"You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you."
"Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing... I dangled a worm and said: 'Wouldn't you like to have that?' Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?"
"We may not be saintly enough to love our enemies, but, for the sake of our own health and happiness, let’s at least forgive them and forget them."
"There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it."
The famous author of pop psychology influence books (How to Win Friends and Influence People, etc), Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was a warm person, but he didn't radiate warmth directly. He studied it. The poor Missouri farm boy who built a global enterprise out of teaching people to be liked was not a fountain of feeling, Fe-lead style; he was an extraordinary reader of people who turned that reading into a method and then into a business. He was an IEE, with a strong LIE accent — a penetrating intuition for what makes individuals tick, harnessed to an entrepreneur's drive to package and sell it.
His famous advice is, at bottom, a taxonomy of human motivation. People crave the feeling of importance; a person's own name is the sweetest sound to them; everyone would rather talk about themselves; people are moved by appeal to their nobler motives; you cannot win an argument, so never start one. He understood the levers by which any individual can be reached. As the opening quote says, he thought about people the way a good angler thinks about fish — reading the appetite of the specific creature in front of him and angling toward it. That is the IEE's gift for grasping the inner workings and possibilities of a human being.
That faint calculatedness is not wholly untypical of IEE, and it separates it from its "benefactor" ESE, who is the most straightforward and least ethically sophisticated/perceptive of all F types. His contemporaries felt it: the satirist Sinclair Lewis sneered that Carnegie taught people to smile and pretend to be interested in others' hobbies precisely so they could screw things out of them, and later critics chided the method as insincere and manipulative. The charge is overstated — Carnegie genuinely believed in his own benevolence, and insisted the interest must be real — but the fact that it sticks at all is the tell.
The whole Dale Carnegie Course was born from an accident in 1912, when, in his very first class, he ran out of prepared material and improvised — telling the students to get up and speak about "something that made them angry." It worked like magic. He had discovered, by instinct, the key to unlocking the latent ability in each individual to perform. It is this very thing that the IEE faculty does: recognizes the untapped potential within the shy individual and discovers the specific key that unlocks it. It was all elicitation, the whole project of his. He truly believed that anybody could unlock the hidden potential in themselves, it was the very thing he sold as a product.
The strong LIE accent is the second half of him. Carnegie certainly was a businessman, and he approached his insights with a very results-driven business sense. He standardized his methods into a franchised global enterprise, turning a knack for reading people into a self-replicating machine. Its promise was Te: an approach to people that gets you the sale — hope for practical purposes peddled in the worst years of the Depression. This is the entrepreneurial spirit of the LIE, which matched perfectly with the IEE foundation, because both types are motivated by what is possible and how it can be achieved, even if one is more interested in people's potential, and another in potential profits. When it comes to Q/D functions, he was quite De-contactable (often the case even with "pure" IEE's), and certainly not a Qi-style individualist loner. As far as secondary dichotomies go, Carnegie was a cheerful and emotionally adaptable emotivist, as well as convergence-minded declatim. There're even hints of the tertiary "result" dichotomy in him, which finds its expression in his easy manner of simplifying things and lack of interest in the complex issues of life. As the optimistic reader of what moves people, Carnegie turned his character traits into the best-selling self-improvement enterprise in history.
Comments
Post a Comment