Why Q-Tips Make Me Sad

March 11, Week 2, Day 11

     Only three days of my two-week challenge left after today, and it’s time to kick it into overdrive.  The chapters are getting shorter, and the Principles are coming fast and furious.  I don’t know if it’s the result of my new “can do” attitude, yesterday’s conciliatory statement, or the natural build of Dale Carnegie’s narrative, but I feel like he’s really starting to deliver the goods.

Today, I actually felt like I was reading something that, although quite practical and commonsensical, I felt like I hadn’t heard before.

     Chapter 5, titled “The Secret of Socrates”, lands the importance of getting the other person to say “Yes” as many times as possible as early in the conversation as possible.  Begin the conversation by asking questions that you know you’ll get an affirmative response to (“Don’t you wish a good haircut wasn’t so danged expensive?”), and keep pumping them for “yes’s” throughout whatever it is your pitching.  He likens this to the Socratic method, which he describes as asking questions that your opponent has to agree with until they start agreeing with things that they may not have in the first place.  While my brief but spectacular love affair with philosophy in college leads me to suspect that this is a pretty incomplete understanding of Socrates’ brilliance, I’m willing to take this bit of advice and run with it.

Chapter 6 and 7, which hit on the techniques of letting the other person do most of the talking while making them think the idea you are proposing was his/hers originally, is on a slightly different track, but consistent with the “customer’s always right” tone of the book.  I keep thinking about how I could do this smoothly in an interview without appearing shifty and unreliable, or just plain stupid (“What do you think my greatest skills are?  Why do you want me to work here?”)  As I understand it, Carnegie advocates that the best way to get what you want is to find out what the other person wants, and convince them that you are the one to give it to them while actually giving them what you want, which has also become what they want because they can’t remember what they wanted in the first place.  Or something like that. 

I was seriously in danger of getting bogged down in another morass of questionable morality, when a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson swooped in to save the day.  Carnegie was attempting to illustrate how important it is to people to have ownership over their own ideas, and receive ample acknowledgement for their successes.  Humans are limited, in Carnegie’s view, in their ability to truly appreciate or invest in anything that they perceive as not having originated with themselves- a perspective less flattering than the mirror in a department store changing room.  Emerson, however, gives it considerably more poetic gravitas when he says that “in every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”  Ah, a big sad breath of fresh air!  I feel this way about the Q-Tip and Therapeutic Toe Alignment Slippers.   I could have invented them.  But I didn’t.

In the end I think I will be able to say that it’s the hallowed voices of great men that Carnegie recruits in service of his message that will make this book a true resource for me.  This was only a suspicion until an oasis of compassion appeared in the desert of Chapter 7, courtesy of Lao Tse.  Despite what I know is the late Dale Carnegie’s commitment to the betterment of mankind, all I can hear in his message most days is “Suck up, and suck up hard.  Suck up until your mouth feels like sandpaper and your cheeks turn inside out.  Then suck up some more.  And mean it.”  Yet in the words of Lao Tse, I get less Machiavelli and more Mother Nature, in an elegant way that sums up the whole book (I think the Tao Te Ching is actually shorter than How To Win Friends and Influence People, but maybe it’s a cultural thing.)  So without further ado…

“The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them.  Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams.  So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to before them, he putteth himself behind them.   Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury.”

I am definitely going to putteth this one in my toolbox.