Chapter 11
This page you are reading now, this sheet of paper you are looking at—it is very ordinary, isn’t it? You have seen countless thousands of such pages. It seems dull and insipid now; but if I tell you a strange fact about it, you are almost sure to be interested. Let us see! This page seems like solid matter as you look at it now. But, in reality, it is more like a cobweb than solid matter. The physicist knows it is composed of atoms. And how small is an atom? We learned in Chapter X that there are as many atoms in one drop of water as there are drops of water in the Mediterranean Sea, that there are as many atoms in one drop of water as there are blades of grass in all the world. And the atoms that make this paper are composed of what? Still smaller things called electrons and protons. These electrons are all rotating around the central proton of the atom, as far from it, relatively speaking, as the moon is from the earth. And they are swinging through their orbits, these electrons of this tiny universe, at the inconceivable speed of approximately ten thousand miles a second. So the electrons that compose this sheet of paper you are holding have moved, since you began reading this very sentence, a distance equal to that which stretches between New York and Tokyo…
And only two minutes ago you may have thought this piece of paper was still and dull and dead; but, in reality, it is one of God’s mysteries. It is a veritable cyclone of energy.
If you are interested in it now, it is because you have learned a new and strange fact about it. There lies one of the secrets of interesting people. That is a significant truth, one that we ought to profit by in our everyday intercourse. The entirely new is not interesting; the entirely old has no attractiveness for us. We want to be told something new about the old. You cannot, for example, interest an Illinois fanner with a description of the Cathedral at Bourges, or the Mona Lisa. They are too new to him. There is no tie-up to his old interests. But you can interest him by relating the fact that farmers in Holland till land below the level of the sea and dig ditches to act as fences and build bridges to serve as gates. Your lllinois farmer will listen open– mouthed while you tell him that Dutch fanners keep the cows, during the winter, under the same roof that houses the family, and sometimes the cows look out through lace curtains at driving snows. He knows about cows and fences—new slants, you see, on old things. “Lace curtains! For a cowl” he’ll exclaim. “I’ll be doggoned!” And he will retail that story to his friends.
Here is another talk. As you read it, see if it interests you. If it does, do you know why?
How Sulphuric Acid Affects You
Most liquids are measured by the pint, quart, gallon or barrel. We ordinarily speak of quarts of wine, gallons of milk, and barrels of molasses. When a new oil gusher is discovered, we speak of its output as so many barrels per day. There is one liquid, however, that is manufactured and consumed in such large quantities that the unit of measurement employed is the ton. This liquid is sulphuric acid.
It touches you in your daily life in a score of ways. If it were not for sulphuric acid, your car would stop, and you would go back to “old Dobbin” and the buggy, for it is used extensively in the refining of kerosene and gasoline. The electric lights that illuminate your office, that shine upon your dinner table, that show you the way to bed at night, would not be possible without it.
When you get up in the morning and turn on the water for your bath, you use a nickel-plated faucet, which requires sulphuric acid in its manufacture. It was required also in the finishing of your enameled tub. The soap you use has possibly been made from greases or oils that have been treated with the acid… Your towel has made its acquaintance before you made the acquaintance of your towel. The bristles in your hair-brush have required it, and your celluloid comb could not have been produced without it. Your razor, no doubt, has been pickled in it after annealing.
You put on your underwear; you button up your outer garments. The bleacher, the manufacturer of dyes and the dyer himself used it. The button-maker possibly found the acid necessary to complete your buttons. The tanner used sulphuric acid in making the leather for your shoes, and it serves us again when we wish to polish them.
You come down to breakfast. The cup and saucer, if they be other than plain white, could not have come into being without it. It is used to produce the gilt and other ornamental colorings. Your spoon, knife and fork have seen a bath of sulphuric acid, if they be silver-plated.
The wheat of which your bread or rolls are made has possibly been grown by the use of a phosphate fertilizer, whose manufacture rests upon this acid. If you have buckwheat cakes and syrup, your syrup needed it…
And so on through the whole day, its work affects you at every turn. Go where you will, you cannot escape its influence. We can neither go to war without it nor live in peace without it. So it hardly seems possible that this acid, so essential to mankind, should be totally unfamiliar to the average man… But such is the case.
The Three Most Interesting Things in the World
What would you say they are—the three most interesting subjects in the world? Sex, property and religion. By the first we can create life, by the second we maintain it, by the third we hope to continue it in the world to come.
