly
that he didn’t know why people went insane. Nobody
knows for sure But he did say that many people who go
insane find in insanity a feeling of importance that they
were unable to achieve in the world of reality. Then he
told me this story:
 
"I have a patient right now whose marriage proved to
be a tragedy. She wanted love, sexual gratification, children
and social prestige, but life blasted all her hopes.
Her husband didn’t love her. He refused even to eat
with her and forced her to serve his meals in his room
upstairs. She had no children, no social standing. She
went insane; and, in her imagination, she divorced her
husband and resumed her maiden name. She now believes
she has married into English aristocracy, and she
insists on being called Lady Smith.
 
“And as for children, she imagines now that she has
had a new child every night. Each time I call on her she
says: ‘Doctor, I had a baby last night.’ "
 
Life once wrecked all her dream ships on the sharp
rocks of reality; but in the sunny, fantasy isles of insanity,
all her barkentines race into port with canvas billowing
and winds singing through the masts.
 
" Tragic? Oh, I don’t know. Her physician said to me:
If I could stretch out my hand and restore her sanity, I
wouldn’t do it. She’s much happier as she is."
 
If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance
that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what
miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest
appreciation this side of insanity.
 
One of the first people in American business to be
paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there
was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a
week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab, He
had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the
first president of the newly formed United States Steel
Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight
years old. (Schwab later left U.S. Steel to take over the
then-troubled Bethlehem Steel Company, and he rebuilt
it into one of the most profitable companies in America.)
 
Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a
year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to
Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius?
No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of
steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told
me himself that he had many men working for him who
knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.
 
Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because
of his ability to deal with people. I asked him how
he did it. Here is his secret set down in his own words
- words that ought to be cast in eternal bronze and hung
in every home and school, every shop and office in the
land - words that children ought to memorize instead of
wasting their time memorizing the conjugation of Latin
verbs or the amount of the annual rainfall in Brazil - words
that will all but transform your life and mine if we
will only live them:
 
“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my
people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and
the way to develop the best that is in a person is by
appreciation and encouragement.
 
“There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a
person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize any-
one. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I
am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything,
I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my
praise. "
 
That is what Schwab did. But what do average people
do? The exact opposite. If they don’t like a thing, they
bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say
nothing. As the old couplet says: “Once I did bad and
that I heard ever/Twice I did good, but that I heard
never.”
 
“In my wide association in life, meeting with many
and great people in various parts of the world,” Schwab
declared, “I have yet to find the person, however great
or exalted his station, who did not do better work and
put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he
would ever do under a spirit of criticism.”
 
That he said, frankly, was one of the outstanding reasons
for the phenomenal success of Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie praised his associates publicly as well as pr-vately.
 
Carnegie wanted to praise his assistants even on his
tombstone. He wrote an epitaph for himself which read:
“Here lies one who knew how to get around him men
who were cleverer than himself:”
 
Sincere appreciation was one of the secrets of the first
John D. Rockefeller’s success in handling men. For example,
when one of his partners, Edward T. Bedford,
lost a million dollars for the firm by a bad buy in South
America, John D. might have criticized; but he knew
Bedford had done his best - and the incident was
closed. So Rockefeller found something to praise; he
congratulated Bedford because he had been able to save
60 percent of the money he had invested. “That’s splendid,"
said Rockefeller. “We don’t always do as well as
that upstairs.”
 
I have among my clippings a story that I know never
happened, but it illustrates a truth, so I’ll repeat it:
 
According to this silly story, a farm woman, at the end
of a heavy day’s work, set before her menfolks a heaping
pile of hay. And when they indignantly demanded
whether she had gone crazy, she replied: “Why, how
did I know you’d notice? I’ve been cooking for you men
for the last twenty years and in all that time I ain’t heard
no word to let me know you wasn’t just eating hay.”
 
When a study was made a few years ago on runaway
wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main
reason wives ran away? It was “lack of appreciation.”
And I’d bet that a similar study made of runaway husbands
would come out the same way. We often take our
spouses so much for granted that we never let them
know we appreciate them.
 
