Lincoln once began a letter saying: “Everybody likes a compliment.” William James said: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”
He didn’t speak, mind you, of the “wish” or the “desire” or the “longing” to be appreciated. He said the “craving” to be appreciated.
Here is a gnawing and unfaltering human hunger, and the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger will hold people in the palm of his or her hand and “even the undertaker will be sorry when he dies.”
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led an uneducated, poverty-stricken grocery clerk to study some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln.
It was this desire for a feeling of importance that inspired Dickens to write his immortal novels.
This desire inspired Sir Christoper Wren to design his symphonies in stone.
This desire made Rockefeller amass millions that he never spent!
And this same desire made the richest family in your town build a house far too large for its requirements.
This desire for a feeling of importance makes you want to wear the latest styles, drive the latest cars, and talk about your brilliant children.
• Make the other person feel important. |
Kelvin Nyash on WP 