Read How to Win Friends and Influence People for Free Online Page A

ancestors hadn’t had this flaming urge for a feeling
    of importance, civilization would have been impossible.
    Without it, we should have been just about like
    animals.

    It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led
    an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study
    some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of
    household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents.
    You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name
    was Lincoln.

    It was this desire for a feeling of importance that inspired
    Dickens to write his immortal novels. This desire
    inspired Sir Christoper Wren to design his symphonies
    in stone. This desire made Rockefeller amass millions
    that he never spent! And this same desire made the richest
    family in your town build a house far too large for its
    requirements.

    This desire makes you want to wear the latest styles,
    drive the latest cars, and talk about your brilliant children.

    It is this desire that lures many boys and girls into
    joining gangs and engaging in criminal activities. The
    average young criminal, according to E. P. Mulrooney,
    onetime police commissioner of New York, is filled with
    ego, and his first request after arrest is for those lurid
    newspapers that make him out a hero. The disagreeable
    prospect of serving time seems remote so long as he can
    gloat over his likeness sharing space with pictures of
    sports figures, movie and TV stars and politicians.

    If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance,
    I’ll tell you what you are. That determines your character.
    That is the most significant thing about you. For
    example, John D. Rockefeller got his feeling of importance
    by giving money to erect a modern hospital in
    Peking, China, to care for millions of poor people whom
    he had never seen and never would see. Dillinger, on
    the other hand, got his feeling of importance by being a
    bandit, a bank robber and killer. When the FBI agents
    were hunting him, he dashed into a farmhouse up in
    Minnesota and said, “I’m Dillinger!” He was proud of
    the fact that he was Public Enemy Number One. “I’m
    not going to hurt you, but I’m Dillinger!” he said.

    Yes, the one significant difference between Dillinger
    and Rockefeller is how they got their feeling of importance.

    History sparkles with amusing examples of famous
    people struggling for a feeling of importance. Even
    George Washington wanted to be called “His Mightiness,
    the President of the United States”; and Columbus
    pleaded for the title “Admiral of the Ocean and Viceroy
    of India.” Catherine the Great refused to open letters
    that were not addressed to “Her Imperial Majesty”; and
    Mrs. Lincoln, in the White House, turned upon Mrs.
    Grant like a tigress and shouted, “How dare you be
    seated in my presence until I invite you!”

    Our millionaires helped finance Admiral Byrd’s expedition
    to the Antarctic in 1928 with the understanding
    that ranges of icy mountains would be named after them;
    and Victor Hugo aspired to have nothing less than the
    city of Paris renamed in his honor. Even Shakespeare,
    mightiest of the mighty, tried to add luster to his name
    by procuring a coat of arms for his family.

    People sometimes became invalids in order to win
    sympathy and attention, and get a feeling of importance.
    For example, take Mrs. McKinley. She got a feeling of
    importance by forcing her husband, the President of the
    United States, to neglect important affairs of state while
    he reclined on the bed beside her for hours at a time, his
    arm about her, soothing her to sleep. She fed her gnawing
    desire for attention by insisting that he remain with
    her while she was having her teeth fixed, and once created
    a stormy scene when he had to leave her alone with
    the dentist while he kept an appointment with John
    Hay, his secretary of state.

    The writer Mary Roberts Rinehart once told me of a
    bright, vigorous young woman who became an invalid
    in order to get a feeling of