How to Win Friends and Influence People (8 page)

Carrier Corporation, the large air-conditioner manufacturer.

One of the participants wanted to persuade the

others to play basketball in their free time, and this is

about what he said: "I want you to come out and play

basketball. I like to play basketball, but the last few

times I’ve been to the gymnasium there haven’t been

enough people to get up a game. Two or three of us got

to throwing the ball around the other night - and I got a

black eye. I wish all of you would come down tomorrow

night. I want to play basketball.”

Did he talk about anything you want? You don’t want

to go to a gymnasium that no one else goes to, do you?

You don’t care about what he wants. You don’t want to

get a black eye.

Could he have shown you how to get the things you

want by using the gymnasium? Surely. More pep.

Keener edge to the appetite. Clearer brain. Fun. Games.

Basketball.

To repeat Professor Overstreet’s wise advice:
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.

One of the students in the author’s training course was

worried about his little boy. The child was underweight

and refused to eat properly. His parents used the usual

method. They scolded and nagged. “Mother wants you

to eat this and that.” "Father wants you to grow up to be

a big man.”

Did the boy pay any attention to these pleas? Just

about as much as you pay to one fleck of sand on a sandy

beach.

No one with a trace of horse sense would expect a

child three years old to react to the viewpoint of a father

thirty years old. Yet that was precisely what that father

had expected. It was absurd. He finally saw that. So he

said to himself: “What does that boy want? How can I

tie up what I want to what he wants?”

It was easy for the father when he starting thinking

about it. His boy had a tricycle that he loved to ride up

and down the sidewalk in front of the house in Brooklyn.

A few doors down the street lived a bully - a bigger boy

who would pull the little boy off his tricycle and ride it

himself.

Naturally, the little boy would run screaming to his

mother, and she would have to come out and take the

bully off the tricycle and put her little boy on again, This

happened almost every day.

What did the little boy want? It didn’t take a Sherlock

Holmes to answer that one. His pride, his anger, his

desire for a feeling of importance - all the strongest

emotions in his makeup - goaded him to get revenge, to

smash the bully in the nose. And when his father explained

that the boy would be able to wallop the daylights

out of the bigger kid someday if he would only eat

the things his mother wanted him to eat - when his father

promised him that - there was no longer any problem

of dietetics. That boy would have eaten spinach,

sauerkraut, salt mackerel - anything in order to be big

enough to whip the bully who had humiliated him so

often.

After solving that problem, the parents tackled another:

the little boy had the unholy habit of wetting his bed.

He slept with his grandmother. In the morning, his

grandmother would wake up and feel the sheet and say:

“Look, Johnny, what you did again last night.”

He would say: “No, I didn’t do it. You did it.”

Scolding, spanking, shaming him, reiterating that the

parents didn’t want him to do it - none of these things

kept the bed dry. So the parents asked: “How can we

make this boy want to stop wetting his bed?”

What were his wants? First, he wanted to wear pajamas

like Daddy instead of wearing a nightgown like

Grandmother. Grandmother was getting fed up with his

nocturnal iniquities, so she gladly offered to buy him a

pair of pajamas if he would reform. Second, he wanted a

bed of his own. Grandma didn’t object.

His mother took him to a department store in Brooklyn,

winked at the salesgirl, and said: “Here is a little

gentleman who would like to do some shopping.”

The salesgirl made him feel important by saying:

“Young man, what can I show you?”

He stood a couple of inches taller and said: “I want to

buy a bed for myself.”

When he was shown the one his mother wanted him

to buy, she winked at the salesgirl and the boy was persuaded

to buy it.

The bed was delivered the next day; and that night,

when Father came home, the little boy ran to the door

shouting: “Daddy! Daddy! Come upstairs and see my

bed that I bought!”

The father, looking at the bed, obeyed Charles

Schwab’s injunction: he was “hearty in his approbation

and lavish in his praise.”

“You are not going to wet this bed, are you?” the father

said. " Oh, no, no! I am not going to wet this bed.” The boy

kept his promise, for his pride was involved. That was

his bed. He and he alone had bought it. And he was

wearing pajamas now like a little man. He wanted to act

like a man. And he did.

Another father, K. T. Dutschmann, a telephone engineer,

a student of this course, couldn’t get his three-year

old daughter to eat breakfast food. The usual scolding,

pleading, 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."

PRINCIPLE 3

Arouse in the other person an eager want.

In a Nutshell    

FUNDAMENTAL TECHNIQUES IN

HANDLING PEOPLE

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

Ways to Make People

Like You

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.

Tippy 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 difjculties in life and provides

the greutest injury to others. It is from umong such individuals

that all humun 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.”

This hard-boiled editor stopped twice in the course of

his talk on fiction writing and apologized for preaching

a sermon. “I am telling you,” he said, “the same things

your preacher would tell you, but remember, you have

to be interested in people if you want to be a successful

writer of stories.”

If that is true of writing fiction, you can be sure it is

true of dealing with people face-to-face.

I spent an evening in the dressing room of Howard

Thurston the last time he appeared on Broadway -

Thurston was the acknowledged dean of magicians. For forty

years he had traveled all over the world, time and again,

creating illusions, mystifying audiences, and making

people gasp with astonishment. More than 60 million

people had paid admission to his show, and he had made

almost $2 million in profit.

I asked Mr. Thurston to tell me the secret of his success.

His schooling certainly had nothing to do with it,

for he ran away from home as a small boy, became a

hobo, rode in boxcars, slept in haystacks, begged his

food from door to door, and learned to read by looking

out of boxcars at signs along the railway.

Did he have a superior knowledge of magic? No, he

told me hundreds of books had been written about legerdemain

and scores of people knew as much about it as

he did. But he had two things that the others didn’t have.

