I go fishing up in Maine every summer. Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream; but I find that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I go fishing, I don’t think about what I want. I think about what they want. I don’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 men?

That is what Lloyd George did. When someone asked him how he managed to stay in power after all the other wartime leaders – Wilson, Orlando and Clemenceau – had been ousted and forgotten, he replied that if his staying on top might be attributed to any one thing, it was probably to the fact that he had learned 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 on earth to influence the other fellow is to talk about what he wants and show him 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 son to smoke, don’t preach at him, and don’t talk about what you want; but show him that cigarettes may keep him 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: Ralph Waldo Emerson and his son one day 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 did just what they did; he thought 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 ever performed since the day you were born is because you wanted something. How about the time you gave $100 to the Red Cross? Yes, that is no exception to the rule. You gave the Red Cross $100 because you wanted to lend a helping hand, because 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 $100, you would not have made the contribution. Of course, you may 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.

Professor Harry A, Overstreet in his illuminating book, Influencing Human Behavior, says:

“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 Scots lad who started to work at two cents an hour and finally gave away $365 million – he 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 $100 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 $5 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.

 

Tomorrow you will want to persuade somebody to do something. Before you speak, pause and ask: “How can I make him want to do it?”

That question will stop us from rushing in heedlessly to see people with futile chatter about our desires.

I rent 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 $5000 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 300 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 his 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 his 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 high 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 paranthesis, 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 mortgage 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 first 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 Mussolini desires, or what Bing Crosby 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 the nerve! You make me feel insignificant by your big talk about your company – and 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 multigraphed letter – a form 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 multigraphed 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 that 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 Blank

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 a man who devotes his life to advertising and who poses as an expert in the art of influencing people to buy – if he writes a letter like that, what can we expect from the butcher and baker and carpet-tack maker?

Here is another letter, written by the superintendent of a large freight terminal to a student of this course, Mr. 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 Street,

Brooklyn, N.Y.

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 forenoon [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 angle, as well as from our own.”

Here is one way of revising it. It may not be the best way, but isn’t it an improvement?

Mr. Edward Vermylen,
c/o A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc.
28 Front St.,
Brooklyn, N.Y.

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. Very bad. How can it be avoided? By making your deliveries at the pier in the forenoon when possible. That will enable your trucks to keep moving, your freight will get immediate attention, and our workmen will get home early at night to enjoy a dinner of the delicious macaroni and noodles that you manufacture.

Please don’t take this as a complaint, and please don’t feel I am presuming to tell you how to run your business. This letter is prompted solely by a desire to serve you more effectively.

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.

 

Thousands of salesmen 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 a salesman can show us how his services or his merchandise will help us solve our problems, he won’t need to sell us. We’ll buy. And a customer likes to feel that he is buying – not being sold.

Yet many salespeople spend a lifetime in selling without seeing things from the customer’s angle. For example, I live 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 on Long Island 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 Gardens 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 myself, and then asked me to let him handle my insurance.

He was not interested in helping me. He was interested only in helping himself.

I ought to have given him copies of Vash Young’s excellent little books, The Go-Giver and A Fortune to Share. If he read those books and practiced their philosophy, they would make him a thousand times as much profit as handling my insurance.

Professional men make the same mistake. Several years ago, I walked into the office of a well-known nose-and-throat specialist in Philadelphia. Before he even looked at my tonsils, he asked me what my business was. He wasn’t interested in the size of my tonsils. He was interested in the size of my exchequer. His chief concern was not in how much he could help me. His chief concern was in how much he could get out of me. The result was he got nothing. I walked out of his office with contempt for his lack of character.

The world is full of people like that: grabbing, self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little competition. Owen D. Young said: “The man who can put himself in the place of other men, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for him.”

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 his angle – if you get that one thing out of this book, it may easily prove to be one of the milestones of your career.