A member of one of our classes told of a request made
by his wife. She and a group of other women in her
church were involved in a self-improvement program.
She asked her husband to help her by listing six things
he believed she could do to help her become a better
wife. He reported to the class: “I was surprised by such
a request. Frankly, it would have been easy for me to list
six things I would like to change about her - my heavens,
she could have listed a thousand things she would
like to change about me - but I didn’t. I said to her, ‘Let
me think about it and give you an answer in the morning.’
 
“The next morning I got up very early and called the
florist and had them send six red roses to my wife with a
note saying: ‘I can’t think of six things I would like to
change about you. I love you the way you are.’
 
“When I arrived at home that evening, who do you
think greeted me at the door: That’s right. My wife! She
was almost in tears. Needless to say, I was extremely
glad I had not criticized her as she had requested.
 
“The following Sunday at church, after she had reported
the results of her assignment, several women
with whom she had been studying came up to me and
said, ‘That was the most considerate thing I have ever
heard.’ It was then I realized the power of appreciation.”
 
Florenz Ziegfeld, the most spectacular producer who
ever dazzled Broadway, gained his reputation by his
subtle ability to “glorify the American girl.” Time after
time, he took drab little creatures that no one ever
looked at twice and transformed them on the stage into
glamorous visions of mystery and seduction. Knowing
the value of appreciation and confidence, he made
women feel beautiful by the sheer power of his gallantry
and consideration. He was practical: he raised the salary
of chorus girls from thirty dollars a week to as high as
one hundred and seventy-five. And he was also chivalrous;
on opening night at the Follies, he sent telegrams
to the stars in the cast, and he deluged every chorus girl
in the show with American Beauty roses.
 
I once succumbed to the fad of fasting and went for six
days and nights without eating. It wasn’t difficult. I was
less hungry at the end of the sixth day than I was at the
end of the second. Yet I know, as you know, people who
would think they had committed a crime if they let their
families or employees go for six days without food; but
they will let them go for six days, and six weeks, and
sometimes sixty years without giving them the hearty
appreciation that they crave almost as much as they
crave food.
 
When Alfred Lunt, one of the great actors of his time,
played the leading role in Reunion in Vienna, he said,
“There is nothing I need so much as nourishment for my
self-esteem.”
 
We nourish the bodies of our children and friends and
employees, but how seldom do we nourish their selfesteem?
We provide them with roast beef and potatoes
to build energy, but we neglect to give them kind words
of appreciation that would sing in their memories for
years like the music of the morning stars.
 
Paul Harvey, in one of his radio broadcasts, “The Rest
of the Story,” told how showing sincere appreciation can
change a person’s life. He reported that years ago a
teacher in Detroit asked Stevie Morris to help her find a
mouse that was lost in the classroom. You see, she appreciated
the fact that nature had given Stevie something
no one else in the room had. Nature had given Stevie a
remarkable pair of ears to compensate for his blind eyes.
But this was really the first time Stevie had been shown
appreciation for those talented ears. Now, years later, he
says that this act of appreciation was the beginning of a
new life. You see, from that time on he developed his
gift of hearing and went on to become, under the stage
name of Stevie Wonder, one of the great pop singers and
and songwriters of the seventies.*
 
* Paul Aurandt, 

Paul Harvey’s The Rest 
the Story (New York: Doubleday,1977). Edited and compiled by Lynne Harvey. Copyright © by
Paulynne, Inc.
 
Some readers are saying right now as they read these
lines: “Oh, phooey! Flattery! Bear oil! I’ve tried that
stuff. It doesn’t work - not with intelligent people.”
 
Of course flattery seldom works with discerning people.
It is shallow, selfish and insincere. It ought to fail
and it usually does. True, some people are so hungry, so
thirsty, for appreciation that they will swallow anything,
just as a starving man will eat grass and fishworms.
 
Even Queen Victoria was susceptible to flattery.
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli confessed that he put
it on thick in dealing with the Queen. To use his exact
words, he said he “spread it on with a trowel.” But Disraeli
was one of the most polished, deft and adroit men
who ever ruled the far-flung British Empire. He was a
genius in his line. What would work for him wouldn’t
necessarily work for you and me. In the long run, flattery
will do you more harm than good. Flattery is counterfeit,
and like counterfeit money, it will eventually get you
into trouble if you pass it to someone else.
 
