If You Don’t Do This, You Are Headed for Trouble

As a boy in Scotland he caught a mother rabbit with a litter, then got the neighborhood children to gather clover and dandelions to feed them by promising to name a baby rabbit after each child who helped. The trick worked, and Carnegie never forgot it. Decades later, wanting to sell steel rails to the Pennsylvania Railroad whose president was J. Edgar Thomson, he named his new steel mill the Edgar Thomson Steel Works — and the railroad bought its rails there.

Jim Farley, the political organizer who helped make Franklin Roosevelt president, built his career on a single skill: he could call some fifty thousand people by their first names. Farley discovered early in life that the average person is more interested in their own name than in all the other names on earth put together. Remember that name and call it easily, and you have paid a subtle and very effective compliment. Forget it or misspell it, and you place yourself at a sharp disadvantage.

The reason most people don't remember names, Carnegie observed, is simply that they don't take the time and energy necessary to concentrate, repeat, and fix the names indelibly in their minds. They excuse themselves on the grounds that they are too busy. But they are surely no busier than Franklin Roosevelt, who took the time to remember and recall even the names of mechanics he met only briefly.

Napoleon III, emperor of France, boasted that despite his royal duties he could remember the name of every person he met. His technique was simple: if he didn't hear the name distinctly, he said, "So sorry, I didn't get the name clearly." If it was unusual, he asked how it was spelled. During the conversation he repeated the name several times and tried to associate it with the person's features and expression. If the person was important, he wrote the name down later, looked at it, fixed it in his mind, and then tore up the paper.

The practical discipline is to treat a name as a thing worth effort. When introduced, hear it clearly, ask for the spelling if needed, repeat it during the conversation, and associate it with something memorable about the person. From the waiter to the executive, names work magic; using a person's name is a way of making them feel unique and important among all the others they encounter. Few things will warm a relationship faster, and few neglects cool one faster than getting a name wrong.