First, he had the ability to put his personality across the

footlights. He was a master showman. He knew human

nature. Everything he did, every gesture, every intonation

of his voice, every lifting of an eyebrow had been

carefully rehearsed in advance, and his actions were

timed to split seconds. But, in addition to that, Thurston

had a genuine interest in people. He told me that many

magicians would look at the audience and say to themselves,

“Well, there is a bunch of suckers out there, a

bunch of hicks; I’ll fool them all right.” But Thurston’s

method was totally different. He told me that every time

he went on stage he said to himself: “I am grateful because

these people come to see me, They make it possible

for me to make my living in a very agreeable way.

I’m going to give them the very best I possibly can.”

He declared he never stepped in front of the footlights

without first saying to himself over and over: “I love my

audience. I love my audience.” Ridiculous? Absurd?

You are privileged to think anything you like. I am

merely passing it on to you without comment as a recipe

used by one of the most famous magicians of all time.

George Dyke of North Warren, Pennsylvania, was

forced to retire from his service station business after

thirty years when a new highway was constructed over

the site of his station. It wasn’t long before the idle days

of retirement began to bore him, so he started filling in

his time trying to play music on his old fiddle. Soon he

was traveling the area to listen to music and talk with

many of the accomplished fiddlers. In his humble and

friendly way he became generally interested in learning

the background and interests of every musician he met.

Although he was not a great fiddler himself, he made

many friends in this pursuit. He attended competitions

and soon became known to the country music fans in the

eastern part of the United States as “Uncle George, the

Fiddle Scraper from Kinzua County.” When we heard

Uncle George, he was seventy-two and enjoying every

minute of his life. By having a sustained interest in other

people, he created a new life for himself at a time when

most people consider their productive years over.

That, too, was one of the secrets of Theodore Roosevelt’s

astonishing popularity. Even his servants loved

him. His valet, James E. Amos, wrote a book about him

entitled
Theodore Roosevelt, Hero to His Valet.
In that

book Amos relates this illuminating incident:

My wife one time asked the President about a bobwhite.

She had never seen one and he described it to her fully.

Sometime later, the telephone at our cottage rang. [Amos

and his wife lived in a little cottage on the Roosevelt estate

at Oyster Bay.] My wife answered it and it was Mr. Roosevelt

himself. He had called her, he said, to tell her that there

was a bobwhite outside her window and that if she would

look out she might see it. Little things like that were so

characteristic of him. Whenever he went by our cottage,

even though we were out of sight, we would hear him call

out: “Oo-oo-oo, Annie?” or “Oo-oo-oo, James!” It was just a

friendly greeting as he went by.

How could employees keep from liking a man like

that? How could anyone keep from liking him?

Roosevelt called at the White House one day when

the President and Mrs. Taft were away. His honest liking

for humble people was shown by the fact that he

greeted all the old White House servants by name, even

the scullery maids.

“When he saw Alice, the kitchen maid,” writes Archie

Butt, “he asked her if she still made corn bread. Alice

told him that she sometimes made it for the servants, but

no one ate it upstairs.

"‘They show bad taste,’ Roosevelt boomed, ‘and I’ll

tell the President so when I see him.’

“Alice brought a piece to him on a plate, and he went

over to the office eating it as he went and greeting gardeners

and laborers as he passed. . .

“He addressed each person just as he had addressed

them in the past. Ike Hoover, who had been head usher

at the White House for forty years, said with tears in his

eyes: ‘It is the only happy day we had in nearly two

years, and not one of us would exchange it for a hundred-dollar

bill.’ ”

The same concern for the seemingly unimportant people

helped sales representative Edward M. Sykes, Jr., of

Chatham, New Jersey, retain an account. “Many years

ago,” he reported, “I called on customers for Johnson

and Johnson in the Massachusetts area. One account was

a drug store in Hingham. Whenever I went into this

store I would always talk to the soda clerk and sales

clerk for a few minutes before talking to the owner to

obtain his order. One day I went up to the owner of the

store, and he told me to leave as he was not interested in

buying J&J products anymore because he felt they were

concentrating their activities on food and discount stores

to the detriment of the small drugstore. I left with my

tail between my legs and drove around the town for several

hours. Finally, I decided to go back and try at least

to explain our position to the owner of the store.

“When I returned I walked in and as usual said hello

to the soda clerk and sales clerk. When I walked up to

the owner, he smiled at me and welcomed me back. He

then gave me double the usual order, I looked at him

with surprise and asked him what had happened since

my visit only a few hours earlier. He pointed to the

young man at the soda fountain and said that after I had

left, the boy had come over and said that I was one of the

few salespeople that called on the store that even bothered

to say hello to him and to the others in the store. He

told the owner that if any salesperson deserved his business,

it was I. The owner agreed and remained a loyal

customer. I never forgot that to be genuinely interested

in other people is a most important quality for a sales-person

to possess - for any person, for that matter.”

I have discovered from personal experience that one

can win the attention and time and cooperation of even

the most sought-after people by becoming genuinely interested

in them. Let me illustrate.

Years ago I conducted a course in fiction writing at the

Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and we wanted

such distinguished and busy authors as Kathleen Norris,

Fannie Hurst, Ida Tarbell, Albert Payson Terhune and

Rupert Hughes to come to Brooklyn and give us the

benefit of their experiences. So we wrote them, saying

we admired their work and were deeply interested in

getting their advice and learning the secrets of their success.

Each of these letters was signed by about a hundred

and fifty students. We said we realized that these authors

were busy - too busy to prepare a lecture. So we enclosed

a list of questions for them to answer about themselves

and their methods of work. They liked that. Who

wouldn’t like it? So they left their homes and traveled to