shepherd's shoulders and the shepherd was petting him. By taking a little interest in the
shepherd and his dog, I made the shepherd happy. I made the dog happy and I made
myself happy."
Can you imagine a man who goes around shaking hands with porters and expressing
sympathy for the cooks in the hot kitchen-and telling people how much he admires their
dogs- can you imagine a man like that being sour and worried and needing the services
of a psychiatrist? You can't, can you? No, of course not. A Chinese proverb puts it this
way: "A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives you roses."
You didn't have to tell that to Billy Phelps of Yale. He knew it. He lived it.
If you are a man, skip this paragraph. It won't interest you. It tells how a worried,
unhappy girl got several men to propose to her. The girl who did that is a grandmother
now. A few years ago, I spent the night in her and her husband's home. I had been
giving a lecture in her town; and the next morning she drove me about fifty miles to
catch a train on the main line to New York Central. We got to talking about winning
friends, and she said: "Mr. Carnegie, I am going to tell you something that I have never
confessed to anyone before- not even to my husband." (By the way, this story isn't going
to be half so interesting as you probably imagine.) She told me that she had been
reared in a social-register family in Philadelphia. "The tragedy of my girlhood and young
womanhood," she said, "was our poverty. We could never entertain the way the other
girls in my social set entertained.
My clothes were never of the best quality. I outgrew them and they didn't fit and they
were often out of style. I was so humiliated, so ashamed, that I often cried myself to
sleep. Finally, in sheer desperation, I hit upon the idea of always asking my partner at
dinner-parties to tell me about his experiences, his ideas, and his plans for the future. I
didn't ask these questions because I was especially interested in the answers. I did it
solely to keep my partner from looking at my poor clothes. But a strange thing
happened: as I listened to these young men talk and learned more about them, I really
became interested in listening to what they had to say. I became so interested that I
myself sometimes forgot about my clothes. But the astounding thing to me was this:
since I was a good listener and encouraged the boys to talk about themselves, I gave
them happiness and I gradually became the most popular girl in our social group and
three of these men proposed marriage to me."
(There you are, girls: that is the way it is done.)
Some people who read this chapter are going to say: "All this talk about getting
interested in others is a lot of damn nonsense! Sheer religious pap! None of that stuff for
me! I am going to put money in my purse. I am going to grab all I can get-and grab it
now-and to hell with the other dumb clucks!"
Well, if that is your opinion, you are entitled to it; but if you are right, then all the great
philosophers and teachers since the beginning of recorded history-Jesus, Confucius,
Buddha, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Saint Francis-were all wrong. But since you may
sneer at the teachings of religious leaders, let's turn for advice to a couple of atheists.
First, let's take the late A. E. Housman, professor at Cambridge University, and one of
the most distinguished scholars of his generation. In 1936, he gave an address at
Cambridge University on "The Name and Nature of Poetry". It that address, he declared
that "the greatest truth ever uttered and the most profound moral discovery of all time
were those words of Jesus: 'He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life
for my sake shall find it.' "