And as for children, she imagines now that she has had a new child every night. Each time I call on her she says: Doctor, I had a baby last night.
Life once wrecked all her dream ships on the sharp rocks of reality; but in the sunny, fantasy isles of insanity, all her barkentines race into port with canvas billowing and winds singing through the masts.
Tragic? Oh, I dont know. Her physician said to me: If I could stretch out my hand and restore her sanity, I wouldnt do it. Shes much happier as she is.
If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.
One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab. He had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the first president of the newly formed United States Steel Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight years old. (Schwab later left U. S. Steel to take over the then-troubled Bethlehem Steel Company, and he rebuilt it into one of the most profitable companies in America.)
Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius? No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told me himself that he had many men working for him who knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.
Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people. I asked him how he did it. Here is his secret set down in his own words words that ought to be cast in eternal bronze and hung in every home and school, every shop and office in the land words that children ought to memorize instead of wasting their time memorizing the conjugation of Latin verbs or the amount of the annual rainfall in Brazil words that will all but transform your life and mine if we will only live them:
I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people, said Schwab, the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.
There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.
That is what Schwab did. But what do average people do? The exact opposite. If they dont like a thing, they bawl out their subordinates; if they do like it, they say nothing. As the old couplet says: Once I did bad and that I heard ever/Twice I did good, but that I heard never.
In my wide association in life, meeting with many and great people in various parts of the world, Schwab declared, I have yet to find the person, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism.
That he said, frankly, was one of the outstanding reasons for the phenomenal success of Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie praised his associates publicly as well as privately.
Carnegie wanted to praise his assistants even on his tombstone. He wrote an epitaph for himself which read: Here lies one who knew how to get around him men who were cleverer than himself.
Sincere appreciation was one of the secrets of the first John U. Rockelellers success in handling men. For example, when one of his partners, Edward T. Bedford, lost a million dollars for the firm by a bad buy in South America, John D. might have criticized; but he knew Bedford had done his best and the incident was closed. So Rockefeller found something to praise; he congratulated Bedford because he had been able to save 60 percent of the money he had invested. Thats splendid, said Rockefeller. We dont always do as well as that upstairs.
I have among my clippings a story that I know never happened, but it illustrates a truth, so Ill repeat it:
According to this silly story, a farm woman, at the end of a heavy days work, set before her menfolks a heaping pile of hay. And when they indignantly demanded whether she had gone crazy, she replied: Why, how did I know youd notice? Ive been cooking for you men for the last twenty years and in all that time I aint heard no word to let me know you wasnt just eating hay.
When a study was made a few years ago on runaway wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main reason wives ran away? It was lack of appreciation. And Id bet that a similar study made of runaway husbands would come out the same way. We often take our spouses so much for granted that we never let them know we appreciate them.
A member of one of our classes told of a request made by his wife. She and a group of other women in her church were involved in a self-improvement program. She asked her husband to help her by listing six things he believed she could do to help her become a better wife. He reported to the class: I was surprised by such a request. Frankly, it would have been easy for me to list six things I would like to change about her my heavens, she could have listed a thousand things she would like to change about me but I didnt. I said to her, Let me think about it and give you an answer in the morning.