Remember that a person’s name is to that
person the sweetest and most important
sound in any language.
4
AN EASY WAY TO
BECOME A
GOOD
CONVERSATIONALIST
Some time ago, I attended a bridge party. I don’t play
bridge - and there was a woman there who didn’t play
bridge either. She had discovered that I had once been
Lowell Thomas’ manager before he went on the radio
and that I had traveled in Europe a great deal while
helping him prepare the illustrated travel talks he was
then delivering. So she said: “Oh, Mr. Carnegie, I do
want you to tell me about all the wonderful places you
have visited and the sights you have seen.”
As we sat down on the sofa, she remarked that she and
her husband had recently returned from a trip to Africa.
“Africa!” I exclaimed. “How interesting! I’ve always
wanted to see Africa, but I never got there except for a
twenty-four-hour stay once in Algiers. Tell me, did you
visit the big-game country? Yes? How fortunate. I envy
you. Do tell me about Africa.”
That kept her talking for forty-five minutes. She never
again asked me where I had been or what I had seen.
She didn’t want to hear me talk about my travels. All she
wanted was an interested listener, so she could expand
her ego and tell about where she had been.
Was she unusual? No. Many people are like that.
For example, I met a distinguished botanist at a dinner
party given by a New York book publisher. I had never
talked with a botanist before, and I found him fascinating.
I literally sat on the edge of my chair and listened
while he spoke of exotic plants and experiments in
developing new forms of plant life and indoor gardens (and
even told me astonishing facts about the humble potato).
I had a small indoor garden of my own - and he was
good enough to tell me how to solve some of my problems.
As I said, we were at a dinner party. There must have
been a dozen other guests, but I violated all the canons of courtesy, ignored everyone else, and talked for hours
to the botanist.
Midnight came, I said good night to everyone and
departed. The botanist then turned to our host and
paid me several flattering compliments. I was “most
stimulating.” I was this and I was that, and he ended by
saying I was a “most interesting conversationalist.”
An interesting conversationalist? Why, I had said
hardly anything at all. I couldn’t have said anything if I
had wanted to without changing the subject, for I didn’t
know any more about botany than I knew about the anatomy
of a penguin. But I had done this: I had listened
intently. I had listened because I was genuinely interested.
And he felt it. Naturally that pleased him. That
kind of listening is one of the highest compliments we
can pay anyone. “Few human beings,” wrote Jack
Woodford in Strangers in Love, “few human beings are
proof against the implied flattery of rapt attention.” I
went even further than giving him rapt attention. I was
“hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.”
I told him that I had been immensely entertained and
instructed - and I had. I told him I wished I had his knowledge - and I did. I told him that I should love to
wander the fields with him - and I have. I told him I
must see him again - and I did.
And so I had him thinking of me as a good conversationalist
when, in reality, I had been merely a good listener
and had encouraged him to talk.
What is the secret, the mystery, of a successful business
interview? Well, according to former Harvard president
Charles W. Eliot, “There is no mystery about
successful business intercourse. . . . Exclusive attention
to the person who is speaking to you is very important.
Nothing else is so flattering as that.”
Eliot himself was a past master of the art of listening,
Henry James, one of America’s first great novelists, recalled:
“Dr. Eliot’s listening was not mere silence, but a
form of activity. Sitting very erect on the end of his spine
with hands joined in his lap, making no movement except
that he revolved his thumbs around each other
faster or slower, he faced his interlocutor and seemed to
be hearing with his eyes as well as his ears.
He listened with his mind and attentively considered
what you had to say while you said it. At the end of an
interview the person who had talked to him felt that
he had had his say.”
Self-evident, isn’t it? You don’t have to study for four
years in Harvard to discover that. Yet I know and you
know department store owners who will rent expensive
space, buy their goods economically, dress their windows
appealingly, spend thousands of dollars in advertising
and then hire clerks who haven’t the sense to be
good listeners - clerks who interrupt customers, contradict
them, irritate them, and all but drive them from the
store.
A department store in Chicago almost lost a regular
customer who spent several thousand dollars each year
in that store because a sales clerk wouldn’t listen. Mrs.
Henrietta Douglas, who took our course in Chicago, had
purchased a coat at a special sale. After she had brought it home she noticed that there was a tear in the lining.
She came back the next day and asked the sales clerk to
exchange it. The clerk refused even to listen to her complaint.
“You bought this at a special sale,” she said. She
pointed to a sign on the wall. “Read that,” she exclaimed.
" 'All sales are final.' Once you bought it, you
have to keep it. Sew up the lining yourself.”
“But this was damaged merchandise,” Mrs. Douglas
complained.
“Makes no difference,” the clerk interrupted. “Final’s
final "
Mrs. Douglas was about to walk out indignantly,
swearing never to return to that store ever, when she
was greeted by the department manager, who knew her
from her many years of patronage. Mrs. Douglas told her
what had happened.
The manager listened attentively to the whole story,
examined the coat and then said: “Special sales are
‘final’ so we can dispose of merchandise at the end of
the season. But this 'no return’ policy does not apply to
damaged goods. We will certainly repair or replace the
lining, or if you prefer, give you your money back.”
What a difference in treatment! If that manager had
not come along and listened to the Customer, a long-term
patron of that store could have been lost forever.
Listening is just as important in one's home life as in
the world of business. Millie Esposito of Croton-on-Hudson,
New York, made it her business to listen carefully
when one of her children wanted to speak with her.
