How to Win Friends and Influence People (4 page)

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