Dale Carnegie
Dale Breckenridge Carnegie (originally Carnagey until 1922 and possibly somewhat later) (November 24, 1888 – November 1, 1955) was an American writer and lecturer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking and interpersonal skills. Born in poverty on a farm in Missouri, he was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936, a massive bestseller that remains popular today. He also wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, titled Lincoln the Unknown, as well as several other books.
Carnegie was an early proponent of what is now called responsibility assumption, although this only appears minutely in his written work. One of the core ideas in his books is that it is possible to change other people's behavior by changing one's reaction to them.
Born in 1888 in Maryville, Missouri, Carnegie was a poor farmer's boy, the second son of James William Carnagey and wife Amanda Elizabeth Harbison (b. Missouri, February 1858 – living 1910). In his teens, though still having to get up at 4 a.m. every day to milk his parents' cows, he managed to get educated at the State Teacher's College in Warrensburg. His first job after college was selling correspondence courses to ranchers; then he moved on to selling bacon, soap and lard for Armour & Company. He was successful to the point of making his sales territory of South Omaha, Nebraska the national leader for the firm.
After saving $500, Carnegie quit sales in 1911 in order to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a Chautauqua lecturer. He ended up instead attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, but found little success as an actor, though it is written that he played the role of Dr. Hartley in a road show of Polly of the Circus.[citation needed] When the production ended, he returned to New York, unemployed, nearly broke, and living at the YMCA on 125th Street. It was there that he got the idea to teach public speaking, and he persuaded the "Y" manager to allow him to instruct a class in return for 80% of the net proceeds. In his first session, he had run out of material; improvising, he suggested that students speak about "something that made them angry", and discovered that the technique made speakers unafraid to address a public audience. From this 1912 debut, the Dale Carnegie Course evolved. Carnegie had tapped into the average American's desire to have more self-confidence, and by 1914, he was earning $500 - the equivalent of nearly $10,000 now - every week.
Perhaps one of Carnegie’s most successful marketing moves was to change the spelling of his last name from “Carnegey” to Carnegie, at a time when Andrew Carnegie (unrelated) was a widely revered and recognized name. By 1916, Dale was able to rent Carnegie Hall itself for a lecture to a packed house. Carnegie's first collection of his writings was Public Speaking: a Practical Course for Business Men (1926), later entitled Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (1932). His crowning achievement, however, was when Simon & Schuster published How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book was a bestseller from its debut in 1937, in its 17th printing within a few months. By the time of Carnegie's death, the book had sold five million copies in 31 languages, and there had been 450,000 graduates of his Dale Carnegie Institute. It has been stated in the book that he had critiqued over 150,000 speeches in his participation of the adult education movement of the time. During World War I he served in the U.S. Army.
His first marriage ended in divorce in 1931. On November 5, 1944, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he married Dorothy Price Vanderpool, who also had been divorced. Vanderpool had two daughters; Rosemary, from her first marriage, and Donna Dale from their marriage together.
Carnegie died at Forest Hills, New York, and was buried in the Belton, Cass County, Missouri cemetery. The official biography fro
“Live an active life among people who are doing worthwhile things, keep eyes and ears and mind and heart open to absorb truth, and then tell of the things you know, as if you know them. The world will listen, for the world loves nothing so much as real life.”
“There is only one excuse for a speaker's asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.”
“Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”
“Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.”
“Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that "everything changes except the law of change". He said: "You cannot step in the same river twice." The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?”
“Winning friends begins with friendliness.”
“Names are the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
“Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice.”
“confusion is the main cause of worry”
“Monotony reveals our limitations.”
“We are gods in the chrysalis.”
“Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.”
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
“Happiness does not depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude”
“arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.”
“I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.”
“The chronic kicker, even the most violent critic, will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener— a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of his system.”
“The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.”
“There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.”
“All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory” was the motto of the King’s Guard in ancient Greece.”
“By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected.”
“You can't win an argument. You can't because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.”
“Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: "Wouldn't you like to have that?"Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?”
“The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another's keeping.”
“Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.”
“John Wanamaker, founder of the stores that bear his name, once confessed: "I learned thirty years ago that it is foolish to scold. I have enough trouble overcoming my own limitations without fretting over the fact that God has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence.”
