by Megan Hustad
1. Won’t look far beyond his own self-interest.
2. Resents change and dislikes newness.
3. Forgets past and remembers inaccurately.
4. Won’t fight for things when he can find something to fight against.
5. Dares not differ from the crowd unless certain his difference will be recognized as superiority.
6. Except in high emotion, won’t exert himself beyond the lines of least resistance.
7. Won’t act, even in important matters, unless properly followed up.
Carnegie was less cynical, but not by much. “So the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.”
The translation for today’s underling would look something like this: The most direct route to reaching your professional goals is to help others meet their goals first. This becomes very clear when you realize that your boss also has a boss—and in the early stages, your job is fundamentally to help your boss look good in front of his or hers. You need to help your boss get promoted. As discussed, this can involve mind-numbing, tedious work, the purpose of which may not be clear, but which seems somehow designed to build trust and suss out the depths of your loyalties.
It also means ascertaining what those bosses’ needs are so you can effectively fill them. Here’s a short list, ripped from actual experiences, of what people gradually learned their superiors really wanted:
1. Not to feel short. (A 5’10“ woman employed by a 5’4” woman figured out she got along better with her boss when she took care to always be seated in her presence. Sometimes this meant crouching on the floor.)
2. Coffee. (One young analyst assisted a man who, walking out of his office, would pause midstride at the assistant’s cubicle and say, “Coffee”—that’s it, just “Coffee”—and walk on with the full expectation that a fresh mug would be on his desk upon his return.)
3. To not feel like he is disappointing anyone. (A young woman who thought she had a joking, gentle-ribbing rapport with her male boss eventually realized he and his long-term girlfriend had a rocky relationship that left him perpetually on the defensive. Those “friendly insults” on the job just wore him down.)
4. To have someone cute to look at. (See chapter 7.)
5. To have someone around who has no life outside the job. (Rare but true. One woman overheard her boss, an editor, express a wish for an assistant “who’s in the office until nine, then goes home and reads manuscripts.”)
6. To be extravagantly obnoxious without suffering any consequences. (According to a former production assistant at a family-friendly network sitcom, story meetings were filled with cracking wise. Not your garden-variety trash-talk. More like things you’d expect to hear in a prison yard, or unfriendly suggestions about your mother’s sexual health. “How about I do you against the wall? Like, right now?” was a particular Tuesday morning favorite.)
7. To watch someone suffer the way she suffered when she was young. (This person is often heard saying things like “You think things are bad here? Now? Well, let me tell you about…” This person tends to reserve the term “honey” for people she doesn’t actually like, and often has significant life regrets.)
All of which provide yet another reason to observe, restlessly, those around you. But bullying, insecure, paranoid ones aside, some ambitious bosses truly would like to pull their assistants up with them once they get promoted. It would, after all, be further affirmation of their power.
Carnegie’s life provides a perfect homespun illustration of the edict that gratification sometimes only comes when you start ministering to someone else’s needs. He floundered for years trying to assert himself before finally hitting his stride—by helping other people get their own professional footing.
His beginnings were nothing if not Norman Rockwell-style picturesque. Jimmy Stewart might have played him in the movies—a photo taken in the ’50s shows him smiling outdoors, hair mussed, wire-rimmed glasses, and wearing a hoodie. He remembered his childhood as one of constant, soul-withering anxiety. His family was poor, his pants always too short, and he was shy. Around age eleven, he lost part of his left index finger in a farm accident. But despite his overall awkwardness, he had a knack for oratory and ended up at Warrensburg State Teachers College. When he left school (he failed Latin and never graduated), he grossly disappointed his mother—who wanted him to enter the seminary—and became a traveling salesman. The first company he knocked on doors for was an outfit called International Correspondence Schools. In two years, he sold exactly one course packet. His next job, working for the Armour Company, involved trying to sell meat to South Dakota farmers. (How one convinces South Dakota farmers, who presumably have cattle, pigs, and chickens nearby and at their disposal, to purchase meat is anyone’s guess.) He dreamed of acting, and pulled together $500 in savings and went east. He’d been fantasizing about Boston, but a friend tipped him off that New York City might be a better bet if he wanted to get into theater. His only part of note—after enrolling at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts—was a minor turn as a doctor in the touring production of Polly of the Circus .20 Whether out of financial necessity or force of habit, he couldn’t leave salesmanship behind. On the road, after performances, he’d haul out his suitcase and try to sell neckties to fellow cast and crew.
When Carnegie finally decided to give up on acting—the year was 1912—he convinced the director of the YMCA on
125th Street in Manhattan to let him teach a night class on public speaking. (Then, as now, 125th Street was the center of Harlem, though the neighborhood was then white and heavily Jewish.) The YMCA wasn’t Carnegie’s first choice; Columbia University and New York University had already turned him down. To Carnegie’s ultimate benefit, instead of giving him the standard $2-per-session salary, the YMCA decided he should work on commission instead. Soon the Dale Carnegie Course in Public Speaking and Effective Human Relations was pulling in $30 a night, and he again went on the road, holding seminars at other Y locations and in conference halls across the country. How to Win Friends and Influence People began as a supplementary text.