The difference between appreciation and flattery?
That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere.
One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth
out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally
admired; the other universally condemned.
 
I recently saw a bust of Mexican hero General Alvaro
Obregon in the Chapultepec palace in Mexico City.
Below the bust are carved these wise words from General
Obregon’s philosophy: “Don’t be afraid of enemies
who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.”
 
No! No! No! I am not suggesting flattery! Far from it.
I’m talking about a new way of life. Let me repeat. I am
talking about a new way of life.
 
King George V had a set of six maxims displayed on
the walls of his study at Buckingham Palace. One of
these maxims said: “Teach me neither to proffer nor receive
cheap praise.” That’s all flattery is - cheap praise.
I once read a definition of flattery that may be worth
repeating: “Flattery is telling the other person precisely
what he thinks about himself.”
 
“Use what language you will,” said Ralph Waldo
Emerson, “you can never say anything but what you
are ."
 
If all we had to do was flatter, everybody would catch
on and we should all be experts in human relations.
 
When we are not engaged in thinking about some definite
problem, we usually spend about 95 percent of our
time thinking about ourselves. Now, if we stop thinking
about ourselves for a while and begin to think of the
other person’s good points, we won’t have to resort to
flattery so cheap and false that it can be spotted almost
before it is out of the mouth,
 
One of the most neglected virtues of our daily existence
is appreciation, Somehow, we neglect to praise
our son or daughter when he or she brings home a good
report card, and we fail to encourage our children when
they first succeed in baking a cake or building a birdhouse.
 
Nothing pleases children more than this kind of
parental interest and approval.
 
The next time you enjoy filet mignon at the club, send
word to the chef that it was excellently prepared, and
when a tired salesperson shows you unusual courtesy,
please mention it.
 
Every minister, lecturer and public speaker knows the
discouragement of pouring himself or herself out to an
audience and not receiving a single ripple of appreciative
comment. What applies to professionals applies
doubly to workers in offices, shops and factories and our
families and friends. In our interpersonal relations we
should never forget that all our associates are human
beings and hunger for appreciation. It is the legal tender
that all souls enjoy.
 
Try leaving a friendly trail of little sparks of gratitude
on your daily trips. You will be surprised how they will
set small flames of friendship that will be rose beacons
on your next visit.
 
Pamela Dunham of New Fairfield, Connecticut, had
among her responsibilities on her job the supervision of
a janitor who was doing a very poor job. The other employees
would jeer at him and litter the hallways to show
him what a bad job he was doing. It was so bad, productive
time was being lost in the shop.
 
Without success, Pam tried various ways to motivate
this person. She noticed that occasionally he did a particularly
good piece of work. She made a point to praise
him for it in front of the other people. Each day the job
he did all around got better, and pretty soon he started
doing all his work efficiently. Now he does an excellent
job and other people give him appreciation and recognition.
Honest appreciation got results where criticism
and ridicule failed.
 
Hurting people not only does not change them, it is
never called for. There is an old saying that I have cut
out and pasted on my mirror where I cannot help but
see it every day:
 
I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I
can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being,
let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall
not pass this way again.
 
Emerson said: “Every man I meet is my superior in
some way, In that, I learn of him.”
 
If that was true of Emerson, isn’t it likely to be a thousand
times more true of you and me? Let’s cease thinking
of our accomplishments, our wants. Let’s try to figure
out the other person’s good points. Then forget flattery.
Give honest, sincere appreciation. Be “hearty in your
approbation and lavish in your praise,” and people will
cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them
over a lifetime - repeat them years after you have forgotten
them.
 
 

PRINCIPLE 2

Give honest and sincere appreciation.

“HE WHO CAN DO THIS HAS THE

WHOLE WORLD WITH HIM.

HE WHO CANNOT WALKS

A LONELY WAY”
 
 
I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer.
Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but
I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer
worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what
I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t
bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled
a worm or a grasshopper in front of the fish and
said: “Wouldn’t you like to have that?”
 
