“He raved on and I listened for nearlv three hours,”
the “troubleshooter” said as he related his experiences
before one of the author’s classes. “Then I went back
and listened some more. I interviewed him four times,
and before the fourth visit was over I had become a
charter member of an organization he was starting. He
called it the ‘Telephone Subscribers’ Protective Association.’
I am still a member of this organization, and, so
far as I know, I’m the only member in the world today
besides Mr. —-.
“I listened and sympathized with him on every point
that he made during these interviews. He had never had
a telephone representative talk with him that way before,
and he became almost friendly. The point on which
I went to see him was not even mentioned on the first
visit, nor was it mentioned on the second or third, but
upon the fourth interview, I closed the case completely,
he paid all his bills in full, and for the first time in the
history of his difficulties with the telephone company he
voluntarily withdrew his complaints from the Public
Service Commission.”
Doubtless Mr. —– had considered himself a holy
crusader, defending the public rights against callous exploitation.
But in reality, what he had really wanted was
a feeling of importance. He got this feeling of importance
at first by kicking and complaining. But as soon as
he got his feeling of importance from a representative of
the company, his imagined grievances vanished into
thin air.
One morning years ago, an angry customer stormed
into the office of Julian F. Detmer, founder of the Detmer
Woolen Company, which later became the world’s
largest distributor of woolens to the tailoring trade.
“This man owed us a small sum of money,” Mr. Detmer
explained to me. “The customer denied it, but we
knew he was wrong. So our credit department had insisted
that he pay. After getting a number of letters from
our credit department, he packed his grip, made a trip to
Chicago, and hurried into my office to inform me not
only that he was not going to pay that bill, but that he
was never going to buy another dollar’s worth of goods
from the Detmer Woolen Company.
“I listened patiently to all he had to say. I was tempted
to interrupt, but I realized that would be bad policy, So
I let him talk himself out. When he finally simmered
down and got in a receptive mood, I said quietly: ‘I want
to thank vou for coming to Chicago to tell me about this.
You have done me a great favor, for if our credit department
has annoyed you, it may annoy other good customers,
and that would be just too bad. Believe me, I am far
more eager to hear this than you are to tell it.’
“That was the last thing in the world he expected me
to say. I think he was a trifle disappointed, because he
had come to Chicago to tell me a thing or two, but here
I was thanking him instead of scrapping with him. I assured
him we would wipe the charge off the books and
forget it, because he was a very careful man with only
one account to look after, while our clerks had to look
after thousands. Therefore, he was less likely to be
wrong than we were.
“I told him that I understood exactly how he felt and
that, if I were in his shoes, I should undoubtedly feel
precisely as he did. Since he wasn’t going to buy from
us anymore, I recommended some other woolen houses.
“In the past, we had usually lunched together when
he came to Chicago, so I invited him to have lunch with
me this day. He accepted reluctantly, but when we came
back to the office he placed a larger order than ever
before. He returned home in a softened mood and, wanting
to be just as fair with us as we had been with him,
looked over his bills, found one that had been mislaid,
and sent us a check with his apologies.
“Later, when his wife presented him with a baby boy,
he gave his son the middle name of Detmer, and he
remained a friend and customer of the house until his
death twenty-two years afterwards.”
Years ago, a poor Dutch immigrant boy washed the
windows of a bakery shop after school to help support
his family. His people were so poor that in addition he
used to go out in the street with a basket every day and
collect stray bits of coal that had fallen in the gutter
where the coal wagons had delivered fuel. That boy,
Edward Bok, never got more than six years of schooling
in his life; yet eventually he made himself one of the
most successful magazine editors in the history of American
journalism. How did he do it? That is a long story,
but how he got his start can be told briefly. He got his
start by using the principles advocated in this chapter.
He left school when he was thirteen and became an
office boy for Western Union, but he didn’t for one moment
give up the idea of an education. Instead, he
started to educate himself, He saved his carfares and
went without lunch until he had enough money to buy
an encyclopedia of American biography – and then he
did an unheard-of thing. He read the lives of famous
people and wrote them asking for additional information
about their childhoods. He was a good listener. He
asked famous people to tell him more about themselves.
He wrote General James A. Garfield, who was then running
for President, and asked if it was true that he was
once a tow boy on a canal; and Garfield replied. He
wrote General Grant asking about a certain battle, and
Grant drew a map for him and invited this fourteen-year
old boy to dinner and spent the evening talking to him.
Soon our Western Union messenger boy was corresponding
with many of the most famous people in the
nation: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Longfellow, Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, Louisa May Alcott,
General Sherman and Jefferson Davis. Not only did he
correspond with these distinguished people, but as soon
as he got a vacation, he visited many of them as a welcome
guest in their homes. This experience imbued him
with a confidence that was invaluable. These men and
women fired him with a vision and ambition that shaped
his life. And all this, let me repeat, was made possible
solely by the application of the principles we are discussing
here.
