How to Win Friends and Influence People
get the other person’s point of view and see things
    from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”

    That is so good, I want to repeat it: "If there is any one
    secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other
    person's point of view and see things from that person’s
    angle as well as from your own.”
     
    That is so simple, so obvious, that anyone ought to see
    the truth of it at a glance; yet 90 percent of the people
    on this earth ignore it 90 percent of the time.

    An example? Look at the letters that come across your
    desk tomorrow morning, and you will find that most of
    them violate this important canon of common sense.
    Take this one, a letter written by the head of the radio
    department of an advertising agency with offices scattered
    across the continent. This letter was sent to the
    managers of local radio stations throughout the country.
    (I have set down, in brackets, my reactions to each paragraph.)

    Mr. John Blank,
    Blankville,
    Indiana

    Dear Mr. Blank:
    The ------ company desires to retain its position in advertising
    agency leadership in the radio field.
     
    [Who cares what your company desires? I am worried
    about my own problems. The bank is foreclosing the
    mortage on my house, the bugs are destroying the hollyhocks,
    the stock market tumbled yesterday. I missed
    the eight-fifteen this morning, I wasn’t invited to the
    Jones’s dance last night, the doctor tells me I have high
    blood pressure and neuritis and dandruff. And then what
    happens? I come down to the office this morning worried,
    open my mail and here is some little whippersnapper
    off in New York yapping about what his company
    wants. Bah! If he only realized what sort of impression
    his letter makes, he would get out of the advertising
    business and start manufacturing sheep dip.]
     
    This agency’s national advertising accounts were the
    bulwark of the network. Our subsequent clearances of
    station time have kept us at the top of agencies year after
    year.
     
    [You are big and rich and right at the top, are you? So
    what? I don’t give two whoops in Hades if you are as big
    as General Motors and General Electric and the General
    Staff of the U.S. Army all combined. If you had as much
    sense as a half-witted hummingbird, you would realize
    that I am interested in how big I am - not how big you
    are. All this talk about your enormous success makes me
    feel small and unimportant.]

    We desire to service our accounts with the last word on
    radio station information .
     
    [You desire! You desire. You unmitigated ass. I’m not
    interested in what you desire or what the President of
    the United States desires. Let me tell you once and for
    all that I am interested in what I desire - and you
    haven’t said a word about that yet in this absurd letter of
    yours .]

    Will you, therefore, put the ---------- company on your
     preferred list for weekly station information - every single
    detail that will be useful to an agency in intelligently booking
    time.
     
    [“Preferred list.” You have your nerve! You make me
    feel insignificant by your big talk about your company
    - nd then you ask me to put you on a “preferred” list,
    and you don’t even say “please” when you ask it.]

    A prompt acknowledgment of this letter, giving us your
    latest “doings,” will be mutually helpful.
     
    [You fool! You mail me a cheap form letter - a letter
    scattered far and wide like the autumn leaves - and you
    have the gall to ask me, when I am worried about the
    mortgage and the hollyhocks and my blood pressure, to
    sit down and dictate a personal note acknowledging your
    form letter - and you ask me to do it “promptly.” What
    do you mean, “promptly”.? Don’t you know I am just as
    busy as you are - or, at least, I like to think I am. And
    while we are on the subject, who gave you the lordly
    right to order me around? . . . You say it will be “mutually
    helpful.” At last, at last, you have begun to see

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