Do This and You’ll Be Welcome Anywhere

The way to make friends and win people, Carnegie taught, is to become genuinely interested in other people. You can win more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. The principle launches Part Two — the six ways to make people like you — and it is the foundation the other five rest on.

His most memorable teacher of the lesson was the dog. The dog, Carnegie noted, makes its living by giving you nothing but love. A dog will run to the gate to greet you, quivering with genuine joy at the sight of you, and so we love dogs. The dog had learned, long before any of us, that you can make more friends by being interested in other people than by trying to make them interested in you.

He cited the Viennese psychologist Alfred Adler: "It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring." Indifference, not malice, is the root of most relational failure.

Theodore Roosevelt's servants adored him because he was genuinely interested in them — he knew their names, asked about their families, remembered the quail one of them had described. Before any visitor came, Roosevelt would sit up the night before reading about the subject he knew interested that guest, because he understood that the royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things they treasure most.

The interest must be sincere, Carnegie warned, and it must pay off for both parties — it is not a trick. The friendliness of a salesperson who is interested only in your wallet is transparent and repellent. But a genuine, asking, listening interest in another person's work, hobbies, children, and opinions is felt instantly and returned in kind.

The application is concrete: greet people with animation and enthusiasm; remember and use their names; ask about what matters to them and then listen; do the small thing that requires thought and time and unselfishness — the birthday remembered, the article clipped and mailed, the follow-up question that shows you were paying attention. If you want others to like you, if you want to develop real friendships, if you want to help others at the same time as you help yourself, become genuinely interested in other people.