How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work

by Megan Hustad

  Molloy, John T. Dress for Success. New York: Peter H. Wyden, 1975.

  See chapter 6.

  Moore, Doris Langley. The Technique of the Love Affair; by a Gentlewoman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1928.

  Morton, Agnes H. Etiquette: Good Manners for All People; Especially for Those Who Dwell Within the Broad Zone of the Average. Philadelphia: The Penn Publishing Company, 1892.

  Nierenberg, Gerald I., and Henry H. Calero. How to Read a Person Like a Book. New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1971.

  One of the first major works exclusively devoted to the importance of reading body language. How to Read a Person Like a Book was derived from painstaking analysis of thousands upon thousands of hours of videotaped seminars and negotiating sessions. (The technology that made this all possible was relatively new and exciting—videocassettes had only been around since the late 1960s.) Gerald I. Nierenberg was a lawyer with a reputation as a master negotiator, and he wanted to help people in business, sure, but also to bring mankind a little closer to world peace. He felt that evaluating body language correctly could stop talks from deteriorating, and what was needed was a careful monitoring of physical gestures and a sincere willingness to try to turn things around if relations got tense.

  The key to decoding body language correctly was not to get distracted by individual gestures and mannerisms, Nierenberg claimed, but rather to look for “gesture-clusters,” or a series of related movements and expressions that together betrayed a person’s true, unspoken feelings. (Nonverbal clues were always more reliable, he’d found.) Hand-to-face gestures—Rodin’s thinker pose was one variation—could mean trouble. See someone pinching the bridge of her nose? She’s most likely attempting to solve a difficult problem (so best to keep quiet for a while, and not attempt to nudge her out of her situation). See someone orient his body in the direction of the door? He wants you to stop talking so he can leave. If you find it at a used bookstore, buy it for the illustrations alone.

  Overstreet, H. A. Influencing Human Behavior: New York: The People’s

  Institute Publishing Company Incorporated, 1925.

  A book that profoundly influenced Dale Carnegie’s thinking. H. A. Overstreet was a professor and head of the philosophy department at the College of the City of New York, and this book was derived from some of his lectures to what sounds (from his description in the preface) very much like an adult education class held at the New School for Social Research. There are many passages illustrative of his tone and outlook, but I’ll limit myself to this one, which is essentially a rousing defense of the whole enterprise suggested by the title: “We are simply trying to come to some manner of understanding… Life is many things; it is food-getting, shelter-getting, playing, fighting, aspiring, hoping, sorrowing. But at the centre of it all it is this: it is the process of getting ourselves believed in and accepted. That is what love-making is. To make love to one who will not be persuaded, is a fool’s game, albeit much indulged in. That is what trading is. The man who can persuade no one to believe in his goods is a business failure. That is what preaching is. The preacher who is a joke to his pew-holders is either a coxcomb or a fool——To get people to think with us! It is an art—the supreme art.”

  He continues: “Must this art—the major art of life—be simply hit or miss? Or may we be fairly intelligent about it?” And were people to become intelligent about it? “Not by talking vaguely about goals and ideals; but by finding out quite specifically what methods are to be employed if the individual is to ‘get across’ to his human fellows, is to capture their attention and win their regard, is to induce them to think and act along with him—whether his human fellows be customers or clients or pupils or children or wife; and whether the regard which he wishes to win is for his goods, or ideas, or artistry, or a great human cause.”

  Packard, Vance. The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers That Affect You, Your Community,

  Your Future. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1959.

  Long out of print but shouldn’t be, because The Status Seekers stands up pretty well over time. Vance Packard was a pop sociologist who sold tons of books but never achieved much critical cachet.

  Parris, Crawley A. Mastering Executive Arts and Skills. West Nyack, New

  York: Parker Publishing Company, 1969.

  Peale, Norman Vincent. A Guide to Confident Living. New York: Prentice Hall, 1948.

  The warm-up to The Power of Positive Thinking.

  -. The Power of Positive Thinking. New York: Prentice Hall, 1952.

  A sensation in its day and a strange, often misunderstood book now. Overall, The Power of Positive Thinking is an awkward marriage of New Thought, Dale Carnegie-isms, and “practical Christianity.” The title has become a catch phrase, and is usually called up only to dismiss all exhortations to look on the bright side as naive, Pol-lyanna-ish, laissez-faire drivel. Which misses Peale’s central point, I think. (It’s a deeply flawed book, but not for those reasons.) Peale does indeed call for eliminating negative thoughts from your mind, but not in the sense that you’d then proceed to accept the world’s injustices or ignore your problems in the hope that they’d just go away on their own. On the contrary, Peale, a minister at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, essentially proposed positive thinking as a means to an end. He believed that if you felt perpetually defeated by adverse circumstances, you would not be likely to screw up the courage to change those circumstances. You’d give yourself over to cynicism or listless despair. If, however, you believed yourself to have some ability to affect circumstances, you’d be more likely to try to do so. Positive thinking was less a sop for the brokenhearted than a course steering you toward greater influence in the world. (It might help to remember that Peale felt the need to be preaching this long before the self-esteem movement came along. His readers did not grow up being told they could achieve anything they dreamed of—in fact, Peale refers repeatedly to a prevailing inferiority complex among Americans.) The tone of the book is alternately strident and wistful, and Peale includes some prescriptions completely at odds with the mainstream, both then and now: Fifteen minutes a day of total silence, for one. No talking, no reading, no writing, no radio, no music, no nothing. This, Peale claimed, would allow you to empty your mind of all the inane, self-defeating chatter that usually ran through it.

  The Power of Positive Thinking is also a good read if you’re looking for Hitchcockian set pieces about the midcentury business traveler. Most of Peak’s illustrative stories take place in airless hotel rooms, packed convention halls, over hurried diner-counter lunches, and feature grim-faced executives, dressed in beige raincoats, all waiting anxiously for their trains.

  Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

  Read his novel The Moviegoer instead.

  Peter, Dr. Laurence J., and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1969. See chapter 7.

  Podhoretz, Norman. Making It. New York: Random House, 1967.

  Post, Edwin. Truly Emily Post. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1961.

  A surprisingly well-told account of Emily Post’s childhood, marriage, and career. Unusually clear-sighted, considering it’s about the author’s mother.

  Post, Emily. Etiquette. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1922.

  See chapter 3.

  -. Etiquette. Tenth edition. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company,

  1960.

  See chapter 3.

  -. How to Behave—Though a Debutante: Opinions by Muriel; As

  Overheard by Emily Post. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1928.

  A satire of the Paris Hiltons of her day.

  Potter, Stephen. Lifemanship: Or; The Art of Getting Away with It Without Being an Absolute Plonk. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1951.

  Stephen Potter was quite well known, on both sides of the Atlantic, in th
e years immediately following publication of Lifemanship and One-Upmanship. (The first in his series, Gamesmanship, focused exclusively on winning without cheating at sports, so I haven’t included it here.) All these titles were sold as satire, but as the Washington Post said of Lifemanship in particular, they were manuals worth committing to memory because, people tending to the perverse as they do, you might encounter someone who actually thought like the sinister glad-handers that Potter skewers.

  All of Potter’s humor is derived from the central premise that some people take it on faith that every human interaction has a winner and a loser. If you weren’t one up, you were one down, and being one down was bad, but unless you wanted to be a complete social pariah, you had to be very subtle about your methods for winning. The goal of the committed Lifeman was therefore “intimidation by conversation,” and the question before him was always and ever, “how to make the other man feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly.” There were several ways to accomplish that nagging feeling in the other man, like taking a long look at your shoes whenever he was talking. Potter also described how you could induce an awkward silence, drop fabricated quotes into a conversation apropos of nothing, and generally make someone feel uncomfortable. If your competition were to tell a funny story, One-Upmanship dictated that you never followed it with a funny story of your own. The best reaction, Potter said, was a stony silence. The businessman committed to One-Upmanship wasn’t interested in making any real contribution, but instead worked hard at appearing friendly while actually undermining everyone he could. The “Mona Lisa Ploy,” for example, entailed sitting at the conference table doodling, a faint hint of a smile deepening the corners of one’s mouth, whenever anyone tried to make a legitimate point.

  Potter’s milieu was smoke-filled drawing rooms in English countryside mansions—the kind of Masterpiece Theatre scenes in which a meaningfully arched eyebrow spelled the end of someone’s life as they knew it. But his prose and many of his references—Harvard, Stanford, salesmanship, and a fictitious Office of American Enthusiasm —show he knew his way around American success literature, and for all his joking, Potter touched a nerve. One reviewer couldn’t figure out how to characterize his work and came up with “mock-serious.”

  -. One-Upmanship: Being Some Account of the Activities and

  Teaching of the Lifemanship Correspondence College of One-Upness and Gameslifemastery. New York: Henry Holt, 1952.

  See above.

  Price, Judith. Executive Style. New York: The Linden Press/Simon and Schuster, 1980.

  A coffee-table book of photographs of expensively decorated executive office suites. Judith Price believed that success was partly achieved through interior design.

  Rancic, Bill, with Daniel Paisner. You*re Hired: How to Succeed in Business and Life. New York: Harper Business, 2004.

  See chapter 10.

  Ritt, Michael J., Jr., and Kirk Landers. A Lifetime of Riches: The Biography of Napoleon Hill New York: Dutton, 1995.

  Schulberg, Budd. What Makes Sammy Run? New York: Random House, 1941.

  Sears, F. W. How to Attract Success. New York: Centre Publishing Co., 1914.

  More New Thought.

  Shinn, Florence Scovel. Your Word Is Your Wand: A Sequel to The Game of Life and How to Play It. New York: self-published, 1928.

  More New Thought.

  Shipler, David K. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

  Sinetar, Marsha. Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood. New York: Dell Publishing, 1989.

  Sittenfeld, Curtis. Prep. New York: Random House, 2005.

  Slater, Robert. No Such Thing as Over-Exposure: Inside the Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2005.

  See chapter 10.

  Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. London: Richard Griffin and Co., 1854.

  Adam Smith wrote this book before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, the bible of capitalism. For an introduction to the ideas Smith plays around with in this book—specifically, the how and why of ambition and keeping up appearances—you might want to consult Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Everyday Life, where it’s cited extensively.