One evening she was sitting in the kitchen with her son,
Robert, and after a brief discussion of something that
was on his mind, Robert said: "Mom, I know that you
love me very much.”
Mrs. Esposito was touched and said: “Of course I love
you very much. Did you doubt it?”
Robert responded: "No, but I really know you love me
because whenever I want to talk to you about something
you stop whatever you are doing and listen to me.”
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 he silent
while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra
and spews the poison out of his system. To illustrate:
The New York Telephone Company discovered a few
years ago that it had to deal with one of the most vicious
customers who ever cursed a customer service representative.
And he did curse. He raved. He threatened to tear
the phone out by its roots. He refused to pay certain
charges that he declared were false. He wrote letters to
the newspapers. He filed innumerable complaints with
the Public Service Commission, and he started several
suits against the telephone company.
At last, one of the company’s most skillful “trouble-shooters”
was sent to interview this stormy petrel. This
“troubleshooter” listened and let the cantankerous customer
enjoy himself pouring out his tirade. The telephone
representative listened and said “yes” and
sympathized with his grievance.
“He raved on and I listened for nearlv three hours,”
the “troubleshooter” said as he related his experiences
before one of the author’s classes.“
Then I went back and listened some more.
I interviewed him four times,
and before the fourth visit was over I had become a
charter member of an organization he was starting. He
called it the ‘Telephone Subscribers’ Protective Association.'
I am still a member of this organization, and, so
far as I know, I’m the only member in the world today
besides Mr.
.
"I listened and sympathized with him on every point
that he made during these interviews. He had never had
a telephone representative talk with him that way before,
and he became almost friendly. The point on which
I went to see him was not even mentioned on the first
visit, nor was it mentioned on the second or third, but
upon the fourth interview, I closed the case completely,
he paid all his bills in full, and for the first time in the
history of his difficulties with the telephone company he
voluntarily withdrew his complaints from the Public
Service Commission.”
Doubtless Mr. had considered himself a holy
crusader, defending the public rights against callous exploitation.
But in reality, what he had really wanted was
a feeling of importance. He got this feeling of importance
at first by kicking and complaining. But as soon as
he got his feeling of importance from a representative of
the company, his imagined grievances vanished into
thin air.
One morning years ago, an angry customer stormed
into the office of Julian F. Detmer, founder of the Detmer
Woolen Company, which later became the world’s
largest distributor of woolens to the tailoring trade.
“This man owed us a small sum of money,” Mr. Detmer
explained to me. “The customer denied it, but we
knew he was wrong. So our credit department had insisted
that he pay. After getting a number of letters from
our credit department, he packed his grip, made a trip to
Chicago, and hurried into my office to inform me not
only that he was not going to pay that bill, but that he
was never going to buy another dollar’s worth of goods
from the Detmer Woolen Company.
"I listened patiently to all he had to say. I was tempted
to interrupt, but I realized that would be bad policy,
So I let him talk himself out. When he finally simmered
down and got in a receptive mood, I said quietly: ‘I want
to thank you for coming to Chicago to tell me about this.
You have done me a great favor, for if our credit department
has annoyed you, it may annoy other good customers,
and that would be just too bad. Believe me, I am far
more eager to hear this than you are to tell it.’
“That was the last thing in the world he expected me
to say. I think he was a trifle disappointed, because he
had come to Chicago to tell me a thing or two, but here
I was thanking him instead of scrapping with him. I assured
him we would wipe the charge off the books and
forget it, because he was a very careful man with only
one account to look after, while our clerks had to look
after thousands. Therefore, he was less likely to be
wrong than we were.
“I told him that I understood exactly how he felt and
that, if I were in his shoes, I should undoubtedly feel
precisely as he did. Since he wasn’t going to buy from
us anymore, I recommended some other woolen houses.
“In the past, we had usually lunched together when
he came to Chicago, so I invited him to have lunch with
me this day. He accepted reluctantly, but when we came
back to the office he placed a larger order than ever
before. He returned home in a softened mood and, wanting
to be just as fair with us as we had been with him,
looked over his bills, found one that had been mislaid,
and sent us a check with his apologies.
"Later, when his wife presented him with a baby boy,he gave his son the middle name of Detmer, and he
remained a friend and customer of the house until his
death twenty-two years afterwards.”
Years ago, a poor Dutch immigrant boy washed the
windows of a bakery shop after school to help support
his family. His people were so poor that in addition he
used to go out in the street with a basket every day and
collect stray bits of coal that had fallen in the gutter
where the coal wagons had delivered fuel. That boy,
Edward Bok, never got more than six years of schooling
in his life; yet eventually he made himself one of the
most successful magazine editors in the history of American
journalism. How did he do it? That is a long story,
but how he got his start can be told briefly. He got his
start by using the principles advocated in this chapter.
He left school when he was thirteen and became an
office boy for Western Union, but he didn’t for one moment
give up the idea of an education. Instead, he
started to educate himself, He saved his carfares and
went without lunch until he had enough money to buy
an encyclopedia of American biography - and then he
did an unheard-of thing. He read the lives of famous
people and wrote them asking for additional information
about their childhoods. He was a good listener. He
asked famous people to tell him more about themselves.
He wrote General James A. Garfield, who was then running
for President, and asked if it was true that he was
once a tow boy on a canal; and Garfield replied. He
wrote General Grant asking about a certain battle, and
Grant drew a map for him and invited this fourteen-year
old boy to dinner and spent the evening talking to him.
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 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 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.