Why not use the same common sense when fishing for
people?
 
That is what Lloyd George, Great Britain’s Prime Minister
during World War I, did. When someone asked him
how he managed to stay in power after the other wartime
leaders - Wilson, Orlando and Clemenceau - had been
forgotten, he replied that if his staying on top might be
attributed to any one thing, it would be to his having
learned that it was necessary to bait the hook to suit the
fish .
 
Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd.
Of course, you are interested in what you want.
You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The
rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we
want.

 
So the only way cm earth to influence other people is
to talk about what they want and show them how to get
it.
 
Remember that tomorrow when you are trying to get
somebody to do something. If, for example, you don’t
want your children to smoke, don’t preach at them, and
don’t talk about what you want; but show them that cigarettes
may keep them from making the basketball team
or winning the hundred-yard dash.
 
This is a good thing to remember regardless of
whether you are dealing with children or calves or chimpanzees.
For example: one day Ralph Waldo Emerson
and his son tried to get a calf into the barn. But they
made the common mistake of thinking only of what they
wanted: Emerson pushed and his son pulled. But the
calf was doing just what they were doing; he was thinking
only of what he wanted; so he stiffened his legs and
stubbornly refused to leave the pasture. The Irish housemaid
saw their predicament. She couldn’t write essays
and books; but, on this occasion at least, she had more
horse sense, or calf sense, than Emerson had. She
thought of what the calf wanted; so she put her maternal
finger in the calf’s mouth and let the calf suck her finger
as she gently led him into the barn.
 
Every act you have ever performed since the day you
were born was performed because you wanted something.
How about the time you gave a large contribution
to the Red Cross? Yes, that is no exception to the rule.
You gave the Red Cross the donation because you
wanted to lend a helping hand; you wanted to do a beautiful,
unselfish, divine act. " Inasmuch as ye have done it
unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done
it unto me.”
 
If you hadn’t wanted that feeling more than you
wanted your money, you would not have made the contribution.
Of course, you might have made the contribution
because you were ashamed to refuse or because a
customer asked you to do it. But one thing is certain. You
made the contribution because you wanted something.
 
Harry A, Overstreet in his illuminating book Influencing
Human Behavior said; “Action springs out of what
we fundamentally desire . . . and the best piece of advice
which can be given to would-be persuaders,
whether in business, in the home, in the school, in politics,
is: First, arouse in the other person an eager want.
He who can do this has the whole world with him. He
who cannot walks a lonely way.”
 
Andrew Carnegie, the poverty-stricken Scotch lad
who started to work at two cents an hour and finally gave
away $365 million, learned early in life that the only
way to influence people is to talk in terms of what the
other person wants. He attended school only four years;
yet he learned how to handle people.
 
To illustrate: His sister-in-law was worried sick over
her two boys. They were at Yale, and they were so busy
with their own affairs that they neglected to write home
and paid no attention whatever to their mother’s frantic
letters.
 
Then Carnegie offered to wager a hundred dollars that
he could get an answer by return mail, without even
asking for it. Someone called his bet; so he wrote his
nephews a chatty letter, mentioning casually in a post-script
that he was sending each one a five-dollar bill.
 
He neglected, however, to enclose the money.
 
Back came replies by return mail thanking “Dear
Uncle Andrew” for his kind note and-you can finish
the sentence yourself.
 
