Free How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie Page A

manufacturer.
    One of the participants wanted to persuade the
    others to play basketball in their free time, and this is
    about what he said: "I want you to come out and play
    basketball. I like to play basketball, but the last few
    times I’ve been to the gymnasium there haven’t been
    enough people to get up a game. Two or three of us got
    to throwing the ball around the other night - and I got a
    black eye. I wish all of you would come down tomorrow
    night. I want to play basketball.”

    Did he talk about anything you want? You don’t want
    to go to a gymnasium that no one else goes to, do you?
    You don’t care about what he wants. You don’t want to
    get a black eye.

    Could he have shown you how to get the things you
    want by using the gymnasium? Surely. More pep.
    Keener edge to the appetite. Clearer brain. Fun. Games.
    Basketball.

    To repeat Professor Overstreet’s wise advice: First,
    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.
     
    One of the students in the author’s training course was
    worried about his little boy. The child was underweight
    and refused to eat properly. His parents used the usual
    method. They scolded and nagged. “Mother wants you
    to eat this and that.” "Father wants you to grow up to be
    a big man.”

    Did the boy pay any attention to these pleas? Just
    about as much as you pay to one fleck of sand on a sandy
    beach.

    No one with a trace of horse sense would expect a
    child three years old to react to the viewpoint of a father
    thirty years old. Yet that was precisely what that father
    had expected. It was absurd. He finally saw that. So he
    said to himself: “What does that boy want? How can I
    tie up what I want to what he wants?”

    It was easy for the father when he starting thinking
    about it. His boy had a tricycle that he loved to ride up
    and down the sidewalk in front of the house in Brooklyn.
    A few doors down the street lived a bully - a bigger boy
    who would pull the little boy off his tricycle and ride it
    himself.

    Naturally, the little boy would run screaming to his
    mother, and she would have to come out and take the
    bully off the tricycle and put her little boy on again, This
    happened almost every day.

    What did the little boy want? It didn’t take a Sherlock
    Holmes to answer that one. His pride, his anger, his
    desire for a feeling of importance - all the strongest
    emotions in his makeup - goaded him to get revenge, to
    smash the bully in the nose. And when his father explained
    that the boy would be able to wallop the daylights
    out of the bigger kid someday if he would only eat
    the things his mother wanted him to eat - when his father
    promised him that - there was no longer any problem
    of dietetics. That boy would have eaten spinach,
    sauerkraut, salt mackerel - anything in order to be big
    enough to whip the bully who had humiliated him so
    often.

    After solving that problem, the parents tackled another:
    the little boy had the unholy habit of wetting his bed.

    He slept with his grandmother. In the morning, his
    grandmother would wake up and feel the sheet and say:
    “Look, Johnny, what you did again last night.”

    He would say: “No, I didn’t do it. You did it.”

    Scolding, spanking, shaming him, reiterating that the
    parents didn’t want him to do it - none of these things
    kept the bed dry. So the parents asked: “How can we
    make this boy want to stop wetting his bed?”

    What were his wants? First, he wanted to wear pajamas
    like Daddy instead of wearing a nightgown like
    Grandmother. Grandmother was getting fed up with his
    nocturnal iniquities, so she gladly offered to buy him a
    pair of pajamas if he would reform. Second, he wanted a
    bed of his own. Grandma didn’t object.

    His mother took him to a department store in Brooklyn,
    winked at the salesgirl, and said: “Here is a little
    gentleman who would like to do some shopping.”

    The