Background of this page

I, Guus, feel often dependent on other people. And I don’t like it. It makes me feel vulnerable. And I don’t like that feeling. And today, feeling alone, I felt compelled to open the book The Magic of Thinking Big from David J. Schwartz, a book I don’t like so much, but that someone let me borrow last weekend and I somehow decided to bring.

So several things are happening in my life right now and one of them I follow hunches a lot, which I already kind of did, but i do more now. And often these hunches bring me something. So today my hunch brought me to the chapter Think right toward people. And it starts with something like “success depends on other people”. And it starts with something like or made me realize that everybody depends on other people for almost everything. So I’m not alone and you’re not alone. We depend on each other.

And there is a lot in this chapter I would like to share, but for now I’ll just stick with a list David J. Schwartz says President Lyndon Johnson used to achieve success, used to make people cooperate with him.

Rules for success of Lyndon Johnson

The rules of success of President Lyndon Johnson are about people, about liking people, respecting people, lifting people up:

1. Learn to remember names. Inefficiency at this point may indicate that your interest is not sufficiently outgoing.
2. Be a comfortable person so there is no strain in being with you. Be an old-shoe kind of individual.
3. Acquire the quality of relaxed easy-going so that things do not ruffle you.
4. Don’t be egotistical. Guard against the impression that you know it all.
5. Cultivate the quality of being interesting so people will get something of value from their association with you.
6. Study to get the “scratchy” elements out of your personality, even those of which you may be unconscious.
7. Sincerely attempt to heal, on an honest basis, every misunderstanding you have had or now have. Drain off your grievances.
8. Practice liking people until you learn to do so genuinely.
9. Never miss an opportunity to day a word of congratulation upon anyone’s achievement, or express sympathy in sorrow or disappointment.
10. Give spiritual strength to people, and they will give genuine affection to you.

Reading these rules I guess you may have a similar experience that I had: many of these things I already do, either naturally or learned. Some of them you may have not realized or neglected, so you may want to brush them up.

Be likable

The main message in the chapter in the book is to be likable. But don’t force it, make sure you’re genuine in your actions and behavior to other people. People are not for sale and, same like you, will feel is something is not genuine.

I am thinking of making an exercise likability. The idea is to let you score yourself on each of the above rules and pick one you want to focus on for a certain period of time.

For now I’ll just make the page exercise likability.