2 The Big Secret of Dealing with People
There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
Remember, there is no other way.
Of course, you can make someone want to give you his watch by sticking a revolver in his ribs. You can make your employees give you cooperation—until your back is turned—by threatening to fire them. But these methods have sharply undesirable repercussions.
The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.
What do you want?
Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, said that everything you and I do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great.
John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers, phrased it a bit differently. Dr. Dewey said that the deepest urge in human nature is “the desire to be important.” Remember that phrase: “the desire to be important.” It is significant. You are going to hear a lot about it in this book.
What do you want? Not many things, but the few things that you do wish, you crave with an insistence that will not be denied. Some of the things that most people want include:
- Health and longevity
- Food
- Sleep
- Money and the things money will buy
- Belief in the hereafter
- Sexual gratification
- The well-being of their children
- A feeling of importance
Some of these wants are usually gratified, others occasionally—all except one. But one of these longings—almost as deep, almost as imperious, as the desire for food or sleep—is seldom gratified. It is what Freud calls “the desire to be great.” It is what Dewey calls “the desire to be important.”
Lincoln once began a letter saying: “Everybody likes a compliment.” William James said: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” Here is a gnawing and unfaltering human hunger, and the rare individual who honestly satisfies in others this heart hunger will hold people in the palm of their 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 humankind and the animals. To illustrate: When I was a farm boy out in Missouri, my father bred fine Duroc-Jersey hogs and pedigreed white-faced cattle. We used to exhibit our hogs and white-faced cattle at the country fairs and livestock shows throughout the Midwest. 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 would have been just about like animals.
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You’ve probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that inspired Charles Dickens to write his immortal novels. This desire inspired Amelia Earhart to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. This desire inspired Sir Christopher Wren, the renowned English architect, to design his symphonies in stone. This desire made Marie Curie conduct pioneering, extremely dangerous, and finally life-threatening research on radioactivity. This desire made John D. Rockefeller amass millions that he never spent! And this same desire made the richest family in your town build a house far too large for its needs.
This desire makes you want to wear the latest styles, drive the latest cars, and talk about your brilliant children.
It is this desire that lures many boys and girls into joining gangs and engaging in criminal activities. The average young criminal, according to E. P. Mulrooney, onetime police commissioner of New York, is filled with ego, and his first request after arrest is for those lurid newspapers that make him out a hero. The disagreeable prospect of serving time seems remote so long as he can gloat over his likeness sharing space with pictures of sports figures, movie stars, and politicians.
If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I’ll tell you what you are. That determines your character. That is the most significant thing about you. For example, John D. Rockefeller got his feeling of importance by giving money to erect a modern hospital in Peking (Beijing), China, to care for millions of poor people whom he had never seen and never would see. John Dillinger, on the other hand, got his feeling of importance by being a bandit, a bank robber, and a killer. When FBI agents were hunting him, he dashed into a farmhouse up in Minnesota and said, “I’m Dillinger!” He was proud of the fact that he was Public Enemy Number One.
Yes, one significant difference between Dillinger and Rockefeller is how they got their feeling of importance.
History sparkles with amusing examples of famous people struggling for a feeling of importance. Even George Washington wanted to be called “His Mightiness, the President of the United States,” and Columbus pleaded for the title “Admiral of the Ocean and Viceroy of India.” Catherine the Great refused to open letters that were not addressed to “Her Imperial Majesty,” and Mrs. Lincoln, in the White House, turned upon Mrs. Grant like a tigress and shouted, “How dare you be seated in my presence until I invite you!”
Our millionaires helped finance Admiral Byrd’s expedition to the Antarctic in 1928 with the understanding that ranges of icy mountains would be named after them; and Victor Hugo aspired to have nothing less than the city of Paris renamed in his honor. Even Shakespeare, mightiest of the mighty, tried to add luster to his name by procuring a coat of arms for his family.
People sometimes became invalids in order to win sympathy and attention, and get a feeling of importance. For example, take Mrs. McKinley. She got a feeling of importance by forcing her husband, the President of the United States, to neglect important affairs of state while he reclined on the bed beside her for hours at a time, his arm about her, soothing her to sleep. She fed her gnawing desire for attention by insisting that he remain with her while she was having her teeth fixed, and once created a stormy scene when he had to leave her alone with the dentist while he kept an appointment with John Hay, his secretary of state.