Most men go through college and learn to read Virgil and master the mysteries of calculus without ever discovering how their own minds function. For instance: I once gave a course in “Effective Speaking” for the young college men who were entering the employ of the Carrier Corporation, Newark, New Jersey, the organization that cools office buildings and air-conditions theatres. One of the men wanted to persuade the others to play basketball, 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 have been to the gymnasium there haven’t been enough men 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 you boys 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 the feast days of the Mohammedan religion.

No man 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 been expecting. 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 when he started thinking about it. His boy had a tricycle which he loved to ride up and down the sidewalk in front of the house in Brooklyn. A few doors down the street lived a “menace”, as they say out in Hollywood – 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 “menace” 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 on to get revenge, to smash the “menace” in the nose. And when his father told him he could wallop the daylights out of the bigger kid some day 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 father 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 mother 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 down to Loeser’s department store in Brooklyn, winked at the salesgirl, and said: “Here is a little gentleman who would like to do some shopping.”

The sales girl 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 sales girl 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 breakfast food and she said: “Oh, look, Daddy, I am making the cereal this morning.”

She ate two helpings of the cereal that morning without any coaxing, because she was interested in it. She had achieved a feeling of importance; she had found in making the breakfast food an avenue of self-expression.

William Winter once remarked that “self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature”. Why can’t we use that same psychology in business? When we have a brilliant idea, instead of making the other person think it is ours, why not let him cook and stir the idea himself. He will then regard it as his own; he 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 world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.”

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 a man want to give you his watch by sticking a revolver in his ribs. You can make an employee give you cooperation – until your back is turned – by threatening to fire him. 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?

The famous Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, one of the most distinguished psychologists of the twentieth century, says that everything you and I do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great.

Professor John Dewey, America’s most profound philosopher, phrases 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. Almost every normal adult wants:

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 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 by 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 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 pedigree white-faced cattle. We used to exhibit our hogs and white-faced cattle at the country fairs and livestock 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 the 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 man in your town build a house far too large for his requirements.

This desire makes you want to wear the latest styles, drive the latest car, and talk about your brilliant children.

It is this desire that lures many boys and girls into becoming gangsters and gunmen. “The average young criminal, of today”, says E. P. Mulrooney, former 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 taking a ‘hot squat’ in the electric chair seems remote, so long as he can gloat over his likeness sharing space with pictures of Babe Ruth, La-Gaurdia, Einstein, Lindbergh, Toscanini, or Roosevelt.”

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 gets his feeling of importance by giving money to erect a modern hospital in Peking, China, to care for millions of poor people whom he has never seen and never will see. Dillinger, on the other hand, got his feeling of importance by being a bandit, a bank robber and killer. When the G-men 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 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.

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, and the fact that she would never be married. 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. If you are over fifteen years of age and residing in New York State, the chances are one out of twenty that you will be confined to an insane asylum for seven years of your life.

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, they are found to be apparently just as healthy as yours and mine.

Why do these people go insane?

I recently put that question to the head physician of one of our most important hospitals for the insane. This doctor, who has received the highest honors and the most coveted awards for his knowledge of insanity, 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 the 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.”

As a group, insane people are happier than you and I. Many enjoy being insane. Why shouldn’t they? They have solved their problems. They will write you a cheque for $1 million, or give you a letter of introduction to the Aga Khan. They have found in a dream world of their own creation the feeling of importance which they so deeply desired.

If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracles you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.

There have been, so far as I know, only two people in history who were paid a salary of $1 million a year: Walter Chrysler and Charles Schwab.

Why did Andrew Carnegie pay Schwab $1 million a year or more than three thousand dollars a day? Why?

Because Schwab is 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 the men,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement.

“There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a man as criticisms from his superiors. I never criticize any-one. I believe in giving a man 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 does. But what does the average man do? The exact opposite. If he doesn’t like a thing, he raises the Old Harry; if he does like it, he says nothing.

“In my wide association in life, meeting with many and great men in various parts of the world,” Schwab declared, “I have yet to find the man, 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 privately.

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 Rockefeller’s success in handling men. For example, when one of his partners, Edward T. Bedford, pulled a boner and lost the firm $1 million 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.”

