Simon and schuster

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. 
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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 apologized for 
preaching a sermon. “I am telling you,” he said, “the same things your preacher would tell you, but remember, 
you have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful writer of stories.” 
If that is true of writing fiction, you can be sure it is true of dealing with people face-to-face. 
I spent an evening in the dressing room of Howard Thurston the last time he appeared on Broadway. 
Thurston was the acknowledged dean of magicians. For forty years he had traveled all over the world, time and 
again, creating illusions, mystifying audiences, and making people gasp with astonishment. More than 60 
million people had paid admission to his show, and he had made almost $2 million in profit. 
I asked Mr. Thurston to tell me the secret of his success. His schooling certainly had nothing to do with 
it, for he ran away from home as a small boy, became a hobo, rode in boxcars, slept in haystacks, begged his 
food from door to door, and learned to read by looking out of boxcars at signs along the railway. 
Did he have a superior knowledge of magic? No, he told me hundreds of books had been written about 
legerdemain and scores of people knew as much about it as he did. But he had two things that the others didn’t 
have. First, he had the ability to put his personality across the footlights. He was a master showman. He knew 
human nature. Everything he did, every gesture, every intonation of his voice, every lifting of an eyebrow had 
been carefully rehearsed in advance, and his actions were timed to split seconds. But, in addition to that, 
Thurston had a genuine interest in people. He told me that many magicians would look at the audience and say 
to themselves, “Well, there is a bunch of suckers out there, a bunch of hicks; I’ll fool them all right.” But 
Thurston’s method was totally different. He told me that every time he went on stage he said to himself, “I am 
grateful because these people come to see me. They make it possible for me to make my living in a very 
agreeable way. I’m going to give them the very best I possibly can.” 
He declared he never stepped in front of the footlights without first saying to himself over and over, “I 
love my audience. I love my audience.” Ridiculous? Absurd? You are privileged to think anything you like. I 
am merely passing it on to you without comment as a recipe used by one of the most famous magicians of all 
time. 
George Dyke of North Warren, Pennsylvania, was forced to retire from his service station business 
after thirty years when a new highway was constructed over the site of his station. It wasn’t long before the idle 
days of retirement began to bore him, so he started filling in his time trying to play music on his old fiddle. Soon 
he was traveling the area to listen to music and talk with many of the accomplished fiddlers. In his humble and 
friendly way he became generally interested in learning the background and interests of every musician he met. 
Although he was not a great fiddler himself, he made many friends in this pursuit. He attended competitions and 
soon became known to the country music fans in the eastern part of the United States as “Uncle George, the 
Fiddle Scraper from Kinzua County.” When we heard Uncle George, he was seventy-two and enjoying every 
minute of his life. By having a sustained interest in other people, he created a new life for himself at a time 
when most people consider their productive years over. 
That, too, was one of the secrets of Theodore Roosevelt’s astonishing popularity. Even his servants 
loved him. His valet, James E. Amos, wrote a book about him entitled