Dale Carnegie - Make Yourself Unforgettable: How to Become the Person Everyone Remembers and No One Can Resist

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Theres a good chance youre already familiar with the poem shown below. It is, after all, one of the most widely read poems in the English languageand it could legitimately be called the worlds most popular poem.

If was published by Rudyard Kipling in 1909. Kipling said it was inspired by the exploits of a British officer in South Africa, but today it transcends any specific time or place. Here at the start of our book on the principles of class and the concept of making yourself unforgettable, there can be no better introduction than Rudyard Kiplings poem. You may want to read it again as you go through the book. In fact, you may want to return to it many times as you proceed through your life as a whole.

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, dont deal in lies,

Or, being hated, dont give way to hating,

And yet dont look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dreamand not make dreams your master;

If you can thinkand not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth youve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: Hold on!;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kingsnor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything thats in it,

Andwhich is moreyoull be a Man, my son!

This is not a sugarcoated picture of what the world is like! As Kipling depicts it, life is no day at the beach. Youre going to be lied to, cheated, blamed, backstabbed, disappointed, and a positive outcome is not guaranteed. Even if you get through all of this, Kipling doesnt provide assurance that youll find wealth or health or wisdom. He does say youll get the Earth and everything thats in it. But what is that supposed to mean? Does anyone even want the Earth and everything thats in it?

However, whatever you may get or not get, Kipling does make a promise about what youll be . Youll be a man. Or, rather, youll be a Man . But once again, as with the Earth and everything thats in it, we need to ask what Kipling intends that to mean.

The answer to that question will be helpful for our understanding of the meaning of class. If being a Man is the payoff for all the trials and tribulations of earthly existence, it must be about much more than gender. Really, its about wisdom. If you read the poem carefully, you can see that each stanza describes several teststo which the right answer is always the hard answer. Why is the hard answer the right one? Again, theres no promise of any material payoff. Theres just the state of being youll eventually attain. And if we want to be consistent with the universe the poem has created, chances are no one will even acknowledge that youre a Man except you yourself.

Perhaps thats the last test, and it sounds like the toughest.

Ultimately, the real payoff for class comes down to self-respect. People with class know theyre people with class, even if no one else is paying attention. As someone once said, Who are you when nobodys looking? When, from the bottom of your heart, you can answer, Im the person I really hope and want to be, then youve achieved the goal that is the subject of this book. And again, it may also be the purpose of your life as a whole.

So, onward.

C lassthat unique energy that makes people truly unforgettableis easier to recognize than it is to define. We know it when we see itbut what is it? This book will not only help you answer that question, but also to really be a class act in every area of your life. When you do thisand it isnt easyyou will literally make yourself unforgettable.

(By the way, just as class is easy to recognize, the absence of class is also easy to detect in a man or a woman. Thats not something you want people to see in you!)

Well have much more to say about what class is and why its important in the chapters that follow. Youll have a chance to evolve your own definition of classand youll gain practical, powerful tools for making yourself unforgettable to everyone you meet. Whether its in business or in any other area of life, nothing is more valuable than that. You may not realize the full importance of class right now, but when you reach the last page of this book, you most definitely will.

Well begin by looking at the often unclear meaning of class, as well as the very clear effect it can have in both business and personal interactions. Well see how class was really the deciding factor at a critical moment in American history, and well explore how you can make the lessons of that moment work for you.

In subsequent chapters, well explore essential elements that compose class in the truest sense of the word. Lastly, in the books final chapter, well look at how class expresses itself through achievement in the material worldfor you and also for those around you. This ability to create success for others is one of the most admirable qualities of class. Like a great athlete, a class person always plays the game at a high level and makes better players of his or her teammates as well.

To begin our exploration of class and what it can do, lets look at a case in point. There has never been a clearer example of class in action than historys first presidential debate. The debate took place on September 26, 1960. The participants were John F. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, and Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

Over the years, whole books have been written about this event, but its rarely been discussed from the perspective of class in the way that well be using the word. Yet class was a huge factor in the debate. It made the difference in who won and who lost, and in that sense it changed the course of history.

John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were both in excellent form at the time of their televised encounter. Each of them had good reason to feel optimistic about the election. Their rsums were very different, but were impressive in their different ways.

Each candidate in 1960 had been nominated on the first ballot at his partys national convention. Kennedy, whose nomination had come first, had won impressive victories over the more experienced Senator Hubert Humphrey in the primaries. Kennedys wins in West Virginia and Wisconsin had made an important point about his chances for gaining the presidency, since there had been some doubt about whether a Roman Catholic could actually win an election outside a predominantly Catholic state such as Massachusetts.