“Make the other person feel important, and do it sincerely.” ~Dale Carnegie
About 20 years ago, I read Dale Carnegie’s classic book, How to Win Friends & Influence People. I loved the book and passed it along to my wife, Marcie. She read a bit of it and returned it to me saying, “This is all common sense. I don’t need to read this.”
Marcie is naturally nice, no doubt one of the things that attracted me to her when we met 30 years ago. And indeed, Carnegie’s strategies, which largely revolve around being nice, were “normal, everyday behavior” for her.
I’ve always prided myself on being a nice person, but I learned a tremendous amount from Carnegie’s 1936 classic.
The first Carnegie suggestion that I recall applying is what I thought of as “Let others be right.” Carnegie tells a story of a dinner party he attended. The man sitting next to Carnegie told a humorous story, which included a quotation the gentleman attributed to the Bible. Carnegie knew that the quotation was from Shakespeare and said so.
They argued the point until a third party, a friend of Carnegie’s, was asked to settle the argument. The third party kicked Carnegie under the table and then agreed with the other man. After dinner, Carnegie’s friend explained that while Carnegie was right, making the other gentleman look bad served no good purpose.
I knew that I could apply that good advice. I had a habit of getting hung up on being precise, correcting other people because I didn’t like to let wrong information hang out there.
Carnegie’s story helped me to realize, to paraphrase the title of another favorite book, that I had a bad habit of “sweating the small stuff” regarding precise information that was not important—a habit I then set out to change.
Being precise is big stuff when you are building something—as the saying goes, “measure twice, cut once.” And it’s important to try to be precise if you are giving someone driving directions (make a left vs. make a right).
But precision is not important in so many other situations, and correcting friends, your spouse, your kids, or anyone else, is often not necessary, and something that’s much nicer to hold back from doing.
The first person with whom I had frequent opportunities to practice my new habit was my dad. He and I had started a company together about five years before I read Carnegie’s book. It had become a pet peeve of mine that he was never precise about dates. (more…)
