How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie Read Free Book Online

Because Schwab was a genius?
    No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of
    steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told
    me himself that he had many men working for him who
    knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.

    Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because
    of his ability to deal with people. I asked him how
    he did it. Here is his secret set down in his own words
    - words that ought to be cast in eternal bronze and hung
    in every home and school, every shop and office in the
    land - words that children ought to memorize instead of
    wasting their time memorizing the conjugation of Latin
    verbs or the amount of the annual rainfall in Brazil - words
    that will all but transform your life and mine if we
    will only live them:

    “I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my
    people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and
    the way to develop the best that is in a person is by
    appreciation and encouragement.

    “There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a
    person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize any-
    one. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I
    am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything,
    I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my
    praise. "
     
    That is what Schwab did. But what do average people
    do? The exact opposite. If they don’t like a thing, they
    bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say
    nothing. As the old couplet says: “Once I did bad and
    that I heard ever/Twice I did good, but that I heard
    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.
    Carnegie praised his associates publicly as well as pr-vately.

    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 the first
    John D. Rockefeller’s success in handling men. 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; 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.”

    I have among my clippings a story that I know never
    happened, but it illustrates a truth, so I’ll repeat it:

    According to this silly story, a farm woman, at the end
    of a heavy day’s work, set before her menfolks a heaping
    pile of hay. And when they indignantly demanded
    whether she had gone crazy, she replied: “Why, how
    did I know you’d notice? I’ve been cooking for you men
    for the last twenty years and in all that time I ain’t heard
    no word to let me know you wasn’t just eating hay.”

    When a study was made a few years ago on runaway
    wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main
    reason wives ran away? It was “lack of appreciation.”
    And 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