If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anybody for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.
Do you know people like that? I do unfortunately; and the astonishing part of it is that some of them are prominent! Bores, that is all they are- bores intoxicated with their own egos, drunk with a sense of their own importance.
People who talk only of themselves think only of themselves. And “those people who think only of themselves, “Dr Nicholas Murray Butler, longtime president of Columbia University, said, “are hopelessly uneducated. They are not educated,” said Dr Butler, “no matter how instructed they may be.”
So if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments. Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems. A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa. Think of that the next time you start a conversation.
:How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie
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