Ziegfeld, the most spectacular entrepreneur who ever dazzled Broadway, gained his reputation by his subtle ability to “glorify the American girl.” He repeatedly took some drab little creature that no one ever looked at twice and transformed her on the stage into a glamorous vision 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 a telegram 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, and 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 played the stellar role in Re-union 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 self-esteem. 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.

Some readers are saying right now as they read these lines: “Old stuff! Soft soap! Bear oil! Flattery! 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 fish worms.

Why, for example, were the much-married Mdivani brothers such flaming successes in the matrimonial market? Why were these so-called “Princes” able to marry two beautiful and famous screen stars and a world-famous prima donna and Barbara Hutton with her five-and-ten-cent-store millions? Why? How did they do it?

“The Mdivani charm for women [said Adela Rogers St. Johns, in an article in the magazine Liberty]… has been among the mysteries of the ages to many.

Pola Negri, a woman of the world, a connoisseur of men, and a great artist, once explained it to me. She said: ‘They understand the art of flattery as do no other men I have ever met. And the art of flattery is almost a lost one in this realistic and humorous age. That, I assure you, is the secret of the Mdivani charm for women. I know.”

Even Queen Victoria was susceptible to flattery. [Prime Minister] 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 try to pass it.

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 General 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 man 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 use flattery, everybody would catch on to it, 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 man’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.

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 man’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.

On May 7, 1931, New York City witnessed the most sensational man-hunt the old town has ever known. After weeks of search, “Two Gun” Crowley – the killer, the gun-man 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 hide-away. Chopping holes in the roof, they tried to smoke out Crowley, the “cop killer,” with tear gas. Then they mounted their machine-guns on surrounding buildings, and for more than an hour one of New York’s fine residential sections 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 had ever been seen before on the sidewalks of New York.

When Crowley was captured, Police Commissioner 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 on a country road out on Long Island. Suddenly a policeman walked up to the parked 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 at 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 erstwhile Public Enemy Number One – the most sinister gang leader who ever shot up Chicago. Capone doesn’t condemn himself. He actually regards 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 Warden Lawes of Sing Sing on this subject, and he declares 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 anti-social 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 behind prison walls don’t blame themselves for anything – what about the people with whom you and I come in contact?

The late John Wanamaker 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, no man ever criticizes himself for anything, no matter how wrong he may be.

Criticism is futile because it puts a man on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a man’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses his resentment.

The German army won’t let a soldier file a complaint and make a criticism immediately after a thing has happened. He has to sleep on his grudge first and cool off. If he files his complaint immediately, he is punished. By the eternals, there ought to be a law like that in civil life too – a law for whining parents and nagging wives and scolding employers and the whole obnoxious parade of fault finders.

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 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 made Taft President, and then 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. Remember it? It kept the newspapers ringing with indignation for years. It rocked the nation! Nothing like it had ever happened before in American public life within the memory of living men. Here are the bare facts of the scandal: Albert 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 hundred million dollar 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, the wrongdoer blaming everybody but himself. 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, and condemn us in return; or, like the gentle Taft, he will say: “I don’t see how I could have done any differently from what I have.”

On Saturday morning, 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 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 men? 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 human being to make. I made a special study of Lincoln’s method of dealing with men. 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 Irish politician by the name of James Shields. Lincoln lampooned him through an anonymous letter published in the 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 he 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 has 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 by some perplexing problem, he used to lean back and look up at a large painting of Lincoln that 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 give somebody “Hail Columbia”, let’s pull a $5 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?”

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.

“When a man’s fight begins within himself”, said Browning, “he is worth something.” It will probably take from now until Christmas to perfect yourself. You can then have a nice long rest over the holidays and devote the New Year to regulating and criticizing other people.

But perfect yourself first.

“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.

And criticism is a dangerous spark – a spark that is liable to cause an explosion in the powder magazine of pride – an explosion that sometimes hastens death. For example, General Leonard Wood was criticized and not allowed to go with the army to France. That blow to his pride probably shortened his life.

Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists that ever enriched English literature, to give up the writing of fiction forever. 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 understanding and forgiving.

