Of course, it doesn’t work. People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves - morning, noon and after dinner. The New York Telephone Company made a detailed study of telephone conversations to find out which word is the most frequently used. You have guessed it: it is the personal pronoun “I.” “I.” I.” It was used 3,900 times in 500 telephone conversations. "I.” “I.” “I.” "I.” When you see a group photograph that you are in, whose picture do you look for first? If we merely try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many true, sincere friends. Friends, real friends, are not made that way. Napoleon tried it, and in his last meeting with Josephine he said: “Josephine, I have been as fortunate as any man ever was on this earth; and yet, at this hour, you are the only person in the world on whom I can rely.” And historians doubt whether he could rely even on her. Alfred Adler, the famous Viennese psychologist, wrote a book entitled What Life Should Mean to You . In that book he says: “It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.” You may read scores of erudite tomes on psychology without coming across a statement more significant for you and for me. Adler’s statement is so rich with meaning that I am going to repeat it in italics: It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all humun failures spring. I once took a course in short-story writing at New York University, and during that course the editor of a leading magazine talked to our class. He said he could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk every day and after reading a few paragraphs he could feel whether or not the author liked people. “If the author doesn’t like people,” he said, “people won’t like his or her stories.” This hard-boiled editor stopped twice in the course of his talk on fiction writing and
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