The Big Secret Of Dealing With People

There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way when it comes to dealing with people. And that is by making the other person want to do it. Remember, there is no other way. Of course, you can make someone want to give you his watch by sticking a revolver in his ribs. YOU can make your employees give you cooperation - until your back is turned - by threatening to fire them. You can make a child do what you want it to do by a whip or a threat. But these crude methods of dealing with people have sharply undesirable repercussions. The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.

Dealing With People for Dummies

Sigmund Freud said that everything you and I do springs from two motives: the sex urge and the desire to be great.

John Dewey, one of America's most profound philosophers, phrased it a bit differently. Dr. Dewey said that the deepest urge in human nature is "the desire to be important." Remember that phrase: "the desire to be important." It is significant. What do you want? Not many things, but the few that you do wish for, you crave with an insistence that will not be denied.

Some of the things most people want include:

1. Health and the preservation of life.

2. Food.

3. Sleep.

4. Money and the things money will buy.

5. Life in the hereafter.

6. Sexual gratification.

7. The well-being of our children.

8. A feeling of importance.

DEALING WITH PEOPLE IS PARAMOUNT

Almost all these wants are usually gratified-all except one. But there is one longing - almost as deep, almost as imperious, as the desire for food or sleep - which is seldom gratified. It is what Freud calls "the desire to be great." It is what Dewey calls the "desire to be important." Anthony Robbins calls it "significance"

Lincoln once began a letter saying: "Everybody likes a compliment."

William James said: "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated." He didn't speak, mind you, of the "wish" or the "desire" or the "longing" to be appreciated. He said the "craving" to be appreciated. Here is a gnawing and unfaltering human hunger, and the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger will hold people in the palm of his or her hand and "even the undertaker will be sorry when he dies."

The desire for a feeling of importance is one of the chief distinguishing differences between mankind and the animals. To illustrate: When I was a farm boy out in Missouri, my father bred fine Duroc-Jersey hogs and . pedigreed white - faced cattle. We used to exhibit our hogs and white-faced cattle at the country fairs and livestock shows throughout the Middle West. We won first prizes by the score. My father pinned his blue ribbons on a sheet of white muslin,and when friends or visitors came to the house, he would get out the long sheet of muslin. He would hold one end and I would hold the other while he exhibited the blue ribbons.The hogs didn't care about the ribbons they had won. But Father did. These prizes gave him a feeling of importance.If our ancestors hadn't had this flaming urge for a feeling of importance, civilization would have been impossible. Without it, we should have been just about like animals. It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Abraham Lincoln.

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