“A great man shows his greatness,” said Carlyle, “by the way he treats little men.”

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?

During the last thirty-five years [1900-1935], the publishing houses of America have 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 recently confessed to me that his company, after seventy-five years of publishing experience, still loses money on seven out of every eight books it publishes.

Why, then, have I had the temerity to write another book? And, after I have written it, why should you bother to read it?

Fair questions, both; and I’ll try to answer them.

In order to explain precisely how and why this book was written, I may, unfortunately, have to repeat briefly some of the facts that you have already read in Lowell Thomas’s introduction entitled “A Short-Cut to Distinction”.

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 now 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 a businessman. Yes, and that is also true if you are an accountant, housewife, architect, or engineer. Investigation and research made a few years ago under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation 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 1,500 engineers have passed through my classes. They came to me because they finally realized, after years of observation and experience, that the highest-paid men in the engineering field are frequently not the men who know the most about engineering. One can, for example, hire mere technical ability in engineering, accountancy, architecture, or any other profession at twenty-five to fifty dollars a week. The market is always gutted with it. But the man who has technical knowledge plus the ability to express his ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among men – that man is headed for higher earning power.

In the heyday of his activity, John D. Rockefeller told Matthew C. Brush 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 really want to study.

That survey cost $25,000 and took two years. The last part of the survey was made in Meriden, Connecticut. It was taken 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 which 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 Dorothy Dix, the divorce-court records, and the Parent’s Magazine, to Professor Overstreet, Alfred Adler, and William James. In addition to that, I hired a trained research man 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 men of all ages had dealt with people. We read the biographies of the great men of all ages. 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 to win friends and influence people.

I personally interviewed scores of successful people, some of them world-famous – Marconi, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Owen D. Young, Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Martin Johnson – and tried to discover the technique 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 has now expanded to a lecture that consumes one hour and thirty minutes. For years, I have given this talk each season to the adults in the Carnegie Institute courses in New York.

I gave the talk and urged them 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. And now, fifteen years of experiment and research, comes 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: Last season 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 three hundred and fourteen 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 now has more profit, more leisure and – what is infinitely more important – he finds far more happiness in his business and in his home.

Countless numbers of salesmen 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 last season reported an increase in salary of five thousand a year largely because he applied these truths.

Another, an executive in the Philadelphia Gas Works Company, was slated for demotion because of his belligerence, because of his inability to lead people skillfully. This training not only saved him from a demotion when he was sixty-five, but brought him promotion with increased pay.

On innumerable occasions, wives attending the banquet given at the end of the course have told me that their homes have been much happier since their husbands took this training.

Men 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 last season that he sat discussing them with the other members of the class until far into the night. 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 is a sophisticated, blase dealer in art, very much the man about town, who speaks three languages fluently and is a graduate of two foreign 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, whose name looms large in the Social Register, a wealthy man, the owner of a large carpet factory, declared that 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 600 men 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 Princetown University, “education 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.

This introduction, like most introductions, is already too long. So let’s go. Let’s get down to brass tacks at once. Please turn immediately to Chapter One.

On a cold, winter night last January (1935), 2,500 men and women thronged into the grand ballroom of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. Every available seat was filled by half-past seven. At eight o’clock the eager crowd was still pouring in. The spacious balcony was soon jammed; presently even standing space was at a premium, and hundreds of people, tired after navigating a day in business, stood up for an hour and a half that night to witness – what?

A fashion show?

A six-day bicycle race or a personal appearance by Clark Gable?

No. These people had been lured there by a newspaper ad. Two evenings previously, they had picked up a copy of the New York Sun and found a full-page announcement staring them in the face.

“Increase Your Income
Learn to Speak Effectively
Prepare for Leadership”

Old stuff? Yes, but believe it or not, in the most sophisticated town on earth, during a depression with 20 percent of the population on relief, 2,500 people left their homes and hustled to the Pennsylvania hotel in response to that ad.