Another example of persuading comes from Stan
Novak of Cleveland, Ohio, a participant in our course.
Stan came home from work one evening to find his
youngest son, Tim, kicking and screaming on the living
room floor. He was to start kindergarten the next day and
was protesting that he would not go. Stan’s normal reaction
would have been to banish the child to his room
and tell him he’d just better make up his mind to go. He
had no choice. But tonight, recognizing that this would
not really help Tim start kindergarten in the best frame
of mind, Stan sat down and thought, “If I were Tim, why
would I be excited about going to kindergarten?” He
and his wife made a list of all the fun things Tim would
do such as finger painting, singing songs, making new
friends. Then they put them into action. “We all started
finger-painting on the kitchen table-my wife, Lil, my
other son Bob, and myself, all having fun. Soon Tim was
peeping around the corner. Next he was begging to participate.
‘Oh, no! You have to go to kindergarten first to
learn how to finger-paint.’ With all the enthusiasm I
could muster I went through the list talking in terms he
could understand-telling him all the fun he would
have in kindergarten. The next morning, I thought I was
the first one up. I went downstairs and found Tim sitting
sound asleep in the living room chair. ‘What are you
doing here?’ I asked. ‘I’m waiting to go to kindergarten.
I don’t want to be late.’ The enthusiasm of our entire
family had aroused in Tim an eager want that no amount
of discussion or threat could have possibly accomplished.”
 
Tomorrow you may want to persuade somebody to do
something. Before you speak, pause and ask yourself:
“How can I make this person want to do it?”
 
That question will stop us from rushing into a situation
heedlessly, with futile chatter about our desires.
 
At one time I rented the grand ballroom of a certain
New York hotel for twenty nights in each season in order
to hold a series of lectures.
 
At the beginning of one season, I was suddenly informed
that I should have to pay almost three times as
much rent as formerly. This news reached me after the
tickets had been printed and distributed and all announcements
had been made.
 
Naturally, I didn’t want to pay the increase, but what
was the use of talking to the hotel about what I wanted?
They were interested only in what they wanted. So a
couple of days later I went to see the manager.
 
"I was a bit shocked when I got your letter,” I said,
“but I don’t blame you at all. If I had been in your position,
I should probably have written a similar letter myself.
Your duty as the manager of the hotel is to make all
the profit possible. If you don’t do that, you will be fired
and you ought to be fired. Now, let’s take a piece of
paper and write down the advantages and the disadvantages
that will accrue to you, if you insist on this increase
in rent.”
 
Then I took a letterhead and ran a line through the
center and headed one column “Advantages” and the
other column “Disadvantages.”
 
I wrote down under the head “Advantages” these
words: “Ballroom free.” Then I went on to say: “You
will have the advantage of having the ballroom free to
rent for dances and conventions. That is a big advantage,
for affairs like that will pay you much more than you can
get for a series of lectures. If I tie your ballroom up
for twenty nights during the course of the season, it is
sure to mean a loss of some very profitable business to
you.
 
“Now, let’s ‘consider the disadvantages. First, instead
of increasing your income from me, you are going to
decrease it. In fact, you are going to wipe it out because
I cannot pay the rent you are asking. I shall be forced to
hold these lectures at some other place.
 
“There’s another disadvantage to you also. These lectures
attract crowds of educated and cultured people to
your hotel. That is good advertising for you, isn’t it? In
fact, if you spent five thousand dollars advertising in the
newspapers, you couldn’t bring as many people to look
at your hotel as I can bring by these lectures. That is
worth a lot to a hotel, isn’t it?” 
 
As I talked, I wrote these two “disadvantages” under
the proper heading, and handed the sheet of paper to
the manager, saying: "I wish you would carefully consider
both the advantages and disadvantages that are
going to accrue to you and then give me your final decision.”
 
I received a letter the next day, informing me that my
rent would be increased only 50 percent instead of 300
percent.
 
Mind you, I got this reduction without saying a word
about what I wanted. I talked all the time about what
the other person wanted and how he could get it.
 
Suppose I had done the human, natural thing; suppose
I had stormed into his office and said, “What do you
mean by raising my rent three hundred percent when
you know the tickets have been printed and the announcements
made? Three hundred percent! Ridiculous!
Absurd! I won’t pay it!”
 
What would have happened then? An argument would
have begun to steam and boil and sputter - and you
know how arguments end. Even if I had convinced him
that he was wrong, his pride would have made it difficult
for him to back down and give in.
 
Here is one of the best bits of advice ever given about
the fine art of human relationships. “If there is any one
secret of success,” said Henry Ford, “it lies in the ability
to get the other person’s point of view and see things
from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
 
That is so good, I want to repeat it: "If there is any one
secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other
person's point of view and see things from that person’s
angle as well as from your own.”
 