“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic,” Carnegie wrote. “We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.” He often claimed there were more Americans suffering from mental illness than from all other diseases combined. Some authorities, Carnegie said, had been looking into it and had concluded that 50 percent of the time it was a matter of damaged brain cells—from syphilis, alcohol, or lesions. In the other half of mental cases, postmortem examinations revealed brain tissue as healthy as the next person’s. Carnegie once put the question to a doctor: “Why do these people go insane?” The doctor had no idea, but he did tell Carnegie a story about one of his patients, a woman who, in order to escape life’s sadness (she was childless, her husband hated her, she had no job or standing in the community), started imagining herself divorced and happily remarried into the English aristocracy. Every time the doctor called on her, she would breathlessly report—delighted—that she’d given birth the night before. She had plainly lost her mind.
Maybe this wasn’t so tragic, Carnegie suggested. For people whose dreams had been dashed on the sharp rocks of reality, insanity might provide welcome relief. This is the second plank of his self-absorption standard: that people would rather go insane, or behave insanely, than admit that they weren’t important. A desire for a feeling of importance is what drove Abraham Lincoln to pick some law books off the floor and start studying. But it was also why, Carnegie claimed, John Dillinger took up bank robbing and cop-killing.21
An office worker today might take this to mean the following: Not everyone, especially not your boss, is looking to be impressed with you. Sometimes, he might want to feel his importance by being able to look down on you. Same goes for colleagues occupying the same lowly station as yourself: they’d prefer not to feel threatened b
y your brilliance. So those underlings who are very careful to cut an impressive figure, who make sure they’re never taken advantage of, who demand they get full credit, or who insist that every professional accomplishment gets a gold star—these people don’t do well in hierarchical organizations. Those who fail to see someone else’s need for importance often forget to let the other kids have a turn. It’s a critical mistake. “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,” Carnegie wrote. (The “behind your back” part is key, it seems to me—resentment generated by this kind of behavior is rarely expressed to your face.)
Those who ignore another’s need to feel important also stumble into what we might call the Dostoyevsky problem, the best illustration of which comes from the original BBC production of The Office. It’s the day of the seventh-annual quiz night. The office manager David Brent is excited, and gets his staff to throw out some typical practice questions, only to get stuck on the name “Dostoyevsky.” Ricky, the new intern, pipes up, “What
D was a Russian dissident who wrote the novel Crime and Punishment?“ Brent slinks back to his office. Some time later, he re-emerges: brent: We were talking earlier about Dostoyevsky, weren’t we? ricky: Oh yeah?
brent: Yeah, the usual. Theodore Michaelovich Dostoyevsky, born 1821, died 1881. Just interesting that stuff about him being exiled in Siberia for four years, wasn’t it?
ricky: Oh. I don’t know much about that. Didn’t cover it really…
brent: All it is is he was a member of a secret political party and they put him in a Siberian labour camp for four years. So… y’know… ricky: Oh, hang on… I read about it in, er… He wrote House of the Dead and I think he put all his… yeah, all his memoirs in that, didn’t he? brent: (quiet as a mouse) Yep.
Brent slinks off again, humiliated. Later, at the copier: brent: Talking earlier about Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead?
ricky: Yeah, I think we mentioned it, yeah… brent:… which he wrote in 1862.1 was just gonna say that, of course, that wasn’t his first major work. ricky: Wasn’t it?
brent: No, his first major work was Notes from the Underground, which he wrote when he got back to St. Petersburg in 1859. ricky: Really? brent: Yeah, definitely.
Brent is about to leave, having at last displayed his comprehensive knowledge of Dostoyevsky, but Ricky continues.
ricky: Well, of course, my favourite is The Raw Youth.
It’s basically where Dostoyevsky, he goes on to explain how science can’t really find answers for the deeper human need… brent: Yeah.
Now it’s clear who the boob is in this exchange, but that’s not the point. The point is that while it’s tempting to slake your thirst for competition, sometimes it’s to your advantage to let someone carry on being dumb. This is especially true if your opponent in this battle of wits is your boss, but it’s also true for casual conversations with colleagues. Here again the insecure person who feels his genius is getting short shrift is in real danger, because he has a hard time not flaunting his knowledge. He’ll then tie in an obscure reference that’s only marginally related to the conversation’s ostensible subject. “Or,” he’ll say, laughing, “I could just swap in Wole Soyinka’s resume for mine. That would be funny.” Now, the standards of happy-fun conversation require you to pick up the joke and keep going with it, but if you’re unable to do so—because you have no idea who Wole Soyinka is—you’re not likely to leave the conversation marveling at this person’s intelligence.22 You may even wonder if this person really likes you or not, and if he does like you, why he wants so much for you to feel stupid. For much the same reason, Carnegie told his speech class students that it was never wise for a speaker to make his audience feel inferior in an attempt to impress them. (“If he thinks well of himself and his knowledge, let him not make an offensive show of his self-congratulation.” Or, as Tyra Banks recently told America’s Next Top Model candidates, “If you’re a bitch, hide it.”)
