Quote of the Day (Dale Carnegie, on How to Get Ahead in Life)

“Arouse in the other person an eager want.”—One of the three “Fundamental Techniques for Handling People” listed in How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie (1936)

(Carnegie, born on this date in 1888, wrote one of the most influential books in the entire American literature of self-help—a tradition that, arguably, extends all the way back to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. The idea for this project came from Leon Shimkin of Simon & Schuster, who, after taking Carnegie’s course, persuaded him to have a secretary take down notes from the class. The resulting book—along with another Shimkin discovery of the time, J.K. Lasser’s Your Business Tax—helped provide a steady cash flow for the publishing house for the next several decades. There’s no doubt that if F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby had been a real-life person, he would have saved every penny he had to purchase the Carnegie title and memorize its lessons by heart.)