by Megan Hustad
Which perhaps explains why Post’s rhetoric became so heated. It was really very simple, you see. Very, very simple. Curiosity about others is what made you appear to be an interesting person yourself, what saved you from obnoxiousness, and what allowed you to appear passionate and engaged without having to express any passion outright—always a sticky proposition at the dinner table.
It’s a subtle process that begins with asking deeper and timelier questions. The following guidelines might help, whether you’re nouveau riche or just nouveau:
Don’t skip a question because you’re pretty sure you already understand what’s going on. Occasionally, you get an answer that’s not what you’d assumed it would be. In those cases, you’ve benefited by being reminded (privately) how much people’s readings of situations can differ. For example, you might assume someone is angry because of X, but it turns out it’s Y and also Z that has them riled. This tells you some things about the angry person that are probably useful to know. But even when political calculations are the furthest thing from your mind, answers to questions you nearly didn’t ask in the first place are often the most rewarding. There’s no law at work here—just the fact that people can be pleasantly surprising.
Do pick your moments. The newcomer who runs to the boss every time the fax machine isn’t working is quickly going to exhaust his boss’s patience. To a certain extent, you want to consider the organizational status of the person you’re posing the question to.
(As will be discussed later on, most higher-ups don’t even know where the fax machine is, let alone how it works—but executive assistants and mailroom guys generally do.) On the other hand, you should never assume someone low on the totem pole isn’t qualified to answer substantive queries. Many outside callers, for instance, annoy both company VIPs and their staff by insisting, per Donald Trump, that “they only deal with the boss,” when in fact the boss employs many people capable of fielding any question related to his business—indeed, who are employed for just that purpose.
Last note on this front: Try to distinguish between an invitation to “sit in on” and an invitation to actively participate.
Do fashion some sort of all-purpose three-question primer. How did you
come to work here? How long have you been here? What are you working on right now? Not asked all in one breath, but following the general flow of conversation. The answers will invariably provide a sense of the lay of the land, of who has seniority in the organization, and the amount of pride someone takes in his or her job. This last proves very significant the longer you work somewhere, and the more entwined you get in the politics and emotional rhythms of the office.
Do have one signature question you can resort to whenever you can’t think of anything to say. It shouldn’t be a test of knowledge, tied to current events, or of the “what’s your favorite color?” variety. Ideally it’s a question that can be used on people you’ve known for five minutes as well as those you’ve been running around with for five years: What are you reading these days? Any travel plans? Anything was better, Post specified, than feeble stabs at seeming exciting, like dropping Au revoir or other foreign phrases into your conversation.
“What was your first job?” works well too. In her 1970 crack at the self-improvement shelf, How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything, Barbara Walters relates how she once had a particularly difficult time getting Aristotle Onas-sis to open up to her. They were at lunch, he was yammering about high-seas finance, and she found herself wondering how this short man with a mouth full of gold fillings could be considered a world-class charmer. She found him uncooperative and intimidating. When she finally found an opening in the conversation, she decided to plow ahead with this: “Tell me, Mr. Onas-sis, you’re so successful—not just in shipping and airlines, but in other industries too—I wonder, how did you begin? What was your very first job?” He opened up like a flower. (His first job was washing dishes, it turns out.)
Do be aware of regional differences. In some parts of the country, a long, leisurely introduction to a professional conversation or phone call is expected. In others—New York and Los Angeles come to mind—any small talk beyond a certain point is seen as a gross imposition. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to tell when you’re starting to wear down someone’s patience. Hearing “uh-huh, uh-huh” while you’re pausing midsentence is a clear sign you need to wind up and get to the point. The rude party in these exchanges is not the one in a hurry, because to take your time is to assume the person you called is not busy—and that’s an insult in her book. In the South and Midwest, be prepared to stick with pleasantries for six, seven minutes.
Don’t talk to a cripple about the joys of dancing. The American Ches-terfield counseled, when starting a conversation, “never to speak of ropes, in the house of one who has been hung.” Nor, Post said, should you veer into the advantages of “bloodline” to a self-made man. It’s reasonable enough to expect adults to be able to stand hurt feelings, but the point is to be aware (and to realize that the person who might suffer the most from someone’s hurt feelings—if you’re New Money—is you).
Don’t ask people you don’t know well to opine. “How about those Sox?” is not a useful question because it asks people to express an opinion apropos of nothing. People can freeze up when you ask them to make judgments on the spot—even when fudging an answer wouldn’t be all that difficult for them.