And the ad appeared – remember this – not in a tabloid sheet, but in the most conservative evening paper in town – the New York Sun; and the people who responded were of the upper economic strata – executives, employers and professional men with incomes ranging from $2,000 to $50,000 a year.

These men and women had come to hear the opening gun of an ultra-modern, ultra-practical course in “Effective Speaking and Influencing Men in Business” – a course given by the Dale Carnegie Institute of Effective Speaking and Human Relations.

Why were they there, these 2,500 business men and women?

Because of a sudden hunger for more education due to the depression?

Apparently not, for this same course had been playing to packed houses in New York City every season for the past twenty-four years. During that time, more than 15,000 business and professional men had been trained by Dale Carnegie. Even large, skeptical, conservative organizations such as the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, Brooklyn Union Gas Company, Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and the New York Telephone Company have had this training conducted in their own offices for the benefit of their members and executives.

The fact that these men, ten or twenty years after leaving grade school, high school, or college, come and take this training is a glaring commentary on the shocking deficiencies of our educational system.

What do adults really want to study? That is an important question; and in order to answer it, the University of Chicago, the American Association for Adult Education, and the United Y.M.C.A. Schools made a survey that cost $25,000 and covered two years.

That survey revealed that the prime interest of adults is health. It also revealed that their second interest is in developing skill in human relationships; they want to learn the technique of getting along with and influencing other people. They don’t want to become public speakers; and they don’t want to listen to a lot of high-sounding talk about psychology – they want suggestions that they can use immediately in business, in social contacts, and in the home.

So that was what adults wanted to study, was it?

“All right,” said the people making the survey. “Fine. If that is what they want, we’ll give it to them.”

Looking around for a text-book, they discovered that no working manual had ever been written to help people solve their daily problems in human relationships.

Here was a fine kettle of fish! For hundreds of years, learned volumes had been written on Greek and Latin and higher mathematics – topics about which the average adult doesn’t give two hoots. But on the one subject on which he has a thirst for knowledge, a veritable passion for guidance and help – nothing!

This explains the presence of 2,500 eager adults crowding into the grand ballroom of the Hotel Pennsylvania in response to a newspaper advertisement. Here, apparently, at last was the thing for which they had long been seeking.

Back in high school and college, they had pored over books, believing that knowledge alone was the open sesame to financial and professional rewards.

But a few years in the rough-and-tumble of business and professional life had brought sharp disillusionment. They had seen some of the most important business successes won by men who possessed, in addition to their knowledge, the ability to talk well, win people to their way of thinking, and to “sell” themselves and their ideas.

They soon discovered that if one aspired to wear the captain’s cap and navigate the ship of business, personality and the ability to talk are more important than a knowledge of Latin verbs or a sheepskin from Harvard.

The advertisement in the New York Sun promised that the meeting in the Hotel Pennsylvania would be highly entertaining. It was.

Eighteen men who had taken the course were marshaled in front of the loud-speaker – and fifteen of them were given precisely seventy-five seconds each to tell his story. Only seventy-five seconds of talk, then “bang” went the gavel, and the chairman shouted: “Time! Next speaker!”

The affair moved with the speed of a herd of buffalo thundering across the plains. Spectators stood for an hour and a half to watch the performance.

The speakers were a cross-section of American business life: a chain store executive; a baker; the president of a trade association; two bankers; a truck salesman; a chemical salesman; an insurance man; the secretary of a brick manufacturer’s association; an accountant; a dentist; an architect; a whisky salesman; a Christian Science practitioner; a druggist who had come from Indianapolis to New York to take the course; a lawyer who had come from Havana, in order to prepare himself to give one important three-minute speech.

The first speaker bore the Gaelic name Patrick J. O’Haire. Born in Ireland, he attended school for only four years, drifted to America, worked as a mechanic, then as a chauffeur.

At forty, his family was growing up, he needed more money; so he tried to sell automobile trucks. Suffering from an inferiority complex that, as he put it, was eating his heart out, he had to walk up and down in front of an office half a dozen times before he could summon up enough courage to open the door. He was so discouraged as a salesman that he was thinking of going back to work with his hands in a machine shop, when one day he received a letter inviting him to an organization meeting of the Dale Carnegie Course in Effective Speaking.