Isaac F. Marcosson, a journalist who interviewed
hundreds of celebrities, declared that many people fail
to make a favorable impression because they don’t listen
attentively. “They have been so much concerned with
what they are going to say next that they do not keep
their ears open. . . . Very important people have told me
that they prefer good listeners to good talkers, but the
ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good
trait .”
And not only important personages crave a good listener,
but ordinary folk do too. As the Reader’s Digest
once said: “Many persons call a doctor when all they
want is an audience,”
During the darkest hours of the Civil War, Lincoln
wrote to an old friend in Springfield, Illinois, asking him
to come to Washington. Lincoln said he had some problems
he wanted to discuss with him. The old neighbor
called at the White House, and Lincoln talked to him for
hours about the advisability of issuing a proclamation
freeing the slaves. Lincoln went over all the arguments
for and against such a move, and then read letters and
newspaper articles, some denouncing him for not
freeing the slaves and others denouncing him for fear he
was going to free them. After talking for hours, Lincoln
shook hands with his old neighbor, said good night, and
sent him back to Illinois without even asking for his
opinion. Lincoln had done all the talking himself. That
seemed to clarify his mind. “He seemed to feel easier
after that talk,” the old friend said. Lincoln hadn’t
wanted advice, He had wanted merely a friendly, sympathetic
listener to whom he could unburden himself.
That’s what we all want when we are in trouble. That is
frequently all the irritated customer wants, and the dissatisfied
employee or the hurt friend.
One of the great listeners of modern times was Sigmund
Freud. A man who met Freud described his manner
of listening: “It struck me so forcibly that I shall
never forget him. He had qualities which I had never
seen in any other man. Never had I seen such concentrated
attention. There was none of that piercing ‘soul
penetrating gaze’ business. His eyes were mild and genial.
His voice was low and kind. His gestures were few.
But the attention he gave me, his appreciation of what I
said, even when I said it badly, was extraordinary,
You’ve no idea what it meant to be listened to like that.”
If you want to know how to make people shun you and
laugh at you behind your back and even despise you,
here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk
incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the
other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish:
bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
Do you know people like that? I do, unfortunately;
and the astonishing part of it is that some of them are
prominent.
Bores, that is all they are – bores intoxicated with their
own egos, drunk with a sense of their own importance.
People who talk only of themselves think only of
themselves. And “those people who think only of themselves,”
Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, longtime president
of Columbia University, said, “are hopelessly uneducated.
They are not educated,” said Dr. Butler, “no matter
how instructed they may be.”
So if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an
attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask
questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage
them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.
Remember that the people you are talking to are a
hundred times more interested in themselves and their
wants and problems than they are in you and your problems.
A person’s toothache means more to that person
than a famine in China which kills a million people. A
boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes
in Africa. Think of that the next time you start a
conversation.
PRINCIPLE 4
Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk
about themselves.
5
HOW TO INTEREST PEOPLE
Everyone who was ever a guest of Theodore Roosevelt
was astonished at the range and diversity of his knowledge.
Whether his visitor was a cowboy or a Rough
Rider, a New York politician or a diplomat, Roosevelt
knew what to say. And how was it done? The answer
was simple. Whenever Roosevelt expected a visitor, he
sat up late the night before, reading up on the subject in
which he knew his guest was particularly interested.
For Roosevelt knew, as all leaders know, that the royal
road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or
she treasures most.
The genial William Lyon Phelps, essayist and professor
of literature at Yale, learned this lesson early in life.
“When I was eight years old and was spending a
weekend visiting my Aunt Libby Linsley at her home in
Stratford on the Housatonic,” he wrote in his essay on
Human Nature, “a middle-aged man called one evening,
and after a polite skirmish with my aunt, he devoted his
attention to me. At that time, I happened to be excited
about boats, and the visitor discussed the subject in a
way that seemed to me particularly interesting. After he
left, I spoke of him with enthusiasm. What a man! My
aunt informed me he was a New York lawyer, that he
cared nothing whatever about boats – that he took not
the slightest interest in the subject. ‘But why then did
he talk all the time about boats?’
” ‘Because he is a gentleman. He saw you were interested
in boats, and he talked about the things he knew
would interest and please you. He made himself agreeable.’ ”
And William Lyon Phelps added: “I never forgot my
aunt’s remark.”
As I write this chapter, I have before me a letter from
Edward L. Chalif, who was active in Boy Scout work.
“One day I found I needed a favor,” wrote Mr. Chalif.
“A big Scout jamboree was coming off in Europe, and I
wanted the president of one of the largest corporations
in America to pay the expenses of one of my boys for the
trip.