That is so simple, so obvious, that anyone ought to see
the truth of it at a glance; yet 90 percent of the people
on this earth ignore it 90 percent of the time.
 
An example? Look at the letters that come across your
desk tomorrow morning, and you will find that most of
them violate this important canon of common sense.
Take this one, a letter written by the head of the radio
department of an advertising agency with offices scattered
across the continent. This letter was sent to the
managers of local radio stations throughout the country.
(I have set down, in brackets, my reactions to each paragraph.)
 
Mr. John Blank,
Blankville,
Indiana
 
Dear Mr. Blank:
The ------ company desires to retain its position in advertising
agency leadership in the radio field.
 
[Who cares what your company desires? I am worried
about my own problems. The bank is foreclosing the
mortage on my house, the bugs are destroying the hollyhocks,
the stock market tumbled yesterday. I missed
the eight-fifteen this morning, I wasn’t invited to the
Jones’s dance last night, the doctor tells me I have high
blood pressure and neuritis and dandruff. And then what
happens? I come down to the office this morning worried,
open my mail and here is some little whippersnapper
off in New York yapping about what his company
wants. Bah! If he only realized what sort of impression
his letter makes, he would get out of the advertising
business and start manufacturing sheep dip.]
 
This agency’s national advertising accounts were the
bulwark of the network. Our subsequent clearances of
station time have kept us at the top of agencies year after
year.
 
[You are big and rich and right at the top, are you? So
what? I don’t give two whoops in Hades if you are as big
as General Motors and General Electric and the General
Staff of the U.S. Army all combined. If you had as much
sense as a half-witted hummingbird, you would realize
that I am interested in how big I am - not how big you
are. All this talk about your enormous success makes me
feel small and unimportant.]
 
We desire to service our accounts with the last word on
radio station information.
 
[You desire! You desire. You unmitigated ass. I’m not
interested in what you desire or what the President of
the United States desires. Let me tell you once and for
all that I am interested in what I desire - and you
haven’t said a word about that yet in this absurd letter of
yours .]
 
Will you, therefore, put the ---------- company on your
 preferred list for weekly station information - every single 
detail that will be useful to an agency in intelligently booking
time.
 
[“Preferred list.” You have your nerve! You make me
feel insignificant by your big talk about your company
- nd then you ask me to put you on a “preferred” list,
and you don’t even say “please” when you ask it.]
 
A prompt acknowledgment of this letter, giving us your
latest “doings,” will be mutually helpful.
 
[You fool! You mail me a cheap form letter - a letter
scattered far and wide like the autumn leaves - and you
have the gall to ask me, when I am worried about the
mortgage and the hollyhocks and my blood pressure, to
sit down and dictate a personal note acknowledging your
form letter - and you ask me to do it “promptly.” What
do you mean, “promptly”.? Don’t you know I am just as
busy as you are - or, at least, I like to think I am. And
while we are on the subject, who gave you the lordly
right to order me around? . . . You say it will be “mutually
helpful.” At last, at last, you have begun to see my
viewpoint. But you are vague about how it will be to my
advantage.]
 
Very truly yours,
John Doe
Manager Radio Department
 
P.S. The enclosed reprint from the Blankville Journal will
be of interest to you, and you may want to broadcast it over
your station.
 
[Finally, down here in the postscript, you mention
something that may help me solve one of my problems.
Why didn’t you begin your letter with - but what’s the
use? Any advertising man who is guilty of perpetrating
such drivel as you have sent me has something wrong
with his medulla oblongata. You don’t need a letter giving
our latest doings. What you need is a quart of iodine
in your thyroid gland.]
 
Now, if people who devote their lives to advertising
and who pose as experts in the art of influencing people
to buy - if they write a letter like that, what can we expect
from the butcher and baker or the auto mechanic?
 
Here is another letter, written by the superintendent
of a large freight terminal to a student of this course,
Edward Vermylen. What effect did this letter have on
the man to whom it was addressed? Read it and then I'll
tell you.
 
