Building genuine interest and getting the most out of people – an excerpt from Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to win friends and influence people’

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Nine out of ten times we make decisions, we consider ourselves. Our human nature is fond of getting ‘less’ concerned when we have nothing or relatively lesser to lose. It’s all about ourselves. We grow more self-conscious and to an extent we grow more selfish with each tangible event that passes.

It’s a selfish world, they say. Probably why we are in a world that seems to ‘care less’ when it comes to others.

Reading from the publication:

The New York Telephone company made a detailed study of telephone conversations to find out which word is the most frequently used. You guessed it; it is the personal pronoun “I”. It was used 3,900 times in 500 telephone conversations.

You’d wonder why the first person you look out for in a group picture is yourself, and people close to you…in their order of importance. Well, it will be hard to say if this is human nature or something we developed over time, but it is a thing actually.

We don’t normally pay close attention to this, why it happens and how it actually affects us, may be because we are so engrossed with our personal life…once again another show of our self-centred nature. ‘It’s just me, myself and I’; rap star, G-eazy in a century-describing song touched this aspect in the way it actually happens.

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But in a flashback, how does it feel when you’re in a conversation with someone who concentrates on how the foregoing affects them and talks about themselves most times? On the other hand, how does it feel when you’re the centre of someone’s attention and they seem willing to give themselves away while caring for you?

The answer is almost certain, you tend to feel dejected and elated respectively, but that’s not where it ends; you’ll prefer the company of the later than the former, even though there might be exceptions to this, they are very rare. In a normal scenario, we resonate towards people who care about us and at least puts us at par with themselves, picks interest in us and actually goes further to show this.

Human relationship could be a tricky exercise, this is due to the unpredictable nature of humans but our sense of value remains innate. And in an exchange of feelings, we care more about people who returns our feelings.

Diving into the topic; being an outgoing person and developing good inter-personal skills could worth a lot…much more than we can imagine.
According to Carnegie;

One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab. He had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the first president of the newly formed United States Steel Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight years old. (Schwab later left U.S. Steel to take over the then troubled Bethlehem Steel Company, and he rebuilt it into one of the most profitable companies in America).

Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius? No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told me himself that he had many men working for him who knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.

Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people

Getting the most out of people requires a good understanding of people. Despite our variable nature, certain features apply to everyone, or most people; one of them is our feeling of and craving for importance. Negligence accounts for most failed or toxic human relationships, in cases like this, one party is either too concerned about themselves while the other languishing in negligence makes moves to regain their sense of importance.

Take some time to ask yourself what your counterpart wants, how they feel, what they want and like to do and strive to help them on their way, even when this means going out of our own way to do so. This breeds admiration of our counterparts, whether a business partner, an employee, our employers or any sort of inter-personal relation.

^{A good relationship always blossoms source}

When done correctly, picking a genuine interest in others and really showing this builds us into an admirable personality, one which people resonate to, listen to and endeavour to follow their lead. We not only make friends by so doing, we also strengthen existing relationships and pave way for all the benefits being someone who could get people to do things.