March 18th, 2005
There is no way that I would ever have picked up anything by Dale Carnegie without the urging of my wife. Even a former boss who rather gently and subtly suggested him to me didn't become a catalyst. (I sometimes missed his quiet suggestions; once he mentioned it and I said something like, "it's all very well and fine, I suppose, but his advice seems so empty-headed and obvious.") And it was the truth about my attitude; I felt that Dale Carnegie was:
Too old to be relevant (this idiotic assertion coming from a man who has repeatedly read poetry 500, 1000, 2000—gosh, even 5000—years old and nodded in sage wisdom, realising that people haven't changed a bit!)
Too mindless to be relevant to me, since I am a very smart person, after all, and normal everyday life is very difficult to "live down to" when you are as much the genius as I am. Hmmph. I actually don't even know where to start picking that one apart so I'll just contradict it: Smart or stupid, we all eat, breath, sleep, defecate, and eventually die. Come to think of it, we all do that even if we are humans, elephants, dolphins, gerbils, or horses. So, "mindless", it turns out, is a relative (near meaningless) term that really means, "simpler than the hardest thoughts I am capable of hosting in my own brain." Just because I can carry bricks around in my backpack doesn't mean I should do it day after day ...
Actually, I didn't even realise that there were two Carnegies! My ignorance was so complete that I thought they were one and the same: Dale Carnegie, the writer of self-help books from the early part of the century was, to my mind, the same Carnegie who went around donating untold millions to every city in, if not the world, at least North America. Why, there's even a Carnegie building in my home town of Vancouver (and you don't need to practice to get to it, you just have to step over the stinking drunks who are passed out on the sidewalk in front).
Anyhow, back to Dale Carnegie's books: My wife loudly encouraged me, so I finally bought How to Stop Worrying and Start Living about a year ago and read it slowly until the Summer—when we got married. Wait a minute! My God! What was she trying to say?!?!?! :-)
I've been re-reading it the past few days, and I am re-learning all the little techniques and concepts (not "tricks") that help me sleep at night and stop ... well, stop worrying about things I did before and those things that may or may not (probably not) happen in the future.
The thing is, I met someone a couple of days ago who could really use a good big dose of Dale Carnegie. It's been on my mind to mail—or FedEx—a couple of Carnegie's books to this person. You know, How to Win Friends and Influence People and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. I reject this idea every time it comes up because I realise that I would be helping this person as much as the rest of the world, and that seems unfair to me; my sense of justice says that he should start to stink as he wallows in his own interpersonal style. But the idea still keeps cropping up, so there must be some merit in it ...