But it is our sex, our property, our religion that interests us. Our interests swarm about our own egos.
We are not interested in a talk on How to Make Wills in Peru; but we may be interested in a talk entitled: How to Make Our Wills. We are not interested—except, perhaps, out of curiosity—in the religion of the Hindu; but we are vitally interested in a religion that insures us unending happiness in the world to come.
When the late Lord Northcliffe was asked what interests people, he answered with one word—and that word was “themselves.” Northcliffe ought to have known for he was the wealthiest newspaper owner in Great Britain.
Do you want to know what kind of person you are? Ah, now we are on an interesting topic. We are talking about you. Here is a way for you to hold the mirror up to your real self, and see you as you really are. Watch your reveries. What do we mean by reveries? Let Professor James Harvey Robinson answer. We are quoting from The Mind in the Making:
We all appear to ourselves to be thinking all the time during our waking hours, and most of us are aware that we go on thinking while we are asleep, even more foolishly than when awake. When uninterrupted by some practical issue we are engaged in what is now known as a reverie. This is our spontaneous and favorite kind of thinking. We allow our ideas to take their own course and this course is determined by our hopes and fears, our spontaneous desires, their fulfillment or frustration; by our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates and resentments. There is nothing else anything like so interesting to ourselves as ourselves. All thought that is not more or less laboriously controlled and directed will inevitably circle about the beloved Ego. It is amusing and pathetic to observe this tendency in ourselves and in others. We lean politely and generously to overlook this truth, but if we dare to think of it, it blazes forth like the noontide sun.
Our reveries form the chief index of our fundamental character. They are a reflection of our nature as modified by often hidden and forgotten experiences… The reverie doubtless influences all our speculations in its persistent tendency to self-magnification and self-justification, which are its chief preoccupations.
So remember that the people you are to talk to spend most of their time when they are not concerned with the problems of homemaking or case work or business, in thinking about and justifying and glorifying themselves. Remember that the average person will be more concerned about the cook leaving than about Italy paying her debts to the United States. He will be more wrought up over a dull razor blade than over a revolution in South America. A woman’s own toothache will distress her more than an earthquake in Asia destroying half a million lives. She would rather listen to you say some nice thing about her than hear you discuss the ten greatest men in history.
How to Be a Good Conversationalist
The reason so many people are poor conversationalists is that they talk about only the things that interest them. That may be deadly boring to others. Reverse the process. Lead the other person into talking about his in retests, his business, his golf score, his success—or, if it is a mother, her children. Do that and listen intently and you will give pleasure; consequently you will be considered a good conversationalist—even though you have done very little of the talking.
Mr. Harold Dwight of Philadelphia made an extraordinarily successful speech at a banquet which marked the final session of a public speaking course. He talked about each man in turn around the entire table, told how he had talked when the course started, how he had improved; recalled the talks various members had made, the subjects they had discussed; he mimicked some of them, exaggerated their peculiarities, had everyone laughing, had everyone pleased. With such material, he could not possibly have failed. It was absolutely ideal. No other topic under the blue dome of heaven would have so interested that group. Mr. Dwight knew how to handle human nature.
An Idea That Won Two Million Readers
Some years ago, the American Magazine enjoyed an amazing growth. Its sudden leap in circulation became one of the sensations of the publishing world. The secret? The secret was the late John M. Siddall and his ideas. When I first met Siddall he had charge of the Interesting People Department of that periodical. I had written a few articles for him; and one day he sat down and talked to me for a long time:
“People are selfish,” he said. “They are interested chiefly in themselves. They are not very much concerned about whether the government should own the railroads; but they do want to know how to get ahead, how to draw more salary, how to keep healthy. If I were editor of this magazine,” he went on, “I would tell them how to take care of their teeth, how to take baths, how to keep cool in summer, how to get a position, how to handle employees, how to buy homes, how to remember, how to avoid grammatical errors, and so on. People are always interested in human stories, so I would have some rich man tell how he made a million in real estate. I would get prominent bankers and presidents of various corporations to tell the stories of how they battled their ways up from the ranks to power and wealth.”
Shortly after that, Siddall was made editor. The magazine then had a small circulation, was comparatively a failure. Siddall did just what he said he would do. The response? It was overwhelming. The circulation figures climbed up to two hundred thousand, three, four, half a million…. Here was something the public wanted. Soon a million people a month were buying it, then a million and a half, finally two millions. It did not stop there, but continued to grow for many years. Siddall appealed to the selfish interests of his readers.