A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc.
28 Front St.
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11201
Attention: Mr. Edward Vermylen
Gentlemen:
 
The operations at our outbound-rail-receiving station are
handicapped because a material percentage of the total
business is delivered us in the late afternoon. This condition
results in congestion, overtime on the part of our forces,
delays to trucks, and in some cases delays to freight. On
November 10, we received from your company a lot of 510
pieces, which reached here at 4:20 P.M.
 
We solicit your cooperation toward overcoming the undesirable
effects arising from late receipt of freight. May we
ask that, on days on which you ship the volume which was
received on the above date, effort be made either to get the
truck here earlier or to deliver us part of the freight during
the morning?
 
The advantage that would accrue to you under such an
arrangement would be that of more expeditious discharge
of your trucks and the assurance that your business would
go forward on the date of its receipt.
 
Very truly yours,
J----- B ----- Supt.
 
After reading this letter, Mr. Vermylen, sales manager
for A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc., sent it to me with the following
comment:
 
This letter had the reverse effect from that which was
intended. The letter begins by describing the Terminal’s
difficulties, in which we are not interested, generally speaking.
Our cooperation is then requested without any thought
as to whether it would inconvenience us, and then, finally,
in the last paragraph, the fact is mentioned that if we do
cooperate it will mean more expeditious discharge of our
trucks with the assurance that our freight will go forward on
the date of its receipt.
 
In other words, that in which we are most interested is
mentioned last and the whole effect is one of raising a spirit
of antagonism rather than of cooperation.
 
Let’s see if we can’t rewrite and improve this letter.
Let’s not waste any time talking about our problems. As
Henry Ford admonishes, let’s “get the other person’s
point of view and see things from his or her angle, as
well as from our own.”
 
Here is one way of revising the letter. It may not be
the best way, but isn’t it an improvement?
 
Mr. Edward Vermylen
% A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc.
28 Front St.
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11201
 
Dear Mr. Vermylen:
 
Your company has been one of our good customers for
fourteen years. Naturally, we are very grateful for your patronage
and are eager to give you the speedy, efficient service
you deserve. However, we regret to say that it isn’t
possible for us to do that when your trucks bring us a large
shipment late in the afternoon, as they did on November
10. Why? Because many other customers make late afternoon
deliveries also. Naturally, that causes congestion. That
means your trucks are held up unavoidably at the pier and
sometimes even your freight is delayed.
 
That’s bad, but it can be avoided. If you make your deliveries
at the pier in the morning when possible, your trucks
will be able to keep moving, your freight will get immediate
attention, and our workers will get home early at night to
enjoy a dinner of the delicious macaroni and noodles that
you manufacture.
 
Regardless of when your shipments arrive, we shall always
cheerfully do all in our power to serve you promptly.
You are busy. Please don’t trouble to answer this note.
 
Yours truly,
J----- B-----, supt.
 
 
Barbara Anderson, who worked in a bank in New
York, desired to move to Phoenix, Arizona, because of
the health of her son. Using the principles she had
learned in our course, she wrote the following letter to
twelve banks in Phoenix:
 
Dear Sir:
 
My ten years of bank experience should be of interest to
a rapidly growing bank like yours.
 
In various capacities in bank operations with the Bankers
Trust Company in New York, leading to my present assignment
as Branch Manager, I have acquired skills in all
phases of banking including depositor relations, credits,
loans and administration.
 
I will be relocating to Phoenix in May and I am sure I can
contribute to your growth and profit. I will be in Phoenix
the week of April 3 and would appreciate the opportunity
to show you how I can help your bank meet its goals.
 
Sincerely,
Barbara L. Anderson
 
 
Do you think Mrs. Anderson received any response
from that letter? Eleven of the twelve banks invited her
to be interviewed, and she had a choice of which bank’s
offer to accept. Why? Mrs. Anderson did not state what
she wanted, but wrote in the letter how she could help
them, and focused on their wants, not her own.
 
Thousands of salespeople are pounding the pavements
today, tired, discouraged and underpaid. Why?
Because they are always thinking only of what they
want. They don’t realize that neither you nor I want to
buy anything. If we did, we would go out and buy it. But
both of us are eternally interested in solving our problems.
And if salespeople can show us how their services
or merchandise will help us solve our problems, they
won’t need to sell us. We’ll buy. And customers like to
feel that they are buying - not being sold.
 