He didn’t want to attend. He feared he would have to associate with a lot of college men, that he would be out of place.

His despairing wife insisted that he go, saying, “It may do you some good, Pat. God knows you need it.” He went down to the place where the meeting was to be held and stood on the sidewalk for five minutes before he could generate enough self-confidence to enter the room.

The first few times he tried to speak he was dizzy with fear. As the weeks drifted by, he lost all fear of audiences and soon found that he loved to talk – the bigger the crowd, the better. And he also lost his fear of individuals. He lost his fear of his own customers. His income mounted and sky-rocketed. Today he is one of the star salesmen in New York City. That night at the Pennsylvania Hotel, Patrick O’Haire stood in front of 2,500 people and told a gay, rollicking story of his achievements. Wave after wave of laughter swept over the audience. Few professional speakers could have equaled his performance.

The next speaker, Godfrey Meyer, was a gray-headed banker, the father of eleven children. The first time he had attempted to speak in class, he was literally struck dumb. His mind refused to function. His story is a vivid illustration of how leadership gravitates to the person who can talk.

He works on Wall Street, and for twenty-five years he has been living in Clifton, New Jersey. During that time, he has taken no active part in community affairs, and knew perhaps 500 people.

Shortly after he had enrolled in the Carnegie course, he received his tax bill and was infuriated by what he considered unjust charges. Ordinarily, he would have sat at home and fumed, or taken it out in grousing to his neighbors. But instead, he put on his hat that night, walked into a town meeting, and blew off his steam in public.

As a result of that talk of indignation, the citizens of Clifton, New Jersey, urged him to run for the town council. So for weeks he went from one meeting to another, denouncing waste and municipal extravagance.

There were ninety-six candidates in the field. When the ballots were counted, lo, Godfrey Meyer’s name led all the rest. Almost overnight, he became a public figure among the 40,000 people in his community. As a result of his talks, he made eighty times more friends in six weeks than he had been able to previously in twenty-five years.

And his salary as councilman meant that he got a return of 1,000 percent a year on his investment [in Dale Carnegie’s course].

The third speaker, the head of a large national association of food manufacturers, told how he had been unable to stand up and express his ideas at meetings of a board of directors.

As a result of learning to think on his feet, two astonishing things happened. He was soon made president of his association, and in that capacity, he was obliged to address meetings all over the United States. Excerpts from his talks were put on the Associated Press wires and printed in newspapers and trade magazines throughout the country.

In two years, after learning to speak, he received more free publicity for his company and its products than he had been able to get previously by a quarter of a million dollars spent in direct advertising. This speaker admitted that he had formerly hesitated to telephone some of the more important business executives in lower Manhattan and invite them to lunch with him. But as a result of the prestige he had acquired by his talks, these same men now telephoned him and invited him to lunch and apologized to him for encroaching on his time.

The ability to speak is a short-cut to distinction. It puts a man in the limelight, raises him head and shoulders above the crowd. And the man who can speak acceptably is usually given credit for an ability out of all proportion to what he really possesses.

A movement for adult education is sweeping over the nation today; and the most spectacular force in that movement is Dale Carnegie, a man who has listened to and criticized more talks by adults than has any other man in captivity. According to a recent cartoon by “Believe-It-or-Not” Ripley, he has criticized 150,000 speeches. If that grand total doesn’t impress you, remember that it means one talk for almost every day that has passed since Columbus discovered America. Or, to put it in other words, if all the men who had spoken before him had used only three minutes and had appeared before him in succession, it would have taken a solid year, listening day and night, to hear them all.

Dale Carnegie’s own career, filled with sharp contrasts, is a striking example of what a man can accomplish when he is obsessed with an original idea and afire with enthusiasm.

Born on a Missouri farm ten miles from a railway, he never saw a street-car until he was twelve years old; yet today, at forty-six, he is familiar with the far-flung corners of the earth, everywhere from Hong Kong to Hammerfest; and, at one time, he approached closer to the North Pole than Admiral Byrd’s headquarters at Little America were to the South Pole.