The Kind of Speech Material
That Always Holds Attention
You may possibly bore people if you talk about things and ideas, but you can hardly fail to hold their attention when you talk about people. Tomorrow there will be millions of conversations floating over fences in the backyards of America, over tea tables and dinner tables—and what will be the predominating note in most of them? Personalities. He said this. Mrs. So-and-so did that. I saw her doing this, that and the other. He is making a “killing,” and so on.
I have addressed many gatherings of school children in the United States and Canada; and I soon learned by experience that in order to keep them interested I had to tell them stories about people. As soon as I became general and dealt with abstract ideas, Johnny became restless and wiggled in his seat, Tommy made a face at someone, Billy threw something across the aisle.
I once asked a group of American business men in Paris to talk on “How to Succeed.” Most of them praised the homely virtues, preached at, lectured to, and bored their hearers. (Incidentally, I recently heard one of the most prominent business men in America make this identical mistake in a radio talk on this identical topic. So do club women and traveling lecturers.)
So I halted this class, and said something like this: “We don’t want to be lectured to. No one enjoys that. Remember you must be entertaining or we will pay no attention whatever to what you are saying. Also remember that one of the most interesting things in the world is sublimated, glorified gossip. So tell us the stories of two persons you have known. Tell why one succeeded and why the other failed. We will gladly listen to that, remember it and possibly profit by it. It will also, by the way, be far easier for you to deliver than are these wordy, abstract preachments.”
There was a certain member of that course who invariably found it difficult to interest either himself or his audience. This night, however, he seized the human story suggestion; and told us of two of his classmates in college. One of them had been so frugal that he had bought shirts at the different stores in town, and made charts showing which ones laundered best, wore longest and gave the most service per dollar invested. His mind was always on pennies; yet, when he was graduated—it was an engineering college—he had such a high opinion of his own importance that he was not willing to begin at the bottom and work his way up, as the other graduates were doing. Even when the third annual reunion of the class came, he was still making laundry charts of his shirts, while waiting for some extraordinarily good thing to come his way. It never came. A quarter of a century has passed since then, and this man, dissatisfied and soured on life, still holds a minor position.
The speaker then contrasted with this failure the story of one of his classmates who had surpassed all expectations. This particular chap was a good mixer. Everyone liked him. Although he was ambitious to do big things later, he started as a draughtsman. But he was always on the lookout for opportunity. Plans were then being made for the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He knew engineering talent would be needed there; so he resigned from his position in Philadelphia and moved to Buffalo. Through his agreeable personality, he soon won the friendship of a Buffalo man with considerable political influence. The two formed a partnership, and engaged immediately in the contracting business. They did considerable work for the telephone company, and this man was finally taken over by that concern at a large salary. He became a multimillionaire, one of the principal owners of Western Union.
We have recorded here only the bare outline of what the speaker told. He made his talk interesting and illuminating with a score of amusing and human details… He talked on and on—this man who could not ordinarily find material for a three-minute speech—and he was surprised beyond words to learn when he stopped that he had held the floor on this occasion for half an hour. The speech had been so interesting that it seemed short to everyone. It was this student’s first real triumph.
Almost everyone can profit by this incident. The average speech would be far more appealing if it were rich and replete with human interest stories. The speaker ought to attempt to make only a few points and to illustrate them with concrete cases. Such a method of speech building can hardly fail to get and hold attention.
If possible, these stories ought to tell of struggles, of things fought for and victories won. All of us are tremendously interested in fights and combats. There is an old saying that all the world loves a lover. It doesn’t. What all the world loves is a scrap. It wants to see two lovers struggling for the hand of one woman. As an illustration of this fact, read almost any novel, magazine story, or go to see almost any film drama. When all the obstacles are removed and the reputed hero takes the so-called heroine in his arms, the audience begin reaching for their hats and coats. Five minutes later the sweeping women are gossiping over their broom handles.
Almost all magazine fiction is based on this formula. Make the reader like the hero or heroine. Make him or her long for something intensely. Make that something seem impossible to get. Show how the hero or heroine fights and gets it.
The story of how a man battled in business or profession against discouraging odds, and won, is always inspiring, always interesting. A magazine editor once told me that the real, inside story of any person’s life is entertaining. If,one has struggled and fought—and who hasn’t?—his story, if correctly told, will appeal. There can be no doubt of that.