Yet many salespeople spend a lifetime in selling without
seeing things from the customer’s angle. For example,
for many years I lived in Forest Hills, a little
community of private homes in the center of Greater
New York. One day as I was rushing to the station, I
chanced to meet a real-estate operator who had bought
and sold property in that area for many years. He knew
Forest Hills well, so I hurriedly asked him whether or
not my stucco house was built with metal lath or hollow
tile. He said he didn’t know and told me what I already
knew - that I could find out by calling the Forest Hills
Garden Association. The following morning, I received
a letter from him. Did he give me the information I
wanted? He could have gotten it in sixty seconds by a
telephone call. But he didn’t. He told me again that I
could get it by telephoning, and then asked me to let
him handle my insurance.
 
He was not interested in helping me. He was interested
only in helping himself.
 
J. Howard Lucas of Birmingham, Alabama, tells how
two salespeople from the same company handled the
same type of situation, He reported:
 
“Several years ago I was on the management team of
a small company. Headquartered near us was the district
office of a large insurance company. Their agents were
assigned territories, and our company was assigned to
two agents, whom I shall refer to as Carl and John.
 
“One morning, Carl dropped by our office and casually
mentioned that his company had just introduced a
new life insurance policy for executives and thought we
might be interested later on and he would get back to us
when he had more information on it.
 
“The same day, John saw us on the sidewalk while
returning from a coffee break, and he shouted: ‘Hey
Luke, hold up, I have some great news for you fellows.’
He hurried over and very excitedly told us about an executive
life insurance policy his company had introduced
that very day. (It was the same policy that Carl
had casually mentioned.) He wanted us to have one of
the first issued. He gave us a few important facts about
the coverage and ended saying, ‘The policy is so new,
I’m going to have someone from the home office come
out tomorrow and explain it. Now, in the meantime, let’s
get the applications signed and on the way so he can
have more information to work with.’ His enthusiasm
aroused in us an eager want for this policy even though
we still did not have details, When they were made
available to us, they confirmed John’s initial understanding
of the policy, and he not only sold each of us a policy,
but later doubled our coverage.
 
“Carl could have had those sales, but he made no effort
to arouse in us any desire for the policies.”
 
The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking.
So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to
serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little
competition. Owen D. Young, a noted lawyer and one of
America’s great business leaders, once said: “People
who can put themselves in the place of other people
who can understand the workings of their minds, need
never worry about what the future has in store for
them.”
 
If out of reading this book you get just one thing - an
increased tendency to think always in terms of other
people’s point of view, and see things from their angle
- if you get that one thing out of this book, it may
easily prove to be one of the building blocks of your
career.
 
Looking at the other person’s point of view and arousing
in him an eager want for something is not to be
construed as manipulating that person so that he will do
something that is only for your benefit and his detriment.
Each party should gain from the negotiation. In the letters
to Mr. Vermylen, both the sender and the receiver
of the correspondence gained by implementing what
was suggested. Both the bank and Mrs. Anderson won
by her letter in that the bank obtained a valuable employee
and Mrs. Anderson a suitable job. And in the
example of John’s sale of insurance to Mr. Lucas, both
gained through this transaction.
 
Another example in which everybody gains through
this principle of arousing an eager want comes from Michael
E. Whidden of Warwick, Rhode Island, who is a
territory salesman for the Shell Oil Company. Mike
wanted to become the Number One salesperson in his
district, but one service station was holding him back. It
was run by an older man who could not be motivated to
clean up his station. It was in such poor shape that sales
were declining significantly.
 
This manager would not listen to any of Mike’s pleas
to upgrade the station. After many exhortations and
heart-to-heart talks - all of which had no impact - Mike
decided to invite the manager to visit the newest Shell
station in his territory.
 
The manager was so impressed by the facilities at the
new station that when Mike visited him the next time,
his station was cleaned up and had recorded a sales increase.
This enabled Mike to reach the Number One
spot