“If you want to conquer fear, don't sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
“if you want to keep happiness , you have to share it !”
“If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.”
“The successful man will profit from his mistakes andtry again in a different way.”
“Always avoid the acute angle.”
“You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.”
“Life is bigger than processes and overflows and dwarfs them.”
“Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn't depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.”
“when the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives-and we cannot prevent them-let us, too, accept the inevitable. And then get busy and pick up the pieces.”
“When we are harassed and reach the limit of our own strength, many of us then turn in desperation to God-"There are no atheists in foxholes." But why wait till we are desperate? Why not renew our strength every day? Why wait even until Sunday? For years I have had the habit of dropping into empty churches on weekday afternoons.When I feel that I am too rushed and hurried to spare a few minutes to think about spiritual things, I say to myself: "Wait a minute, Dale Carnegie, wait a minute. Why all the feverish hurry and rush, little man? You need to pause and acquire a little perspective." At such times, I frequently drop into the first church that I find open.Although I am a Protestant, I frequently, on weekday afternoons, drop into St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and remind myself that I'll be dead in another thirty years, but that the great spiritual truths that all churches teach are eternal. I close my eyes and pray. I find that doing this calms my nerves, rests my body, clarifies my perspective, and helps me revalue my values. May I recommend this practice to you?”
“One of the most distinguished psychiatrists living, Dr. Carl Jung, says in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul (*):"During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life-that is to say, over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
“Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass...if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass...slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own...structure.”
“When I asked him -Mr.Henry Ford- if he ever worried, he replied: "No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end.So what is there to worry about?”
“A good deed, "said the prophet Mohammed, "is one that brings a smile of joy to the face of another."Why will doing a good deed every day produce such astounding efforts on the doer?Because trying to please others will cause us to stop thinking of ourselves: the verything that produces worry and fear and melancholia.”
“The words "Think and Thank" are inscribed in many of the Cromwellian churches ofEngland. These words ought to be inscribed in our hearts, too: "Think and Thank". Thinkof all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties.”
“That is the way Emerson said it. But here is the way a poet -the late Douglas Mallochsaidit:If you can't be a pine on the top of the hill.Be a scrub in the valley-but beThe best little scrub by the side of the rill;Be a bush, if you can't be a tree.If you can't be a bush, be a bit of the grass.If you can't be a muskie, then just be a bass-But the liveliest bass in the lake!We can't all be captains, we've got to be crew.There's something for all of us here.There's big work to do and there's lesser to doAnd the task we must do is the near.If you can't be a highway, then just be a trail,If you can't be the sun, be a star;It isn't by the size that you win or you fail-Be the best of whatever you are!”
“If You Have A Lemon, Make A LemonadeThat is what a great educator does. But the fool does the exact opposite. If he findsthat life has handed him a lemon, he gives up and says: "I'm beaten. It is fate. I haven'tgot a chance." Then he proceeds to rail against the world and indulge in an orgy of selfpity.But when the wise man is handed a lemon, he says: "What lesson can I learn fromthis misfortune? How can I improve my situation? How can I turn this lemon into alemonade?”
“Let's never try to get even with our enemies, because if we do we will hurtourselves far more than we hurt them. Let's do as General Eisenhower does: let's neverwaste a minute thinking about people we don't like.”
“Two men looked out from prison bars,One saw the mud, the other saw stars.”
“When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: "Try tobear lightly what needs must be." Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness andresignation that touched the hem of divinity.”
“You are going to survive. And good things are going to start to happen again. And one day you are going to look back and this will not even be such a bad thing”
“Thomas Edison said in allseriousness: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labour ofthinking"-if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts thatbolster up what we already think-and ignore all the others! We want only the facts thatjustify our acts-the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justifyour preconceived prejudices!As Andre Maurois put it: "Everything that is in agreement with our personal desiresseems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage."Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems?Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, ifwe went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot ofpeople in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that twoplus two equals five-or maybe five hundred!”
“If you want to be enthusiastic,act enthusiastic.”
“Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, ‘I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.’ That is why dogs make such a hit. They are so glad to see us that they almost jump out of their skins. So, naturally, we are glad to see them.”