Be Concrete
The writer once had, in the same course in public speaking, a Doctor of Philosophy and a rough-and-ready fellow who had spent his youth thirty years ago in the British Navy. The polished scholar was a university professor; his classmate from the seven seas was the proprietor of a small side street moving-van establishment. Strange to say, the moving-van man’s talks during the course would have held a popular audience far better than the talks of the college professor. Why? The college man spoke in beautiful English, with a demeanor of culture and refinement, and with logic and clearness; but his talks lacked one essential, concreteness. They were too vague, too general. On the other hand, the van owner got right down to business immediately. He was definite; he was concrete. That quality, coupled with his virility and his fresh phraseology, made his talks very entertaining.
I have cited this instance, not because it is typical either of college men or moving-van proprietors, but because it illustrates the interest-getting power that accrues to the man—regardless of formal education—who has the happy habit of being concrete and definite in his speaking.
This principle is so important that we arc going to use several illustrations to try to lodge it firmly in your mind. We hope you will never forget it, never neglect it.
Is it, for example, more interesting to state that Martin Luther, as a boy, was “stubborn and intractable,” or is it better to say that he confessed that his teachers had flogged him as often as “fifteen times in a forenoon”?
Words like “stubborn and intractable” have very little attention value. But isn’t it easy to listen to the flogging count?
The old method of writing a biography was to deal in a lot of generalities which Aristotle called, and rightly called, “The refuge of weak minds.” The new method is to deal with concrete facts that speak for themselves. The old–fashioned biographer said that John Doe was born of “poor but honest parents.” The new method would say that John Doe’s father couldn’t afford a pair of overshoes, so when the snow came, he had to tie gunny sacking around his shoes to keep his feet dry and warm; but, in spite of his poverty, he never watered the milk and he never traded a horse with the heaves as a sound animal. That shows that his parent were “poor but honest,” doesn’t it? And doesn’t it do it in a way that is far more interesting than the “poor but honest” method?
If this method works for modem biographers it will work also for modem speakers.
Let us take one more illustration. Suppose you wished to state that the potential horse power wasted at Niagara every day was appalling. Suppose you said just that, and then added, that if it were utilized and the resulting profits turned to purchasing the necessities of life, crowds could be clothed and fed. Would that be the way to make it interesting and entertaining? No—no. Isn’t this far better? We are quoting from Edwin S. Slosson in the Daily Science News Bulletin:
We are told that there are some millions of people in poverty and poorly nourished in this country, yet here at Niagara is wasted the equivalent of 250,000 loaves of bread an hour. We may see with our mind’s eye 600,000 nice fresh eggs dropping over the precipice every hour and making a gigantic omelet in the whirlpool. If calico were continuously pouring from the looms in a stream 4,000 feet wide like Niagara River, it would represent the same destruction of property. If a Carnegie Library were held under the spout it would be filled with good books in an hour or two. Or we can imagine a big department store floating down from Lake Erie every day and smashing its varied contents on the rocks 160 feet below. That would be an exceedingly interesting and diverting spectacle, quite as attractive to the crowd as the present, and no more expensive to maintain. Yet some people might object to that on the ground of extravagance who now object to the utilization of the power of the falling water.
Picture-Building Words
In this process of interest-getting, there is one aid, one technique, that is of the highest importance; yet it is all but ignored. The average speaker does not seem to be aware of its existence. He has probably never consciously thought about it at all. I refer to the process of using words that create pictures. The speaker who is easy to listen to is the one who sets images floating before your eyes. The one who employs foggy, commonplace, colorless symbols sets the audience to nodding.
Pictures. Pictures. Pictures. They are as free as the air you breathe. Sprinkle them through your talks, your conversation; and you will be more entertaining, more influential.
To illustrate: let us take the excerpt just quoted from the Daily Science News Bulletin regarding Niagara. Look at the picture words. They leap up and go scampering away in every sentence, as thick as rabbits in Australia: “250,000 loaves of bread, 600,000 eggs dropping over the precipice, gigantic omelet in the whirlpool, calico pouring from the looms in a stream 4,000 feet wide, Carnegie Library held under the spout, books, a big department store floating, smashing, rocks below, falling water.”
It would be almost as difficult to ignore such a talk or article as it would be to pay not the slightest attention to the scenes from a film unwinding on the silver screen of the motion picture theatre.
Herbert Spencer, in his famous little essay on the Philosophy of Style, pointed out long ago the superiority of terms that call forth bright pictures:
“We do not think,” says he, “in generals but in particulars… We should avoid such a sentence as
“In proportion as the manners, customs and amusements of a nation are cruel and barbarous, the regulations of their penal code will be severe. “And in place of it, we should write:
“In proportion as men delight in battles, bull fights and combats of gladiators, will they punish by hanging, burning and the rack.”
