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" It was used 3,900 timesin 500 telephone conversations. "I."
"I." "I." "I." When you see a group photograph that you are in, whose picture do you look for first?
If we merely try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many true, sincere friends. Friends, real friends, are not made that way.
Napoleon tried it, and in his last meeting with Josephine he said:
"Josephine, I have been as fortunate as any man ever was on this earth; and yet, at this hour, you are the only person in the world on whom I can rely." And historians doubt whether he could rely even on her.
Alfred Adler, the famous Viennese psychologist, wrote a book entitled What Life Should Mean to You. In that book he says: "It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others.
It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring."
You may read scores of erudite tomes on psychology without coming across a statement more significant for you and for me. Adler's statement is so rich with meaning that I am going to repeat it in italics:
It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difjculties in life and provides the greutest injury to others. It is from umong such individuals that all humun failures spring.
I once took a course in short-story writing at New York University, and during that course the editor of a leading magazine talked to our class. He said he could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk every day and after reading a few paragraphs he could feel whether or not the author liked people. "If the author doesn't like people," he said, "people won't like his or her stories."
This hard-boiled editor stopped twice in the course of his talk on fiction writing and apologized for preaching a sermon. "I am telling you," he said, "the same things your preacher would tell you, but remember, you have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful writer of stories."
If that is true of writing fiction, you can be sure it is true of dealing with people face-to-face.
I spent an evening in the dressing room of Howard Thurston the last time he appeared on Broadway -Thurston was the acknowledged dean of magicians. For forty years he had traveled all over the world, time and again, creating illusions, mystifying audiences, and making people gasp with astonishment. More than 60 million people had paid admission to his show, and he had made almost $2 million in profit.
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