chapter7.3

Soon our Western Union messenger boy was corresponding with many of the most famous people in the nation: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longfellow, Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, Louisa May Alcott, General Sherman and Jefferson Davis.

Not only did he correspond with these distinguished people, but as soon as he got a vacation, he visited many of them as a welcome guest in their homes.

This experience imbued him with a confidence that was invaluable.

These men and women fired him with a vision and ambition that shaped his life.

And all this, let me repeat, was made possible solely by the application of the principles we are discussing here.

Isaac F. Marcosson, a journalist who interviewed hundreds of celebrities, declared that many people fail to make a favorable impression because they don’t listen attentively.

“They have been so much concerned with what they are going to say next that they do not keep their ears open.

Very important people have told me that they prefer good listeners to good talkers, but the ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait.”

And not only important personages crave a good listener, but ordinary folk do too.

As the Reader’s Digest once said: “Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience,”

During the darkest hours of the Civil War, Lincoln wrote to an old friend in Springfield, Illinois, asking him to come to Washington.

Lincoln said he had some problems he wanted to discuss with him.

The old neighbor called at the White House, and Lincoln talked to him for hours about the advisability of issuing a proclamation freeing the slaves.

Lincoln went over all the arguments for and against such a move, and then read letters and newspaper articles, some denouncing him for not freeing the slaves and others denouncing him for fear he was going to free them.

After talking for hours, Lincoln shook hands with his old neighbor, said good night, and sent him back to Illinois without even asking for his opinion.

Lincoln had done all the talking himself.

That seemed to clarify his mind.

“He seemed to feel easier after that talk,” the old friend said.

Lincoln hadn’t wanted advice.

He had wanted merely a friendly, sympathetic listener to whom he could unburden himself.

That’s what we all want when we are in trouble.

That is frequently all the irritated customer wants, and the dissatisfied employee or the hurt friend.

One of the great listeners of modern times was Sigmund Freud.

A man who met Freud described his manner of listening: “It struck me so forcibly that I shall never forget him.

He had qualities which I had never seen in any other man.

Never had I seen such concentrated attention.

There was none of that piercing ‘soul penetrating gaze’ business.

His eyes were mild and genial.

His voice was low and kind.

His gestures were few.

But the attention he gave me, his appreciation of what I said, even when I said it badly, was extraordinary, You’ve no idea what it meant to be listened to like that.”

If you want to know how to make people shun（避开） you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long.

Talk incessantly about yourself.

If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust（打碎） right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.

Do you know people like that?

I do, unfortunately; and the astonishing part of it is that some of them are prominent.

Bores, that is all they are—bores intoxicated with their own egos, drunk with a sense of their own importance.

People who talk only of themselves think only of themselves.

And “those people who think only of themselves,” Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, longtime president of Columbia University, said, “are hopelessly uneducated.

They are not educated,” said Dr. Butler, “no matter how instructed they may be.”

So if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener.

To be interesting, be interested.

Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering.

Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments.

Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems.

A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people.

A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa.

Think of that the next time you start a conversation.

Principle 4—Be a good listener.

Encourage others to talk about themselves.