Even when working for a boss who knows more about Dostoyevsky than you do (which, trust me, is ideal), it’s a good idea to perform above average but excel only sporadically. If you consistently overperform, your boss may feel you’re snapping at his heels. And if you consistently go above and beyond the call of duty, you’ll eventually be expected to keep up that pace. Slacking from time to time keeps expectations at a more reasonable level. It also relieves people from having to admire you daily, which gets old pretty fast.
(One more note on importance-seekers behaving insanely: In 1921, when Carnegie was not yet famous, he married a woman named Lolita Baucaire, who claimed to be a long-lost countess from Alsace, the oft-contested French-German border region. For the first couple years of their marriage, Dale and Lolita lived in Europe, settling not far from the palace of Versailles, while Dale worked on a novel. Every day on his walk he’d pass by the palace gardens, and for a former Missouri farm boy, this was all very exotic and gratifying. Lolita, however, was not so impressed with her husband’s intractable Americanness. They were divorced by 1931 —after “ten years and forty days,” Carnegie would later sigh. Lolita had evidently believed Carnegie could be transformed into French aristocracy by sheer osmosis. And his desire for importance led him to believe that some weird woman claiming to be a long-lost countess from Alsace actually was one.)
The third and final principle of the self-absorption standard is that content matters, but not if it fails to get across. This may sound obvious but it’s easily forgotten by people who are worried mainly about themselves, and how they’re doing according to some internal standard, and so they forget they have an “audience” that matters just as much, if not more. This is how the New School University professor Harry A. Overstreet—one of Carnegie’s intellectual heroes—put it in his own book, Influencing Human Behavior:
It is a bit of sentimental nonsense to say that it makes no difference at all if a writer convinces not even a single soul of his pertinence and value, so be it only that he “expresses” himself. We have a way of being over-generous with so-called misunderstood geniuses. True, this is a barbarian world; and the fine soul has its hard innings. But the chances are that a writer who can convince no single person of the value of what he writes, probably has nothing of value to write.
The concept is touched on briefly in Carnegie’s first book. In 1915, when he was still Dale Carnagey, he coauthored The Art of Public Speaking, a textbook, which runs 512 pages long and is liberally peppered with quotes from Rudyard Kipling and Voltaire.23 It is heavily theoretical, pompous and abstruse, and more than a little sanctimonious—it’s little wonder why this wasn’t one of Carnegie’s biggest sellers. A typical line from the preface: “Training in public speaking is not a matter of externals—primarily; it is not a matter of imitation—fundamentally; it is not a matter of conformity to standards—at all. Public speaking is public utterance, public issuance, of the man himself; therefore the first thing both in time and in importance is that the man should be and think and feel things that are worthy of being given forth.” Which sounds, to me, like he’s recommending spiritual cleansing before stepping up to the microphone—but it’s hard to tell.
The Art of Public Speaking was quite clear, however, on the notion that speakers have tremendous obligations to their audience. They were obligated to prepare presentations well, and to not stammer or stumble over their thoughts. (Ironic, then, that this should be his least articulate book.) This was not for your sake, so everyone could marvel at your excellence, but for their sake. If you were ill-prepared, or found yourself standing at a podium with nothing much to say, “you ought to be ashamed to steal the time of your audience.” If your audience didn’t understand your point, the problem was you. A polished delivery also simply provided the audience more pleasure. A monotonous, tone-deaf delivery wasn’t just wearisome or maddening, Carnegie and coauthor scolded, like hearing the same key on a piano struck over and over. It was a sin.
The thing you had to keep in mind, they continued, was that no audience would simply assume a speaker was competent and had a good heart. The speaker’s competence and goodwill had to be demonstrated—demonstrated very clearly—so as to leave no doubt. You had to convince people that what you were saying, doing, or writing was of value, and if you couldn’t, well, consider that maybe it wasn’t. You got zero points for being “misunderstood.”
For today’s underling, this is the takeaway: You can’t just show up and quietly do your job. Your competence and dedication have to be performed in some way. You have to look as busy as you actually are, because if you aren’t reaching people, it’s the same—to your audience of colleagues—as if you spent your day making a grocery list. Looking busy is inherently difficult in many office jobs, as doing something and doing bup-kis look very much the same (in both instances you’re probably seated in front of a computer monitor). If your boss regularly gives new assignments and regularly asks for updates, then your visibility is less of a problem. But if she doesn’t, and there are long stretches when you’re unsupervised, then what you’re doing all day has to be expressed in some deliberate fashion—and unfortunately this generally demands an entirely different skill set than your regular job requires.
It requires more planning, in other words. The sociologist Erving Goffman would later call this “dramatic realization” of a job, and when you press people for their methods, you’ll find that many seemingly impromptu acts turn out to have been mulled over, weighed and considered, sometimes even practiced at home.24 But often looking busy is just a matter of exploiting the fact that the communal printer time-stamps every job and so if you print a document at 8:17 p.m. on a Wednesday night and leave it there until 10:00 a.m. the next day, someone—no telling who—will know you stayed late. An even more common manifestation of this is sending an e-mail at 9:01 p.m. saying,
