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wild horses in return for his passage, After landing in
south Omaha, he got a job selling bacon and soap and
lard for Armour and Company. His territory was up
among the Badlands and the cow and Indian country of
western South Dakota. He covered his territory by
freight train and stage coach and horseback and slept in
pioneer hotels where the only partition between the
rooms was a sheet of muslin. He studied books on salesmanship,
rode bucking bronchos, played poker with the
Indians, and learned how to collect money. And when,
for example, an inland storekeeper couldn t pay cash for
the bacon and hams he had ordered, Dale Carnegie
would take a dozen pairs of shoes off his shelf, sell the
shoes to the railroad men, and forward the receipts to
Armour and Company.
He would often ride a freight train a hundred miles a
day. When the train stopped to unload freight, he would
dash uptown, see three or four merchants, get his orders;
and when the whistle blew, he would dash down the
street again lickety-split and swing onto the train while
it was moving.
Within two years, he had taken an unproductive territory
that had stood in the twenty-fifth place and had
boosted it to first place among all the twenty-nine car
routes leading out of south Omaha. Armour and Company
offered to promote him, saying: You have
achieved what seemed impossible. But he refused the
promotion and resigned, went to New York, studied at
the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and toured the
country, playing the role of Dr. Hartley in Polly of the
Circus.
He would never be a Booth or a Barrymore. He had
the good sense to recognize that, So back he went to
sales work, selling automobiles and trucks for the Packard
Motor Car Company.
He knew nothing about machinery and cared nothing
about it. Dreadfully unhappy, he had to scourge himself
to his task each day. He longed to have time to study, to
write the books he had dreamed about writing back in
college. So he resigned. He was going to spend his days
writing stories and novels and support himself by teaching
in a night school.
Teaching what? As he looked back and evaluated his
college work, he saw that his training in public speaking
had done more to give him confidence, courage, poise
and the ability to meet and deal with people in business
than had all the rest of his college courses put together,
So he urged the Y.M.C.A. schools in New York to give
him a chance to conduct courses in public speaking for
people in business.
What? Make orators out of business people? Absurd.
The Y.M.C.A. people knew. They had tried such courses
-and they had always failed. When they refused to pay
him a salary of two dollars a night, he agreed to teach on
a commission basis and take a percentage of the net profits
-if there were any profits to take. And inside of three
years they were paying him thirty dollars a night on that
basis - instead of two.
The course grew. Other "Ys" heard of it, then other
cities. Dale Carnegie soon became a glorified circuit
rider covering New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and
later London and Paris. All the textbooks were too academic
and impractical for the business people who
flocked to his courses. Because of this he wrote his own
book entitled Public Speaking and Influencing Men in
Business. It became the official text of all the Y.M.C.A.s
as well as of the American Bankers Association and the
National Credit Men s Association.
Dale Carnegie claimed that all people can talk when
they get mad. He said that if you hit the most ignorant
man in town on the jaw and knock him down, he would
get on his feet and talk with an eloquence, heat and
emphasis that would have rivaled that world famous orator
William Jennings Bryan at the height of his career.
He claimed that almost any person can speak acceptably
in public if he or she has self-confidence and an idea
that is boiling and stewing within.
The way to develop self-confidence, he said, is to do
the thing you fear to do and get a record of successful
experiences behind you. So he forced each class member
to talk at every session of the course. The audience
is sympathetic. They are all in the same boat; and, by
constant practice, they develop a courage, confidence
and enthusiasm that carry over into their private speaking.
Dale Carnegie would tell you that he made a living all
these years, not by teaching public speaking - that was
incidental. His main job was to help people conquer
their fears and develop courage.
He started out at first to conduct merely a course in
public speaking, but the students who came were business
men and women. Many of them hadn t seen the
inside of a classroom in thirty years. Most of them were
paying their tuition on the installment plan. They
wanted results and they wanted them quick - results
that they could use the next day in business interviews
and in speaking before groups.
So he was forced to be swift and practical. Consequently,
he developed a system of training that is
unique - a striking combination of public speaking,
salesmanship, human relations and applied psychology.
A slave to no hard-and-fast rules, he developed a
course that is as real as the measles and twice as much
fun.
When the classes terminated, the graduates formed
clubs of their own and continued to meet fortnightly for
years afterward. One group of nineteen in Philadelphia
met twice a month during the winter season for seventeen
years. Class members frequently travel fifty or a
hundred miles to attend classes. One student used to
commute each week from Chicago to New York.
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