pleaded for the title “Admiral of the Ocean and Viceroy
of India.” Catherine the Great refused to open letters
that were not addressed to “Her Imperial Majesty”; and
Mrs. Lincoln, in the White House, turned upon Mrs.
Grant like a tigress and shouted, “How dare you be
seated in my presence until I invite you!”
Our millionaires helped finance Admiral Byrd’s expedition
to the Antarctic in 1928 with the understanding
that ranges of icy mountains would be named after them;
and Victor Hugo aspired to have nothing less than the
city of Paris renamed in his honor. Even Shakespeare,
mightiest of the mighty, tried to add luster to his name
by procuring a coat of arms for his family.
People sometimes became invalids in order to win
sympathy and attention, and get a feeling of importance.
For example, take Mrs. McKinley. She got a feeling of
importance by forcing her husband, the President of the
United States, to neglect important affairs of state while
he reclined on the bed beside her for hours at a time, his
arm about her, soothing her to sleep. She fed her gnawing
desire for attention by insisting that he remain with
her while she was having her teeth fixed, and once created
a stormy scene when he had to leave her alone with
the dentist while he kept an appointment with John
Hay, his secretary of state.
The writer Mary Roberts Rinehart once told me of a
bright, vigorous young woman who became an invalid
in order to get a feeling of importance. “One day,” said
Mrs. Rinehart, “this woman had been obliged to face
something, her age perhaps. The lonely years were
stretching ahead and there was little left for her to anticipate.
“She took to her bed; and for ten years her old mother
traveled to the third floor and back, carrying trays, nursing
her. Then one day the old mother, weary with service,
lay down and died. For some weeks, the invalid
languished; then she got up, put on her clothing, and
resumed living again.”
Some authorities declare that people may actually go
insane in order to find, in the dreamland of insanity, the
feeling of importance that has been denied them in the
harsh world of reality. There are more patients suffering
from mental diseases in the United States than from all
other diseases combined.
What is the cause of insanity?
Nobody can answer such a sweeping question, but we
know that certain diseases, such as syphilis, break down
and destroy the brain cells and result in insanity. In fact,
about one-half of all mental diseases can be attributed to
such physical causes as brain lesions, alcohol, toxins and
injuries. But the other half – and this is the appalling
part of the story – the other half of the people who go
insane apparently have nothing organically wrong with
their brain cells. In post-mortem examinations, when
their brain tissues are studied under the highest-powered
microscopes, these tissues are found to be apparently
just as healthy as yours and mine.
Why do these people go insane?
I put that question to the head physician of one of our
most important psychiatric hospitals. This doctor, who
has received the highest honors and the most coveted
awards for his knowledge of this subject, told me frankly
that he didn’t know why people went insane. Nobody
knows for sure But he did say that many people who go
insane find in insanity a feeling of importance that they
were unable to achieve in the world of reality. Then he
told me this story:
“I have a patient right now whose marriage proved to
be a tragedy. She wanted love, sexual gratification, children
and social prestige, but life blasted all her hopes.
Her husband didn’t love her. He refused even to eat
with her and forced her to serve his meals in his room
upstairs. She had no children, no social standing. She
went insane; and, in her imagination, she divorced her
husband and resumed her maiden name. She now believes
she has married into English aristocracy, and she
insists on being called Lady Smith.
“And as for children, she imagines now that she has
had a new child every night. Each time I call on her she
says: ‘Doctor, I had a baby last night.’ ”
Life once wrecked all her dream ships on the sharp
rocks of reality; but in the sunny, fantasy isles of insanity,
all her barkentines race into port with canvas billowing
and winds singing through the masts.
” Tragic? Oh, I don’t know. Her physician said to me:
If I could stretch out my hand and restore her sanity, I
wouldn’t do it. She’s much happier as she is.”
If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance
that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what
miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest
appreciation this side of insanity.
One of the first people in American business to be
paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there
was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a
week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab, He
had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the
first president of the newly formed United States Steel
Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight
years old. (Schwab later left U.S. Steel to take over the
then-troubled Bethlehem Steel Company, and he rebuilt
it into one of the most profitable companies in America.)
Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a
year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to
Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius?
No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of
steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told
me himself that he had many men working for him who
knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.
Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because
of his ability to deal with people. I asked him how
he did it. Here is his secret set down in his own words
– words that ought to be cast in eternal bronze and hung
in every home and school, every shop and office in the
land – words that children ought to memorize instead of
wasting their time memorizing the conjugation of Latin
verbs or the amount of the annual rainfall in Brazil – words
that will all but transform your life and mine if we
will only live them:
“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my
people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and
the way to develop the best that is in a person is by
appreciation and encouragement.
“There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a
person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize any-
one. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I
am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything,
I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my
praise. ”
That is what Schwab did. But what do average people
do? The exact opposite. If they don’t like a thing, they
bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say
nothing. As the old couplet says: “Once I did bad and
that I heard ever/Twice I did good, but that I heard
never.”
“In my wide association in life, meeting with many
and great people in various parts of the world,” Schwab
declared, “I have yet to find the person, however great
or exalted his station, who did not do better work and
put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he
would ever do under a spirit of criticism.”
That he said, frankly, was one of the outstanding reasons
for the phenomenal success of Andrew Carnegie.
Carnegie praised his associates publicly as well as pr-vately.
Carnegie wanted to praise his assistants even on his
tombstone. He wrote an epitaph for himself which read:
“Here lies one who knew how to get around him men
who were cleverer than himself:”
Sincere appreciation was one of the secrets of the first
John D. Rockefeller’s success in handling men. For example,
when one of his partners, Edward T. Bedford,
lost a million dollars for the firm by a bad buy in South
America, John D. might have criticized; but he knew
Bedford had done his best – and the incident was
closed. So Rockefeller found something to praise; he
congratulated Bedford because he had been able to save
60 percent of the money he had invested. “That’s splendid,”
said Rockefeller. “We don’t always do as well as
that upstairs.”