the tongue-lashing that this proud and precise pilot
would unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didn’t
scold the mechanic; he didn’t even criticize him. Instead,
he put his big arm around the man’s shoulder and
said, “To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this
again, I want you to service my F-51 tomorrow.”
Often parents are tempted to criticize their children.
You would expect me to say “don’t.” But I will not, I am
merely going to say, “Before you criticize them, read
one of the classics of American journalism, ‘Father Forgets.’ ”
It originally appeared as an editorial in the People’s
Home Journnl. We are reprinting it here with the
author’s permission, as condensed in the Reader’s Digest:
“Father Forgets” is one of those little pieces which-
dashed of in a moment of sincere feeling – strikes an
echoing chord in so many readers as to become a perenial
reprint favorite. Since its first appearance, “Father
Forgets” has been reproduced, writes the author,
W, Livingston Larned, “in hundreds of magazines and
house organs, and in newspapers the country over. It has
been reprinted almost as extensively in many foreign
languages. I have given personal permission to thousands
who wished to read it from school, church, and
lecture platforms. It has been ‘on the air’ on countless
occasions and programs. Oddly enough, college periodicals
have used it, and high-school magazines. Sometimes
a little piece seems mysteriously to ‘click.’ This
one certainly did.”
FATHER FORGETS
W. Livingston Larned
Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little
paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily
wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room
alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper
in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me.
Guiltily I came to your bedside.
There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross
to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because
you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took
you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily
when you threw some of your things on the floor.
At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You
gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table.
You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you
started off to play and I made for my train, you turned
and waved a hand and called, “Goodbye, Daddy!” and
I frowned, and said in reply, “Hold your shoulders
back!”
Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I
came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing
marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated
you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to
the house. Stockings were expensive – and if you had to
buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son,
from a father!
Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library,
how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in
your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at
the interruption, you hesitated at the door. “What is it you
want?” I snapped.
You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous
plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed
me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that
God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect
could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the
stairs.
Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped
from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me.
What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault,
of reprimanding – this was my reward to you for being a
boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected
too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of
my own years.
And there was so much that was good and fine and true in
your character. The little heart of you was as big as the
dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your
spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night.
Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bed-side
in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed!
It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand
these things if I told them to you during your waking
hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum
with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you
laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I
will keep saying as if it were a ritual: “He is nothing but a
boy – a little boy!”
I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see
you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that
you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s
arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much,
too much.
Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand
them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do.
That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism;
and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. “To
know all is to forgive all.”
As Dr. Johnson said: “God himself, sir, does not propose
to judge man until the end of his days.”
Why should you and I?
PRINCIPLE 1
Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
2
THE BIG SECRET OF DEALING WITH
PEOPLE
There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody
to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes,
just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it.
Remember, there is no other way.
Of course, you can make someone want to give you his
watch by sticking a revolver in his ribs. YOU can make
your employees give you cooperation – until your back
is turned – by threatening to fire them. You can make a
child do what you want it to do by a whip or a threat. But
these crude methods have sharply undesirable repercussions.
The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving
you what you want.
What do you want?
Sigmund Freud said that everything you and I do
springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to
be great.
John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers,
phrased it a bit differently. Dr. Dewey said that
the deepest urge in human nature is “the desire to be
important.” Remember that phrase: “the desire to be
important.” It is significant. You are going to hear a lot
about it in this book.
What do you want? Not many things, but the few
that you do wish, you crave with an insistence
that will not be denied. Some of the things most people
want include:
1. Health and the preservation of life.
2. Food.
3. Sleep.
4. Money and the things money will buy.
5. Life in the hereafter.
6. Sexual gratification.
7. The well-being of our children.
8. A feeling of importance.
Almost all these wants are usually gratified-all except
one. But there is one longing – almost as deep, almost
as imperious, as the desire for food or sleep – which
is seldom gratified. It is what Freud calls “the
desire to be great.” It is what Dewey calls the “desire to
be important.”
Lincoln once began a letter saying: “Everybody likes
a compliment.” William James said: “The deepest principle
in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
He didn’t speak, mind you, of the “wish” or the “desire”
or the “longing” to be appreciated. He said the “craving”
to be appreciated.
Here is a gnawing and unfaltering human hunger, and
the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger
will hold people in the palm of his or her hand and
“even the undertaker will be sorry when he dies.”
The desire for a feeling of importance is one of the
chief distinguishing differences between mankind and
the animals. To illustrate: When I was a farm boy out in
Missouri, my father bred fine Duroc-Jersey hogs and .
pedigreed white – faced cattle. We used to exhibit our
hogs and white-faced cattle at the country fairs and live-stock
shows throughout the Middle West. We won first
prizes by the score. My father pinned his blue ribbons
on a sheet of white muslin, and when friends or visitors
came to the house, he would get out the long sheet of
muslin. He would hold one end and I would hold the
other while he exhibited the blue ribbons.
The hogs didn’t care about the ribbons they had won.
But Father did. These prizes gave him a feeling of importance.
If our ancestors hadn’t had this flaming urge for a feeling
of importance, civilization would have been impossible.
Without it, we should have been just about like
animals.
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led
an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study
some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of
household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents.
You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name
was Lincoln.
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that inspired
Dickens to write his immortal novels. This desire
inspired Sir Christoper Wren to design his symphonies
in stone. This desire made Rockefeller amass millions
that he never spent! And this same desire made the richest
family in your town build a house far too large for its
requirements.
This desire makes you want to wear the latest styles,
drive the latest cars, and talk about your brilliant children.
It is this desire that lures many boys and girls into
joining gangs and engaging in criminal activities. The
average young criminal, according to E. P. Mulrooney,
onetime police commissioner of New York, is filled with
ego, and his first request after arrest is for those lurid
newspapers that make him out a hero. The disagreeable
prospect of serving time seems remote so long as he can
gloat over his likeness sharing space with pictures of
sports figures, movie and TV stars and politicians.
If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance,
I’ll tell you what you are. That determines your character.
That is the most significant thing about you. For
example, John D. Rockefeller got his feeling of importance
by giving money to erect a modern hospital in
Peking, China, to care for millions of poor people whom
he had never seen and never would see. Dillinger, on
the other hand, got his feeling of importance by being a
bandit, a bank robber and killer. When the FBI agents
were hunting him, he dashed into a farmhouse up in
Minnesota and said, “I’m Dillinger!” He was proud of
the fact that he was Public Enemy Number One. “I’m
not going to hurt you, but I’m Dillinger!” he said.
Yes, the one significant difference between Dillinger
and Rockefeller is how they got their feeling of importance.
History sparkles with amusing examples of famous
people struggling for a feeling of importance. Even
George Washington wanted to be called “His Mightiness,
the President of the United States”; and Columbus