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Concept

Arousing an Eager Want

Arousing an Eager Want is Dale Carnegie's principle that the only reliable way to move someone is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it, so every request starts from the other person's point of view rather than from your own need.

Carnegie states this principle in How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) as a plain observation: people are interested in what they want, and almost nobody is interested in what you want. His image is the angler. He was fond of strawberries and cream, he explains, but when he went fishing he baited the hook with what the fish liked. Most requests ignore this. They explain what the asker needs, how busy the asker is and what the deadline means to the asker, and then they are surprised by the slow reply. Carnegie passes on Henry Ford's advice that success depends on seeing things from the other person's angle as well as your own. The principle is not manipulation, because it only works when the benefit is real: if what you ask truly serves the other person, show them how; if it does not, no wording will hold for long. In practice it changes the first sentence of an email, of a meeting, or of a conversation with a teenager. Before you ask, answer the question the other person is silently asking: what is in this for me? Then make the first step towards it easy.

A real-life example

Murat runs the IT team at a furniture maker in Ankara and needs the sales staff to fill in three new fields in the customer system. His first email, about data quality, gets no response. His second opens differently: the three fields let the system build each salesperson's commission report automatically, so nobody spends a Friday afternoon on a spreadsheet again. By Wednesday most of the team has filled them in, and two salespeople ask for a fourth field.

How to use it

  1. 1Before your next request, write down in one line what the other person wants, not what you need.
  2. 2Open with that benefit in their terms, and keep your own reasons for the end or leave them out.
  3. 3Make the first step small and obvious, so that wanting it and doing it are only a minute apart.