Give a Dog a Good Name

Carnegie's twenty-eighth lesson is captured in an old English saying: give a dog a good name. The principle is that if you want to improve a person in a certain respect, act as though that particular trait were already one of their outstanding characteristics. Give them a fine reputation to live up to, and they will make prodigious efforts rather than see you disillusioned.

He told of Mrs. Ruth Hopkins, a fourth-grade teacher who faced the worst "bad boy" in the school. On the first day she told Tommy openly, "Tommy, I understand you are a natural leader. I'm going to depend on you to help me make this the best class in the fourth grade this year." By treating him as a leader and reinforcing the role for the first few days, the boy who had been a holy terror became one of her finest helpers. He could not bear to let down the reputation she had given him.

The same approach, Carnegie argued, works on adults. Henry Clay Risner, a French manager during the war, transformed an idle worker by telling him the work he did was so good that the company would be lost without men like him. The praise, attached to a quality the man could grow into, produced the very behavior it described.

Carnegie summarized the psychology bluntly: "The average person can be led readily if you have his or her respect and if you show that you respect that person for some kind of ability." People conform, often unconsciously, to the label we attach to them — for good or ill. Tell someone repeatedly that they are careless and they live down to it; tell them they have a reputation for thoroughness and they guard it.

This is not manipulation in the cynical sense, because the trait you name must be one the person could plausibly embody. You are not deceiving them; you are calling out a better version of themselves and inviting them to step into it. The child told they are honest thinks twice before lying. The employee praised for reliability arrives early. The reputation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To apply the principle, choose the single quality you most want to see and refer to it as if it were already true and characteristic of the person. Be specific about the standard and generous in assuming they meet it. Then watch how often people would rather rise to your good opinion than shatter it. Few of us want to be the one who proves a sincere believer wrong about us.