How To Win Friends And Influence People | Page 8

don't want to listen to a lot of high
sounding talk about psychology; they want suggestions 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 textbook, 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 explained the presence of twenty-five hundred 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 dissillusionment. 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, to
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
would be highly entertaining. It was. Eighteen people who had taken
the course were marshaled in front of the loudspeaker - and fifteen
of them were given precisely seventy-five seconds each to tell his or
her 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 life: several sales
representatives, a chain store executive, a baker, the president of a
trade association, two bankers, an insurance agent, an accountant, a
dentist, an architect, 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.

Now, however, he was forty, he had a growing family and needed
more money, so he tried selling 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
working 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 graduates, 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 in front of the others, he was
dizzy with fear. But 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 and of his
superiors. He presented his ideas to them, and soon he had been
advanced into the sales department. He had become a valued and
much liked member of his company. This night, in the Hotel
Pennsylvania, Patrick O'Haire stood in front of twenty-five hundred
people and told a gay, rollicking story of his achievements. Wave
after wave of laughter swept over the audience. Few