This Missouri lad who once picked strawberries and cut cockleburs for five cents an hour is now paid a dollar a minute for training the executives of large corporations in the art of self-expression.

This erstwhile cowboy who once punched cattle and branded calves and rode fences out in western South Dakota, later went to London to put on shows under the patronage of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.

This chap who was a total failure the first half-dozen times he tried to speak in public, later became my personal manager. Much of my success has been due to training under Dale Carnegie.

Young Carnegie had to struggle for an education, for hard luck was always battering away at the old farm in north-west Missouri with a flying tackle and a body slam. Year after year, the “102” River rose and drowned the corn and swept away the hay. Season after season, the fat hogs sickened and died from cholera, the bottom fell out of the market for cattle and mules, and the bank threatened to foreclose the mortgage.

Sick with discouragement, the family sold out and bought another farm near the State Teachers’ College at Warrensburg, Missouri. Board and room could be had in town for a dollar a day; but young Carnegie couldn’t afford it. So he stayed on the farm and commuted on horseback three miles to college each day. At home, he milked the cows, cut the wood, fed the hogs, and studied his Latin verbs by the light of a coal-oil lamp until his eyes blurred and he began to nod.

Even when he got to bed at midnight, he set the alarm for three o’clock. His father bred pedigree Duroc-Jersey hogs – and there was danger, during the bitter cold nights, of the young pigs freezing to death; so they were put in a basket, covered with a gunny sack, and set behind the kitchen stove. True to their nature, the pigs demanded a hot meal at 3 a.m.. So when the alarm went off, Dale Carnegie crawled out of the blankets, took the basket of pigs out to their mother, waited for them to nurse, and then brought them back to the warmth of the kitchen stove.

There were six hundred students in State Teachers’ College; and Dale Carnegie was one of the isolated half-dozen who couldn’t afford to board in town. He was ashamed of the poverty that made it necessary for him to ride back to the farm and milk the cows every night. He was ashamed of his coat, which was too tight, and his trousers, which were too short. Rapidly developing an inferiority complex, he looked for some shortcut to distinction. He soon saw that there were certain groups in college that enjoyed influence and prestige – the football and baseball players and the chaps who won the debating and public-speaking contests.

Realizing that he had no flair for athletics, he decided to win one of the speaking contests. He spent months preparing his talks. He practiced as he sat in the saddle galloping to college and back; he practiced his speeches as he milked the cows; and then he mounted a bale of hay in the barn and with great gusto and gestures harangued the frightened pigeons about the necessity of halting Japanese immigration.

But in spite of all his earnestness, and preparation, he met with defeat after defeat. He was eighteen at the time – sensitive and proud. He became so discouraged so depressed that he even thought of suicide. And then suddenly he began to win, not one contest but every speaking contest in college.

Other students pleaded with him to train them; and they won also.

Graduating from college, he started selling correspondence courses to the ranchers among the sand-hills of western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming.

In spite of all his boundless energy and enthusiasm, he couldn’t make the grade. He became so discouraged that he went to his hotel room in Alliance, Nebraska, in the middle of the day, threw himself across the bed, and wept with despair. He longed to go back to college, he longed to retreat from the harsh battle of life; but he couldn’t. So he resolved to go to Omaha and get another job. He didn’t have the money for a railroad ticket, so he traveled on a freight train, feeding and watering two carloads of wild horses in return for his passage.

Landing in south Omaha, he got a job selling bacon and soap and lard for Armour and Company. His territory was up among the Bad Lands and the cow and Indian country of western South Dakota. He covered his territory by freight train and on stage coach and on horseback, and slept in pioneer hotels, where the only partition between the rooms was a sheet of muslin.

He studied books on salesmanship, rode bucking bronchos, played poker with squaw men, and learned how to collect money. When an inland storekeeper couldn’t pay cash for the bacon and hams he had ordered, Dale Carnegie would take a dozen pairs of shoes off his shelf, sell the shoes to the railroad men, and forward the receipts to Armour and Company.

