◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Take a Sincere Interest I was a Missouri farm boy named Carnagey — I changed the spelling later — and I started out teaching public speaking at the YMCA in New York in 1912, because no one else would hire me to teach anything. I wrote a book in 1936 called How to Win Friends and Influence People. It has sold tens of millions of copies. It is on every American businessman's shelf. I am not a philosopher. I am not a psychologist. I am a man who spent fifty years watching ordinary human beings — salesmen and housewives and schoolchildren and the president of the United States — and writing down what worked between them and what did not. I want to give you, plainly, the simplest finding of my whole life. People are starving for appreciation. Not flattery — flattery is the cheap counterfeit and they can always tell. Real appreciation. The deepest hunger any of us carries, from the cradle to the grave, is to feel that we matter to another human being. I built my whole teaching on that one observation: that if you actually take a sincere interest in another person — really see them, really listen, really make them feel important — they will respond, because you have fed a hunger they had no idea you would notice. I also learned, watching the people who failed, the things that have never worked. I put them in a list at the front of my book, in three short don'ts. Don't criticize. Don't condemn. Don't complain. Because in fifty years I never once saw another human being changed for the better by being mocked at, sneered at, or condemned. You can criticize a person into resentment. You cannot criticize him into anything else. Now I have been watching your country, from wherever the dead watch from. And I want to say what I see, gently, because I never had the heart to say things otherwise. You have elected, repeatedly, a man who is the photographic negative of every single thing I ever taught. He never apologizes — and one of the central rules I gave was that when you are wrong, you admit it quickly and emphatically. He cannot see anything from another person's point of view — and the great rule of persuasion is to try honestly to see things from the other person's side. He criticizes, he condemns, and he complains, every hour of every day, on every channel available to him — and those were the three things I begged Americans not to do. He treats no other human being on earth as if they mattered, except as a mirror — and the deepest hunger of a human being is to feel he matters. Your country has a copy of my book on every shelf, and it has elected my photographic opposite, and it has begun, slowly, to talk like him. I am not saying this to score a point. The misery is too large. The misery is built on a misunderstanding about what strength is. The man who must mock another to feel tall is not tall. The man who can never admit a mistake cannot govern anything, not even his own house. The man whose whole performance is criticize, condemn, and complain is teaching the country to become smaller — and it is working. Millions of you are walking around in a smaller version of yourself than you used to be. I will not let my last word be diagnosis. Here is the remedy, and it is the remedy I spent my life giving, and it is more powerful than people think — because it is the thing the cruelty most fears. Go out today and do the three things. Take a sincere interest in one person you are not required to. Smile at someone — meaning it. Listen to someone for ten minutes without preparing your rebuttal. And refuse to criticize, refuse to condemn, refuse to complain. Not because it is high-minded. Because it does not work, and because it makes the one doing it the smallest version of himself. Make someone feel important. It is the medicine for exactly this season.