How To Win Friends And Influence People | Page 9

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 worked on Wall Street, and for twenty-five years he had been
living in Clifton, New Jersey. During that time, he had taken no
active part in community affairs and knew perhaps five hundred
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 he would have
taken it out in grousing to his neighbors. But instead, he put on his
hat that night, walked into the town meeting, and blew off 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 had become a public figure among the forty thousand 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 the Carnegie 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 more effectively, he received
more free publicity for his company and its products than he had
been able to get previously with 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 Manhattan and invite them to lunch with him. But as a
result of the prestige he had acquired by his talks, these same
people telephoned him and invited him to lunch and apologized to
him for encroaching on his time.

The ability to speak is a shortcut to distinction. It puts a person in
the limelight, raises one head and shoulders above the crowd. And
the person who can speak acceptably is usually given credit for an
ability out of all proportion to what he or she really possesses.

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

Dale Carnegie's own career, filled with sharp contrasts, was a striking
example of what a person can accomplish when obsessed with an
original idea and afire with enthusiasm.

Born on a Missouri farm ten miles from a railway, he never saw a
streetcar until he was twelve years old; yet by the time he was forty-
six, he was 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 was to the South Pole.

This Missouri lad who had once picked strawberries and cut
cockleburs for five cents an hour became the highly paid trainer of
the executives of large corporations in the art of self-expression.

This erstwhile cowboy who had once punched cattle and branded
calves and ridden fences out in western South Dakota later went to
London to put on shows under the patronage