coaxing methods had all ended in futility. So the parents asked themselves: “How can we make her want to do it?”
The little girl loved to imitate her mother, to feel big and grown up; so one morning they put her on a chair and let her make the breakfast food. At just the psychological moment, Father drifted into the kitchen while she was stirring the cereal and she said: “Oh, look, Daddy, I am making the cereal this morning.”
She ate two helpings of the cereal without any coaxing, because she was interested in it. She had achieved a feeling of importance; she had found in making the cereal an avenue of self-expression.
William Winter once remarked that “self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.” Why can’t we adapt this same psychology to business dealings? When we have a brilliant idea, instead of making others think it is ours, why not let them cook and stir the idea themselves. They will then regard it as their own; they will like it and maybe eat a couple of helpings of it.
Remember: “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.”
1) What conclusion did D. Carnegie arrive at, when he went fishing?
2) What is the only way to influence other people?
3) How did the Irish housemaid manage to get the calf into the barn?
4) What does A. Overstreet say about motivation of our action?
5) What is D. Carnegie’s advice of persuading somebody to do something?
6) What bit of advice about the fine art of human relations does Henry Ford give?
7) How did D. Carnegie manage to decrease rent of a ballroom?
8) What is the difference in the manner of work between two agents – Carl and John?
9) What is Professor Overstreet’s wise advice?
10) What advantage do people, who follow Professor’s Overstreet’s advice, get?
11) Why couldn’t the parents of a little thin boy cope with him?
12) How was the problem of the little boy who slept with his grandmother solved?
13) What problem did an engineer and his wife have with their three-year-old daughter?
14) What is dominating necessity in William Winter’s opinion?
PRINCIPLE 1 Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
PRINCIPLE 2 Give honest and sincere appreciation.
PRINCIPLE 3 Arouse in the other person an eager want.
Part two
Six ways to make people like you
I
Do this and you’ll be welcome anywhere
Why read this book to find out how to win friends? Why not study the technique of the greatest winner of friends the world has ever known? Who is he? You may meet him tomorrow coming down the street. When you get within ten feet of him, he will begin to wag his tail. If you stop and pat him, he will almost jump out of his skin to show you how much he likes you. And you know that behind this show of affection on his part, there are no ulterior motives: he doesn’t want to sell you any real estate, and he doesn’t want to marry you.
Did you ever stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn’t have to work for a living? A hen has to lay eggs, a cow has to give milk, and a canary has to sing. But a dog makes his living by giving you nothing but love.
When I was five years old, my father bought a little yellow-haired pup for fifty cents. He was the light and joy of my childhood. Every afternoon about four-thirty, he would sit in the front yard with his beautiful eyes staring steadfastly at the path, and as soon as he heard my voice or saw me swinging my dinner pail through the buck brush, he was off like a shot, racing breathlessly up the hill to greet me with leaps of joy and barks of sheer ecstasy.
T ippy was my constant companion for five years. Then one tragic night – I shall never forget it – he was killed within ten feet of my head, killed by lightning. Tippy’s death was the tragedy of my boyhood.
You never read a book on psychology, Tippy. You didn’t need to. You knew by some divine instinct that you can make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Let me repeat that. You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
Yet I know and you know people who blunder through life trying to wigwag other people into becoming interested in them.
Of course, it doesn’t work. People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves – morning, noon and after dinner.
The New York Telephone Company made a detailed study of telephone conversations to find out which word is the most frequently used. You have guessed it: it is the personal pronoun “I.” “I.” “I.” It was used 3,900 times in 500 telephone conversations. “I.” “I.” “I.” “I.”
When you see a group photograph that you are in, whose picture do you look for first?
If we merely try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many true, sincere friends. Friends, real friends, are not made that way.
Napoleon tried it, and in his last meeting with Josephine he said: “Josephine, I have been as fortunate as any man ever was on this earth; and yet, at this hour, you are the only person in the world on whom I can rely.” And historians doubt whether he could rely even on her.
Alfred Adler, the famous Viennese psychologist, wrote a book entitled What Life Should Mean to You.
In that book he says: “It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.”
You may read scores of erudite tomes on psychology without coming across a statement more significant for you and for me. Adler’s statement is so rich with meaning that I am going to repeat it in italics:
It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.
I once took a course in short-story writing at New York University, and during that course the editor of a leading magazine talked to our class. He said he could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk every day and after reading a few paragraphs he could feel whether or not the author liked people. “If the author doesn’t like people,” he said, “people won’t like his or her stories.”
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