Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social LifeBlackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Science
Analyzing Character: The New Science of Judging Men; Misfits in Business, the Home and Social Life
Blackford, Katherine M. H. (Katherine Melvina Huntsinger)
Characters and characteristics; Success
But different people think about themselves in entirely different ways.
The glutton thinks of his stomach; the scholar of his knowledge; the
athlete of his prowess, and the seeker after power, of his ambitions.
Those who seek to persuade others by scientific means will learn to
determine in just what way each individual is most interested in himself.
Then his task will be to make every individual whom he seeks to persuade
think, as he best likes to think, of himself and, at the same time, in
close connection, think of the idea or the article or the proposition
offered.
INTERESTING THE INTELLECTUAL MAN
Suppose he were trying to persuade a man of the intellectual type to
purchase a life insurance policy. After having gained favorable attention,
his further argument might be along these lines: "Your greatest asset is
in your mental power. With your intellect you can accomplish what it would
take a hundred men a year to accomplish with their hands. In fact, with
your intellect you can accomplish what no number of men working throughout
eternity could accomplish by the mere toil of their hands. Intellectual
power depends upon the ability to concentrate and the freedom and health
of your intellectual faculties. Psychologists and physiologists both
agree, as you well know, that there is nothing which quite so quickly
upsets both your physical and your mental machinery as anxiety and worry.
With this policy in force, you are fortified--you are free to concentrate
upon your problems, your work, without anxiety as to the future of your
wife and children. Whatever happens to you, you know that they will be
provided for. Furthermore, if you should live twenty years from now, you
will receive ten thousand dollars in one lump sum. That is a provision
against the possible day when you may be weary and wish to rest, or it may
be just the endowment which you need in order to carry on your researches
and investigations and, perhaps, find the solution to some of the
intellectual problems on which you have so long been working."
INTERESTING THE FAT MAN
The fat man likes to think of himself enjoying the good things of life as
to body and mind, comfort, luxury, a jovial good time with congenial
friends, the exercise of executive, financial or political power, or all
three. His interest, therefore, is readily aroused if you talk to him
about himself in connection with these things. There are many cases, of
course, in which this must be done indirectly rather than directly. The
effort should be not always to talk directly about the man to himself, but
to make him think about himself. It is usually not permissible to talk to
the judge on the bench about himself, but it is always permissible to
paint the picture in such a way that the judge, if he is a fat man, will
almost inevitably think of himself in connection with the matters
presented.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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