Picture-building phrases swarm through the pages of the Bible and through Shakespeare like bees around a cider mill. For example, a commonplace writer would have said that a certain thing would be superfluous, like trying to improve the perfect. How did Shakespeare express the same thought? With a picture phrase that is immortal: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw perfume on the violet.”
Did you ever pause to observe that the proverbs that are passed on from generation to generation are almost all visual sayings? “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” “It never rains but it pours.” “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” And you will find the same picture element in almost all the similes that have lived for centuries and grown hoary with too much use: “Sly as a fox.” “Dead as a door nail.” “Flat as a pancake.” “Hard as a rock.”
Lincoln continually talked in visual terminology. When be became annoyed with the long, complicated, red-tape reports that came to his desk in the White House, he objected to them, not with a colorless phraseology, but with a picture phrase that it is almost impossible to forget. “When I send a man to buy a horse,” said he, ‘’I don’t want to be told bow many hairs the horse bas in his tail. I wish only to know his points.”
The Interest-Getting Value of Contrasts
Listen to the following condemnation of Charles I by Macaulay. Note that Macaulay not only uses pictures, but he also employs balanced sentences. Violent contrasts almost always hold our interests; violent contrasts are the very brick and mortar of this paragraph: ·
We charge him with having broken his coronation oath; and we are told that he kept his marriage vow! We accuse him of having given up his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed of prelates; and the defense is that he took his little son on his knee and kissed him! We censure him for having violated the articles of the Petition of Right, after having, for good and valuable consideration, promised to observe them; and we are informed that he was accustomed to hear prayers at six o’clock in the morning! It is to such considerations as these, together with his Vandyke dress, his handsome face and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily believe, most of his popularity with the present generation.
Interest Is Contagious
We have been discussing so far the kind of material that interests an audience. However, one might mechanically follow ail the suggestions made here and speak according to Cocker, and yet be vapid and dull. Catching and holding the interest of people is a delicate thing, a matter of feeling and spirit. It is not like operating a steam engine. No precise rules can be given for it.
Interest, be it remembered, is contagious. Your hearers are almost sure to catch it if you have a bad case of it yourself. A short time ago, a gentleman rose during a session of my course in Baltimore and warned his audience that if the present methods of catching rock fish in Chesapeake Bay were continued the species would become extinct. And in a very few years! He felt his subject. It was important. He was in real earnest about it. Everything about his matter and manner showed that. When he arose to speak, I did not know that there was such an animal as a rock fish in Chesapeake Bay. I imagine that most of the audience shared my lack of knowledge and lack of interest. But before the speaker finished, all of us had caught some thing of his concern. All of us would probably have been willing to have signed a petition to the legislature to protect the rock fish by law.
I once asked Richard Washburn Quid, then American Ambassador to Italy, the secret of his success as an interesting writer. He replied: “I am so excited about life that I cannot keep still. I just have to tell people about it.” One cannot keep from being enthralled with a speaker or writer like that.
I heard a speaker in London: after he was through, one of our party, Mr. E. F. Benson, well-known English novelist, remarked that he enjoyed the last part of the talk far more than the first. When I asked him why, he replied: “The speaker himself seemed more interested in the last part, and I always rely on the speaker to supply the enthusiasm and interest.”
Everyone does. Remember that.
Summary
- We are interested in extraordinary facts about ordinary things.
- Our chief interest is ourselves.
- The person who leads others to talk about themselves and their interests and listens intently will generally be considered a good conversationalist, even though he does very little talking.
- Glorified gossip, stories of people, will almost always win and hold attention. The speaker ought to make only a few points and to illustrate them with human interest stories.
- Be concrete and definite. Do not belong to the “poor– but–honest” school of speakers. Do not merely say that Martin Luther was “stubborn and intractable” as a boy. Announce that fact. Then follow it with the assertion that his teachers flogged him as often as “fifteen times in a forenoon.” That makes the general assertion clear, impressive and interesting.
- Sprinkle your talks with phrases that create pictures, with words that set images floating before your eyes.
- If possible use balanced sentences and contrasting ideas.
- Interest is contagious. The audience is sure to catch it if the speaker himself has a bad case of it. But it cannot be won by the mechanical adherence to mere rules.
