The truth is most of us are not Dale Carnegie, nor are we capable of the sacrifices required to win friends and influence people. For the most part, we don’t need small armies of people that we can use and recruit. It’s important to recognize what kind of person you are, and once you have done so, decide on the appropriate strategy with dealing with others.
If you are like Dale, a lecturer, an author, and a salesman, then perhaps having influence over people might be beneficial to your book sales. However, most of us just want to get by, with as few people around us as possible who are annoying or insufferable.
One might think the solution is obvious, but I’ve seen so many people act counter-intuitively that it bears mentioning: The greatest power you have over someone is your disinterest in them.
I learned this powerful secret through interactions with women in university. Nothing perplexed me more than someone who wanted nothing to do with me and had no interest in anything I would say. But this phenomena is not unique to relationships. Sure, being in your early twenties in post-secondary necessarily means that you think everything you have to say is both interesting and important, but that trait still carries on for everyone even as they get older, albeit to a lesser degree.
It’s important to realize that everyone thinks that they are both right, smart, important, and relevant; and that most people are none of these things. The greatest weapon you have against someone is to actively show signs that some, if not all, of those traits are imperceptible to you.
Say, for example, there’s a certain annoying person that constantly comes to your desk while your working. He interrupts you from the tedious task of looking at Excel documents, for an even more tedious conversation about an award show you did not see, a concert you did not go to, or vacation photos you’d rather not look at. You, being somewhat nice and genuinely caring about other people, decide to feign interest in these topics, to be polite.
Politeness is to annoying people a light to a moth. They will follow politeness as a path of least resistance, being reinforced by your lack of rudeness to continuously show up at your desk, perhaps eating chips with open-mouth, shooting crumbs on your pants from above like some nacho-flavoured meteor shower.
You might be inclined to blame this annoying person for his behaviour, but the truth is the fault lies with you. You broke the sacred rule: you feigned interest in something you are not interested in.
Imagine that you had, instead, ignored him and continued to do your work. This may be hard for you to visualize, as it’s difficult to be rude, but is it not ruder to fake an interest, than it is to be honest?
Ignoring someone takes practice for those who are not used to it. But with a little work, it will start to come naturally. Your annoying colleague will talk to you, but get no response. At first, he will be oblivious, and continue to talk, chew with his mouth open, and generally take up a lot of space, but soon he will see that not only are you not responding, but you are not listening or looking at him, and instead busy clicking the same cell in Excel over and over again, bottling up your rage.
He will move on and look for someone more polite than you, and there will always be someone else that he can mark his territory with. Once this uncomfortable phase is complete, rest assured you will be left alone, so long as you continue to practice this valuable skill when he inevitably attempts another occasional round to test your wits.
Look forward to more chapters in my new book, The Power of Negative Thinking: by Who Would Publish This Press
Chapter 1: The Power of Negative Thinking
Chapter 2: The Downward Spiral
Chapter 3: Become genuinely uninterested in people
Chapter 4: Give constant and sincere criticism
Chapter 5: Frown
Chapter 6: Getting by: how to look busy while doing nothing
Chapter 7: Stop blaming your parents, blame yourself
Chapter 8: How to lose friends and influence your cat
Chapter 9: The Power of Later
Chapter 10: The Secret (there is none, you’re an idiot)