Some medical 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.
If some people are so hungry for those feelings of importance and attention that they actually find solace in madness to win them, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of sanity.
One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of more than a million dollars a yearI (when there was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab. He had been picked by industrialist Andrew Carnegie to become the first president of the newly formed United States Steel Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight years old. (Schwab later left U.S. Steel to take over the then troubled Bethlehem Steel Company, and rebuilt it into one of the most profitable companies in America.)
Why did Carnegie pay a million dollars a year, or roughly three thousand dollars a day, to Charles Schwab? Because Schwab was a genius? No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told me himself that he had many men working for him who knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.
Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people. I asked him how he did it. Here is his secret set down in his own words—words that ought to be cast in eternal bronze and hung in every home and school, every shop and office in the land—words that children ought to memorize instead of wasting their time memorizing the conjugation of Latin verbs or the amount of the annual rainfall in Brazil—words that will all but transform your life and mine if we will only live them:
“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.
“There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.”
That is what Schwab did. But what do average people do?
The exact opposite.
If they don’t like a thing, they bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say nothing. As the old couplet says: “Once I did bad and that I heard ever / Twice I did good, but that I heard never.”
“In my wide association in life, meeting with many and great people in various parts of the world,” Schwab declared, “I have yet to find the person, 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. He praised his associates publicly as well as privately. Carnegie wanted to praise his assistants even on his tombstone. His epitaph, which he wrote himself, reads: “Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself.”
Sincere appreciation was one of the secrets of the first John D. Rockefeller’s success in handling those who worked for him. For example, when one of his partners, Edward T. Bedford, lost a million dollars for the firm by a bad buy in South America, John D. might have criticized him. But he knew Bedford had done his best, and the incident was closed. Rockefeller instead 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.”
When a study was made a few years ago on runaway wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main reason they fled? It was “lack of appreciation.” I’d bet that a similar study made of runaway husbands would come out the same way. We often take our spouses so much for granted that we never let them know we appreciate them.
A member of one of our classes told of a request made by his wife. She and a group of other women in her church were involved in a self-improvement program. She asked her husband to help her by listing six things he believed she could do to help her become a better partner. He reported to the class: “I was surprised by such a request. Frankly, it would have been easy for me to list six things I would like to change about her—my heavens, she could have listed a thousand things she would like to change about me—but I didn’t. I said to her, ‘Let me think about it and give you an answer in the morning.’
“The next morning I got up very early and called the florist and had them send six red roses to my wife with a note saying: ‘I can’t think of six things I would like to change about you. I love you the way you are.’
“When I arrived at home that evening, who do you think greeted me at the door? That’s right. My wife! She was almost in tears. Needless to say, I was extremely glad I had not criticized her as she had requested.
“The following Sunday at church, after she had reported the results of her assignment, several women with whom she had been studying came up to me and said, ‘That was the most considerate thing I have ever heard.’ It was then I realized the power of appreciation.”
Would you believe that anyone could build a two-million-dollar business on the power of appreciation? Because that is precisely what Alice Foote MacDougall did, despite having no training or business experience, and almost starting out penniless. After her husband had passed away, and with three young children dependent on her, she was forced to find a way to support her family. In her own words:
“When my husband died I was so discouraged I wanted to die, too. One night I was actually tempted to drown myself and I would have if not for the sake of my children. I had to make a living for them. I didn’t have the training to hold a job so I knew my only hope was to go into business for myself.
“My husband had been in the coffee business and he used to make up a delicious blend we used at home. I knew there would be a market for this coffee if we could only get people to try it. I had $38 so I rented an ‘office,’ a tiny room just large enough to store coffee. I bought a tiny coffee grinder that ground a half-pound at a time, and when I got an order for 50 pounds of coffee, I had to fill the machine a hundred times to complete that single order.”
Mrs. MacDougall solicited customers by copying names from phone directories and sending out one hundred letters a day, inviting people to try her blend. In the beginning the orders barely trickled in, but “I was taught as a child to write thank-you notes, so I applied the same courtesy in business. In each letter I explained how much the order meant to me and how eager I was to supply that customer with the coffee best suited to their taste. I was astonished at what happened. The men in the coffee business had all prophesied that I would fail within six months.”