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Etiquette sparked a trend, and many copycat titles were published throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Most of them lacked Post’s way with words—and nearly all abandoned her overarching goal of paying more attention to other people’s feelings than one’s own, at least as long as one was in public. The editors of 1929’s Vogue’s Book of Etiquette tried—particularly in their section on the office—but missed the mark, presuming as they did that anyone who’d be reading their book was a limp snob: “Don’t ever be too grand to disentangle difficulties or misunderstandings for anyone who, either at the telephone or in person, appeals for help… Behave politely. Speak distinctly. Hear discreetly. Dress demurely. Be indispensable, and see some fun in work.” In their Guide to Effective Living, a grab bag of lifestyle advice that came out in 1957, husband and wife team N. H. and S. K. Mager delivered their rules for conversation in another list: Do be pleasant. Do ask people with expertise in a particular area for advice. Don’t exaggerate. Don’t ask people if they have any children (you’d hear about it if they did). Do read newspapers (so you’ll be able to talk about something other than yourself). Try carrying on a conversation without making personal references. Do be kind. Don’t be a crusader. Don’t complain, “especially around males.” Do tell jokes about yourself. “Don’t admit you are self-conscious, have an inferiority complex, or are sensitive.” Pause. Vary the tempo of your speech.
All decent advice, but you can imagine Post stifling a yawn. Vogue’s halfhearted “fun in work” aside, there’s a certain joyless, carpet-gazing quality to these prescriptions. Conversation was not about close, checked observance of the words coming out of your mouth, Post felt, but intense interest in what people had to say for themselves. A few years after the success of Etiquette, she joined the pantheon of authors who get to write pretty much anything they please and get it published. Her son Edwin likened the book to both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone With the Windy the first because it shaped popular opinion, the second because its publication changed the life of the author. And for all her gentility, Post was not above cashing in. She was sought for countless commercial endorsements, and once pocketed $3,000 for scribbling a note to the effect that ginger ale was a refreshing drink to serve at parties—she didn’t even have to specify the brand.
As the success-literature canon expanded, more and more pages would be devoted to the connection between a real democratic curiosity in people—whoever they might be, whatever they might do—and realizing one’s own earning potential. Indeed it was Post’s doggedness in fact gathering that made h
er career. Edwin estimated that about seven-eighths of Etiquette was not drawn from his mother’s personal recollections of life amongst the silver-spoon set but from patiently mining other sources. What qualified Post as an authority on etiquette was not blue blood but her “inveterate thoroughness in assembling all the available information on any subject.” She’d simply been extraordinarily adept at asking questions, and better than most at recording the answers.
4
On Near Universal
Self-Absorption
* * *
How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Recognizing What Navel-Gazers People Are
The truth is that we can only sell
what people are willing to buy.
—LEE IACOCCA, former car manufacturer
and Dale Carnegie devotee
BESTSELLER LISTS have a self-generating property. At some point people start wanting to read a book because they get the uneasy feeling that everyone else already has. This phenomenon is partly responsible for the astounding success of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. First published in November 1936, How to Win Friends reached the top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list by the end of the year. By April 1937, it had gone through thirty printings. Some twenty million copies later, it has become one of twentieth-century America’s most recognizable literary exports. Years before John Lennon ventured a similar comparison, Carnegie’s publisher declared that sales of How to Win Friends were second only to those of the Bible.*
+ Dale is no relation to Andrew Carnegie. At least, not that anyone’s aware of. Dale was born “Dale Carnagey” in rural Missouri, and though his father, James, claimed some dim, distant connection to Andrew, Dale himself never did. He did,
Carnegie has been blamed for all kinds of social frustrations since. The fact that some grinning stranger greets you with a “Hi, how ya doing today!” every time you stumble into The Gap. That waitresses draw smiley faces and write “THANKS!” on your dinner check. The expectation that, in a well-functioning world, we would all just get along. My home state has a concept it likes to call “Minnesota Nice,” which as far as I can tell means you never know whether someone is being honest with you, or simply trying to avoid saying anything that might be controversial. The first Dale Carnegie parody—it was called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and was released within months of the original—blamed him for the “I’m-Going-to-Make-You-Like-Me Movement,” and for the fact that everyone was now expected to suffer through wheezy, overly polite chitchat.
The few highbrow critics that have bothered to study How to Win Friends put Carnegie at the forefront of hiring policies that place a premium on personality—never mind actual merit. In the late 1980s, even Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (and not someone you’d expect to turn his nose up at anyone else’s self-improvement efforts), strongly hinted that Carnegie’s book marked a sad shift in American thinking on success. Covey suggested that where once upward mobility ethics were about “fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule,” we now had a nation of ever-ebullient, smarmy, amateur PR people running around.
The book appeared at an unusual cultural moment, and this is worth keeping in mind. Emily Post’s readers could worry about charm and conversation because they had handfuls of cash—the only thing they lacked was social status. Carnegie’s readers had neither. How to Win Friends was written when the country was still wriggling out from under the Depression, when nobody could believe that hard work would ensure financial security.
however, change the spelling of his last name upon moving to New York City and going into business. Any confusion could only be to his benefit, he reasoned.
