How to win Friends and influence People / Как завоевывать друзей и оказывать влияние на людей. Книга для чтения на английском языке

That is a big advantage, for affairs like that will pay you much more than you can get for a series of lectures. If I tie your ballroom up for twenty nights during the course of the season, it is sure to mean a loss of some very profitable business to you.

“Now, let’s consider the disadvantages. First, instead of increasing your income from me, you are going to decrease it. In fact, you are going to wipe it out because I cannot pay the rent you are asking. I shall be forced to hold these lectures at some other place.

“There’s another disadvantage to you also. These lectures attract crowds of educated and cultured people to your hotel. That is good advertising for you, isn’t it? In fact, if you spent five thousand dollars advertising in the newspapers, you couldn’t bring as many people to look at your hotel as I can bring by these lectures. That is worth a lot to a hotel, isn’t it?”

As I talked, I wrote these two “disadvantages” under the proper heading, and handed the sheet of paper to the manager, saying: “I wish you would carefully consider both the advantages and disadvantages that are going to accrue to you and then give me your final decision.

I received a letter the next day, informing me that my rent would be increased only 50 percent instead of 300 percent.

Mind you[20 - Mind you – зд.: обратите внимание], I got this reduction without saying a word about what I wanted.

Suppose I had done the human, natural thing; suppose I had stormed into his office and said, “What do you mean by raising my rent three hundred percent when you know the tickets have been printed and the announcements made? Three hundred percent! Ridiculous! Absurd! I won’t pay it!”

What would have happened then? An argument would have begun to steam and boil and sputter – and you know how arguments end.

Here is one of the best bits of advice ever given about the fine art of human relationships. “If there is any one secret of success,” said Henry Ford, “it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.