He would often ride a freight train a hundred miles a day. When the train stopped to unload freight, he would dash uptown, see three or four merchants, get his orders; and when the whistle blew, he would dash down the street again lickety-split and swing onto the train while it was moving.

Within two years, he had taken an unproductive territory that had stood in the twenty-fifth place and boosted it to first place among all the twenty-nine car routes leading out of South Omaha. Armour and Company offered to promote him, saying: “You have achieved what seemed impossible.” But he refused the promotion and resigned – resigned, went to New York, studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and toured the country, playing the role of Dr. Hartley in Polly of the Circus.

He would never be a Booth or a Barrymore. He had the good sense to recognize that. So back he went to sales work again, dispensing automobile trucks for the Packard Motor Car Company.

He knew nothing about machinery and cared nothing about it. Dreadfully unhappy, he had to scourge himself to his task each day. He longed to have time to study, to write the books he had dreamed about writing back in college. So he resigned. He was going to spend his days writing stories and novels and support himself by teaching in a night school.

Teaching what? As he looked back and evaluated his college work, he saw that his training in public speaking had done more to give him confidence, courage, poise and the ability to meet and deal with people in business than had all the rest of his college courses put together. So he urged the Y.M.C.A. schools in New York to give him a chance to conduct courses in public speaking for businessmen.

What? Make orators out of businessmen? Absurd. They knew. They had tried such courses – and they had always failed.

When they refused to pay him a salary of two dollars a night, he agreed to teach on a commission basis and take a percentage of the net profits – if there were any profits to take. And inside of three years they were paying him thirty dollars a night on that basis – instead of two.

The course grew. Other “Ys” heard of it, then other cities. Dale Carnegie soon became a glorified circuit rider covering New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and later London and Paris. All the textbooks were too academic and impractical for the businessmen who flocked to his courses. Nothing daunted, he sat down and wrote one entitled Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business. It is now the official text of all the Y.M.C.A.s as well as of the American Bankers’ Association and the National Credit Men’s Association.

Today far more adults come to Dale Carnegie for training in public speaking each season than go to all the extension courses in public speaking conducted by all the twenty-two colleges and universities located in New York City.

Dale Carnegie claims that any man can talk when he gets mad. He said that if you hit the most ignorant man in town on the jaw and knock him down, he would get on his feet and talk with an eloquence, heat and emphasis that would have rivaled William Jennings Bryan in his palmiest days. He claims that almost any man can speak acceptably in public if he has self-confidence and an idea that is boiling and stewing within him.

The way to develop self-confidence, he says, is to do the thing you fear to do and get a record of successful experiences behind you. So he forces each man to talk at every session of the course. The audience is sympathetic. They are all in the same boat; and, by constant practice, they develop a courage, confidence and enthusiasm that carry over into their private speaking.

Dale Carnegie will tell you that he made a living all these years, not by teaching public speaking – that has been incidental. He claims his main job has been to help men conquer their fears and develop courage.

He started out at first to conduct merely a course in public speaking, but the students who came were businessmen. Many of them hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom in thirty years. Most of them were paying their tuition on the installment plan. They wanted results, and they wanted them quick – results that they could use the next day in business interviews and in speaking before groups.

So he was forced to be swift and practical. Consequently, he has developed a system of training that is unique – a striking combination of public speaking, salesmanship, human relations, and applied psychology.

A slave to no hard-and-fast rules, he has developed a course that is as real as the measles and twice as much fun.

When the classes terminate, the men form clubs of their own and continue to meet fortnightly for years afterwards. One group of nineteen men in Philadelphia have been meeting twice a month during the winter season for seventeen years. Men frequently motor fifty or a hundred miles to attend these classes. One student used to commute each week from Chicago to New York.

Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only 10 percent of his latent mental ability. Dale Carnegie, by helping business men and women to develop their latent possibilities, has created one of the most significant movements in adult education.

– Lowell Thomas, 1936