ANYWHERE
Why
read this book to find out how to win friends? Why not study the technique of
the greatest winner of friends the world has ever known? Who is he? You may
meet him tomorrow coming down the street. When you get within ten feet of him,
he will begin to wag his tail. If you stop and pat him, he will almost jump out
of his skin to show you how much he likes you. And you know that behind this
show of affection on his part, there are no ulterior motives: he doesn’t want
to sell you any real estate, and he doesn’t want to marry you. Did you ever
stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn’t have to work for a
living? A hen has to lay eggs, a cow has to give milk, and a canary has to
sing.
When
I was five years old, my father bought a little yellow-haired pup for fifty
cents. He was the light and joy of my childhood. Every afternoon about
four-thirty, he would sit in the front yard with his beautiful eyes staring
steadfastly at the path, and as soon as he heard my voice or saw me swinging my
dinner pail through the buck brush, he was off like a shot, racing breathlessly
up the hill to greet me with leaps of joy and barks of sheer ecstasy. Tippy was
my constant companion for five years. Then one tragic night - I shall never
forget it - he was killed within ten feet of my head, killed by lightning.
Tippy’s death was the tragedy of my boyhood. You never read a book on psychology,
Tippy. You didn’t need to. You knew by some divine instinct that you can make
more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people
than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Let
me repeat that. You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested
in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people
interested in you. Yet I know and you know people who blunder through life
trying to wigwag other people into becoming interested in them.
Of
course, it doesn’t work. People are not interested in you. They are not
interested in me. They are interested in themselves - morning, noon and after
dinner. The New York Telephone Company made a detailed study of telephone
conversations to find out which word is the most frequently used. You have
guessed it: it is the personal pronoun “I.” “I.” I.” It was used 3,900 times in
500 telephone conversations. "I.” “I.” “I.” "I.” When you see a group
photograph that you are in, whose picture do you look for first? If we merely
try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many
true, sincere friends. Friends, real friends, are not made that way. Napoleon
tried it, and in his last meeting with Josephine he said: “Josephine, I have
been as fortunate as any man ever was on this earth; and yet, at this hour, you
are the only person in the world on whom I can rely.” And historians doubt
whether he could rely even on her. Alfred Adler, the famous Viennese
psychologist, wrote a book entitled What Life Should Mean to You. In that book he says:
“It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the
greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is
from among such individuals that all human failures spring.” You may read
scores of erudite tomes on psychology without coming across a statement more
significant for you and for me. Adler’s statement is so rich with meaning that
I am going to repeat it in italics: It is the individual who is not interested
in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the
greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human
failures spring. I
once took a course in short-story writing at New York University, and during
that course the editor of a leading magazine talked to our class. He said he
could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk
every day and after reading a few paragraphs he could feel whether or not the
author liked people. “If the author doesn’t like people,” he said, “people
won’t like his or her stories.” This hard-boiled editor stopped twice in the
course of his talk on fiction writing and apologized for preaching a sermon. “I
am telling you,” he said, “the same things your preacher would tell you, but
remember, you have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful
writer of stories.” If that is true of writing fiction, you can be sure it is
true of dealing with people face-to-face. I spent an evening in the dressing
room of Howard Thurston the last time he appeared on Broadway - Thurston was
the acknowledged dean of magicians. For forty years he had traveled all over
the world, time and again, creating illusions, mystifying audiences, and making
people gasp with astonishment. More than 60 million people had paid admission
to his show, and he had made almost $2 million in profit. I asked Mr. Thurston
to tell me the secret of his success. His schooling certainly had nothing to do
with it, for he ran away from home as a small boy, became a hobo, rode in
boxcars, slept in haystacks, begged his food from door to door, and learned to
read by looking out of boxcars at signs along the railway. Did he have a
superior knowledge of magic? No, he told me hundreds of books had been written
about legerdemain and scores of people knew as much about it as he did. But he
had two things that the others didn’t have. First, he had the ability to put
his personality across the footlights. He was a master showman. He knew human
nature. Everything he did, every gesture, every intonation of his voice, every
lifting of an eyebrow had been carefully rehearsed in advance, and his actions
were timed to split seconds. But, in addition to that, Thurston had a genuine
interest in people. He told me that many magicians would look at the audience
and say to themselves, “Well, there is a bunch of suckers out there, a bunch of
hicks; I’ll fool them all right.” But Thurston’s method was totally different.
He told me that every time he went on stage he said to himself: “I am grateful
because these people come to see me, They make it possible for me to make my
living in a very agreeable way.
I’m
going to give them the very best I possibly can.” He declared he never stepped
in front of the footlights without first saying to himself over and over: “I
love my audience. I love my audience. ”Ridiculous? Absurd?. You are privileged
to think anything you like. I am merely passing it on to you without comment as
a recipe used by one of the most famous magicians of all time. George Dyke of
North Warren, Pennsylvania, was forced to retire from his service station
business after thirty years when a new highway was constructed over the site of
his station. It wasn’t long before the idle days of retirement began to bore
him, so he started filling in his time trying to play music on his old fiddle.
Soon he was traveling the area to listen to music and talk with many of the
accomplished fiddlers. In his humble and friendly way he became generally
interested in learning the background and interests of every musician he met.
Although he was not a great fiddler himself, he made many friends in this
pursuit. He attended competitions and soon became known to the country music
fans in the eastern part of the United States as “Uncle George, the Fiddle
Scraper from Kinzua County.” When we heard
Uncle
George, he was seventy-two and enjoying every minute of his life. By having a
sustained interest in other people, he created a new life for himself at a time
when most people consider their productive years over. That, too, was one of
the secrets of Theodore Roosevelt’s astonishing popularity. Even his servants
loved him. His valet, James E. Amos, wrote a book about him entitled Theodore Roosevelt, Hero to His Valet. In that book Amos relates this
illuminating incident:
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