When the economy’s in full swing, it’s easy to talk about happiness and the universal storehouse of goodwill, as Orison Swett Marden did, or to celebrate young genius a la Scott and Zelda. Free markets always give advantages to those blessed with big brains because they can use their smarts, if they want, to finagle a larger piece of the pie for themselves. No one’s getting less than his or her share, and we can all breathe easy, knowing that with just a little extra effort, we too can put on cocktail attire and traipse champagne-drunk through fountains. But when the economy tanks, as it did so spectacularly after the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the national money spigot is turned off, one of the first casualties is admiration for precociousness. It quickly becomes a nagging reminder that talent is not—and never will be—distributed evenly across the population.
This is a sobering idea. It is far more sobering if you aren’t one of the gifted ones, because now you’ve got a much more daunting problem than your cleverer neighbor does. Unless, unless, unless… the key to success is not a function of distinguishing yourself. The strangely uplifting message of How to Win Friends and Influence People is that people are endlessly fascinated by themselves—by you, and what you can or can’t do, not so much. Carnegie’s outlook is similar to his success-literature predecessors, but he states the implications a little more baldly. “When we are not engaged in thinking about some definite problem,” Carnegie wrote, “we usually spend about ninety-five percent of our time thinking about ourselves.” The Big Secret of Dealing with People was that everyone wanted to feel important, and that whether you reached them or not had everything to do with whether you confirmed that feeling of importance.
This sounds like Emily Post: Success is wrapped up in being considerate—or at the very least aware—of other people’s feelings. But Carnegie believed attentiveness to others’ needs wouldn’t just help get you accepted, it could actually put money in your pockets. He claimed that all the trouble salesmen were having could not solely be blamed on hard economic times. Some of them, he said, were simply too focused on what they wanted out of every transaction—in other words, big commissions. These salesmen needed to shift their focus to helping customers solve problems, and if they did that, they never had to worry about where their next check was coming from. The same was true for butchers, bakers, auto mechanics, and elder statesmen—How to Win Friends is a riot of democracy. Carnegie wanted you to get better service at your local diner using the same methods Abraham Lincoln used to break into politics. He mentioned past presidents of Harvard in the same breath as part-time piano teachers from Tulsa. When he invoked Ralph Waldo Emerson, it was not to wrestle with transcendentalism, but to pass on Emerson’s surefire method for getting a stubborn cow to go where you wanted it to go.
This we’re-all-in-it-together impulse can make the Carnegie philosophy somewhat difficult to implement on the job. He doesn’t take pecking orders into account, and he seems defiantly, willfully ignorant of class. We learn from him that Theodore Roosevelt’s valet considered the former roughrider a real hero, and we learn why—Teddy was a nice boss, and remembered all his servants’ names, and the names of their spouses, too. But how the president’s position in life was fundamentally different from the man paid to wait on him hand and foot didn’t seem to interest Carnegie. He was not really concerned with who had power in the exchange and who didn’t.
I started to wonder how one might translate the advice in How to Win Friends and Influence People for those at the bottom of the ladder. In other words, how do you influence people on the job if you can’t assume that people are even thinking about you? “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,” Carnegie cautioned his readers. “Think of that next time you start a conversation.” If navel-gazing is the name of the game, what does that mean for someone who’s dependent on the navel-gazer for promotion? It takes some maneuvering of Carnegie’s original principles, but I found at least three big repercussions bubbling up from beneath the surface. In all instances it demands an outlook that seems, at first glance, totally wrong.
The first principle of the 95 perc
ent self-absorption standard is that people only listen to what you have to say if you take the time to talk about what’s on their minds first. Carnegie put it rather brusquely: “Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is.” Humans weren’t even unique in this regard. (The way Emerson got that calf into the barn was by putting his finger in its mouth and letting it suck.) You could get someone to do something, but ultimately they would only do it for their own reasons—not yours.
Carnegie wasn’t alone in this line of thinking—the idea that people were fundamentally apathetic and self-serving was already changing advertising. In a 1929 book called How to Turn People into Gold (unfortunate timing, considering that Wall Street crash), the adman Kenneth M. Goode claimed that the old way of advertising was useless now that audiences were more sophisticated. Ads used to tell you why a product was good—the quality of the craftsmanship, or the purity of the ingredients. The first shift in technique came when ads started plugging a product’s effectiveness—how quickly you’d be finished with the floors using this new soap. On the horizon now was copy that sold the effect of the effect—with all the time you saved washing floors, you’d have more time to do your hair. This was necessary, Goode said, because John Q. Public couldn’t be expected to care about the merits of your product. He devised the following list to sum up the psychological profile of the American man-in-the-street as he saw it. Such a man, he said:
