Smile
A smile is a signal before any words land. Charles Schwab told Carnegie his smile had been worth a million dollars — and Carnegie thought he was understating it. What a smile communicates is immediate and unambiguous: "I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you."
The principle sounds disarmingly simple. Carnegie insists that simplicity is exactly why it gets dismissed — and exactly why it works when most people won't bother.
The Mechanism
An insincere grin doesn't fool anyone. People feel the mechanical version and resent it. Carnegie is specific: he means a real smile, a heartwarming smile, one that comes from within. A department store employment manager told him she would rather hire a salesclerk who hadn't finished grade school but had a pleasant smile than a doctoral candidate with a somber face.
Professor James V. McConnell (University of Michigan) quantified it: "People who smile tend to manage, teach, and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children. There's far more information in a smile than a frown. That's why encouragement is a much more effective teaching device than punishment."
The effect extends beyond face-to-face contact. Telephone companies ran "phone power" programs because a smile comes through in the voice. Robert Cryer, a department manager in Cincinnati, used this to recruit a Ph.D. candidate over larger, better-known firms — the candidate chose him because his phone manner conveyed genuine warmth: "Your voice sounded as if you were glad to hear from me."
The Action-Feeling Loop
What if you don't feel like smiling? Carnegie quotes William James directly:
"Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there."
Force yourself to smile. Whistle. Hum. Act as if you were already happy — and that will tend to make you happy. This is the same mechanism Carnegie uses in criticism-is-futile — behavior changes internal state, not just vice versa.
The happiness itself doesn't depend on outward conditions. Shakespeare: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Lincoln: "Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." Carnegie watched boys on canes and crutches at Penn Station laughing and joking — their caretaker explained that once the initial shock passes, they adjust and become just as happy as any other boys.
Evidence from Practice
William Steinhardt, a New York stockbroker, had barely spoken to his wife in eighteen years of marriage before Carnegie asked him to try smiling for a week. He forced a smile at breakfast. His wife was shocked. Two months later he wrote:
"This changed attitude of mine brought more happiness into our home in the two months since I started than there was during the last year.... I have also eliminated criticism from my system. I give appreciation and praise now instead of condemnation. I have stopped talking about what I want. I am now trying to see the other person's viewpoint. And these things have literally revolutionized my life. I am a totally different man, a richer man, richer in friendships and happiness."
Steinhardt extended the practice to elevator operators, doormen, cashiers, and people on the Stock Exchange floor — and found that "everybody was smiling back at me."
The Chinese Proverb as Operating Principle
Carnegie cites it without fuss: "A person without a smiling face must not open a shop."
A smile is a messenger of good will. To someone who has seen a dozen people frown or turn away, it is like sun breaking through clouds. The New York department store's Christmas advertisement said it plainly: "It costs nothing, but creates much. It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give. It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever."
Connections
- genuine-interest-in-others — a real smile is an outward expression of genuine interest; you can't fake the interest and fake the smile simultaneously
- give-honest-and-sincere-appreciation — both operate through warmth expressed outward; both fail when mechanical
- desire-to-feel-important — a smile acknowledges the other person as worth smiling at; it meets the same underlying need as appreciation