  Stengel, Richard. You’re Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

  Strainchamps, Ethel, ed. Rooms with No View: A Woman’s Guide to the Man’s World of the Media. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

  See chapter 7. Nancy Weber’s account of working for Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan comes from this anthology.

  Tichy, Noel M., and Stratford Sherman. Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will: How Jack Welch Is Making General Electric the World’s Most Competitive Corporation. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1993.

  Traube, Elizabeth G. Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender; and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992.

  Tressler, Irving. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A Burlesque. New York: Stackpole Sons, 1937.

  The first parody of How to Win Friends and Influence People, published within months of its inspiration. Irving Tressler styled himself as the head of the “Institute of Human Relations Up To a Certain Point,” and pitched this book as the antidote to the How to Win Friends movement. His book would tell you how to speak at length about your physical ailments, deliver jokes, laugh loudly at those jokes, and generally get people to start leaving you alone. (If you want to get the most out of this book, there is one major requirement: “a deep, driving desire to want to make others dislike you just as much as you dislike them, a vigorous determination to recognize the fact that most people are about as interesting as a semi-annual report of the U.S. Gypsum Co.“) Interestingly, it was dedicated to Adolf Hitler (“a Man Who Doesn’t Need to Read It”).

  Trimble, Vance H. Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America’s Richest Man. New York: A Dutton Book, 1990.

  The “inside story” here is a biography so admiring it glows. Vance H. Trimble gives Sam Walton—father to Wal-Mart—the humble beginnings treatment by directly comparing Walton to Tom Sawyer (and Walton’s childhood best friend and high school sweetheart to Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher, respectively).

  Troward, Thomas. The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1909.

  More New Thought.

  Trump, Donald J., with Meredith Mclver. Trump: Think Like a Billionaire. New York: Random House, 2004.

  See chapter 10.

  Trump, Donald J., with Tony Schwartz. Trump: The Art of the Deal. New York: Random House, 1987.

  See chapter 10.

  Wakeman, Frederic. The Hucksters. New York: Rinehart, 1946.

  See chapter 6.

  Walters, Barbara. How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

  See chapter 3.

  Wareham, John. Secrets of a Corporate Headhunter: New York: Athe-neum, 1980.

  See chapters 8 and 10.

  Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

  Welch, Jack, with John A. Byrne. Jack: Straight from the Gut. New York: Warner Books, 2001.

  Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913.

  -. The House of Mirth. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905.

  Whistler, James McNeill. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. London: William Heinemann, 1890.

  Whitaker, Leslie, and Elizabeth Austin. The Good Girl’s Guide to Negotiating: How to Get What You Want at the Bargaining Table. New York: Little, Brown, 2001.

  Wolfe, Tom. The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987.

  Wortley, Edward. Impulses to Success: What the Successful Men of Today Read Yesterday, an Anthology. New York: Park Row Publishing House, 1957.

  Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1994. Originally pub
lished by Thames and Hudson in 1958.

  Young, Toby. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2002.

  Not coincidentally, Toby Young is the son of Michael Young (just above).

  Index

  “acceptance look,” 99-100. See also conforming, value of; dressing for work Ailes, Roger, 199 Aldrich, Nelson, Jr., 199 Alexander, James W., 9,13,16,199 Alger, Horatio, 4,139,200-201 ambition, 221

  assumptions and, 15 Sister Carrie and, 205 as unfashionable, xiv-xv The American Chesterfield, or Way to Wealthy Honoury and Distinction… Suited to the Youth of the United States (Grigg), 4, 8-9,50,207-8 Amicus, C.B.C., 3-4 Amis, Martin, 16-17 Aniston, Jennifer, 162-63 apologies bosses and, 160-62,165-66 nonapology and, 168-69 appreciation, expression of, 69 The Apprentice (TV show). See also Trump, Donald strategic no’s on, 179-81,188-89 success of, 171-73 “you’re fired” principle and, 172, 173-74,175-76

  The Art of Public Speaking (Esen-wein and Carnagey), 66-67, 205

  asking for help, 87-88. See also Mas-ter Mind asking questions guidelines for, 48-51,215 importance of, 42-48 rhetorical questions and, 167-68 Astor, Mrs. William Backhouse, Jr., 40-41

  attitude. See also cynicism; New Thought approach; self-pity feeling grateful and, 192-96 powerlessness and, 123 self-deprecation and, 150-51 toward coworkers, 123 attracting attention, advice on, 5-6, 12-16,206-7

  The Autobiography & Selections from His Other Writings (Franklin), 206 autosuggestion, 28-29 The Awkward Embrace (Burns), 203 Ayres, Rufus, 78n

  Babson, Roger, 26-27 Bakan, Joel, 201 Balbirer, Nancy, 162-63

  barefoot business. See self-deprecation

  Barnes, Edwin C., 77-78 The Basil and Josephine Stories (Fitzgerald), 206 Baucaire, Lolita, 65 being “nice,” 32,54,69,176 being yourself. See also posing as bad advice, 1-3 clothes and, 91-92 scripted communication and, 14-15