Yet two years later, Mrs. MacDougall had a thriving coffee business and later branched out into the restaurant business. How did that happen?
“I opened a tiny coffee shop in Grand Central Station. For months the shop was a dismal failure. Then one day it rained and the corridors outside my shop were packed with people who were soaking wet. I’ve never seen a more miserable mass of humanity!
“I knew how those people felt because I had been cold and wet myself. I wanted to show them my honest appreciation for what they were feeling and so on an impulse I had my waffle iron sent from home and served coffee and waffles for free. We began to serve them every day after that but the demand was so great that we had to charge for them.
“Those free waffles turned my business into a success and in five months we had a line half a block long. At the end of five years, I had built six restaurants and my business was worth half a million dollars.”
Nobody needed to tell Mrs. MacDougall the value of appreciation.
Nor did anyone need to tell it to Florenz Ziegfeld. In the early part of the twentieth century, Ziegfeld was the most spectacular entrepreneur who had ever dazzled Broadway, and he gained his reputation by his subtle ability to “glorify the American girl.” Time after time, he recruited average-looking young women—not great beauties or stunning head-turners—to be in his fabulous productions. Yet onstage, these “average” girls were transformed into glamorous visions of mystery and seduction who captivated their audiences. People from all walks of life thronged to see them each night in Ziegfeld’s Follies, and many “Ziegfeld girls”—such as Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, and Joan Blondell—later launched successful movie careers. Ziegfeld had taken “ordinary” American girls and turned them into spectacular stars.
How did he do it? Ziegfeld knew the value of appreciation and confidence, and took every opportunity to let them know they were special. Through the sheer power of his gallantry and his consideration toward them, they metamorphosed into the beauties the audience saw on the stage every night.
He was practical, as well: He raised the salary of chorus girls from $35 a week to as high as $175. And he was chivalrous: On opening night at the Follies, he sent a telegram to each star in the cast, and deluged every girl in the chorus line 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, as do you, people who would think they had committed a crime if they let their families or employees go for six days without food. Yet 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, one of the great actors of his time, played the leading role in Reunion 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 nutritious food 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: “Hogwash! Stop! It’s just flattery! I’ve tried that and 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 fishworms.
Even Queen Victoria was susceptible to flattery. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli confessed that he put it on thick in dealing with the Queen. To use his exact words, he “spread it on with a trowel.” But Disraeli was one of the most polished and deft men who ever ruled the far-flung British Empire. What worked 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 pass it to someone else.
The difference between appreciation and flattery? Simple. One is sincere, 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 the Mexican hero, General (and later President) Álvaro Obregón, in the Chapultepec palace in Mexico City. Below the bust are carved these wise words from his 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 am 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 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 person precisely what he thinks about himself.”
If all we had to do was flatter, everybody would catch on and we would 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 person’s good points, we wouldn’t have to resort to flattery so cheap and false that it can be spotted almost before it is out of the mouth.
One of the most neglected virtues of our daily existence is appreciation. Somehow, we neglect to praise our daughter or son when she or he brings home a good report card, and we fail to encourage our children when they first succeed in building a birdhouse or baking brownies. Nothing pleases children more than this kind of parental interest and approval.
The next time you enjoy an exceptional meal dining out, send word to the chef that it was excellently prepared. When a tired salesperson shows you unusual courtesy, please mention it.
Every minister, lecturer, and public speaker knows the discouragement of pouring themselves out to an audience and not receiving a single ripple of appreciative comment. What applies to professionals applies doubly to workers in offices, shops, and factories, and to our families and friends. In our relations at work we should never forget that all our associates are human beings and hunger for appreciation. It is the legal tender that all souls enjoy.
Try leaving a friendly trail of little sparks of gratitude on your daily trips. You will be surprised how they will set small flames of friendship that will be rose beacons on your next visit.
Hurting people not only does not change them; it is never called for. There’s an old saying that I have cut out and pasted on my mirror where I cannot help but see it every day:
“I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”
The great philosopher Ralph Waldo 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 us cease thinking of our accomplishments, our wants. Let us try to figure out the other person’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 repeat them over a lifetime—repeat them years after you have forgotten them.
PRINCIPLE 2
Give honest and sincere appreciation.
- I. Equivalent to about fifteen million dollars today.