People will go for six days without food before complaining seriously. Carnegie points out they'll go six weeks — sometimes sixty years — without receiving the honest appreciation they crave almost as urgently. Alfred Lunt, one of the great stage actors of the twentieth century, said: "There is nothing I need so much as nourishment for my self-esteem." The craving is that constant.
This is the second of Carnegie's three fundamental principles in handling people, and it rests directly on desire-to-feel-important. Give people genuine, specific appreciation, and you satisfy a hunger that almost nothing else in their daily life addresses. The relationship that follows is not purchased — it's real.
Appreciation versus flattery
Carnegie draws a sharp line. Flattery is what most people think of when they imagine "complimenting someone." It's generic, slightly excessive, calibrated to please rather than to observe. "Great job!" when you haven't watched the work. "You look wonderful!" said out of social habit. People detect it almost instantly, and it doesn't land — it slides off.
Genuine appreciation is different in kind, not just degree. It comes from actually looking at the other person and noticing something real: a specific effort, a difficult thing done well, a quality that you genuinely respect. Then naming it. Charles Schwab, who was paid over a million dollars a year (roughly fifteen million today) by Andrew Carnegie — not for his steel knowledge, but for his ability to deal with people — put it this way: "I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise." When he found something worth praising, he praised it fully and specifically.
Schwab also observed: "I have yet to find the person, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism." Average people do the opposite — they say nothing when things go well and bawl out subordinates when things go wrong.
Examples
When one of John D. Rockefeller's partners, Edward Bedford, lost a million dollars for the firm on a bad investment in South America, Rockefeller could have criticized him. Instead, Rockefeller found something real to praise: Bedford had saved 60 percent of the invested capital. "That's splendid," Rockefeller said. "We don't always do as well as that upstairs."
Florenz Ziegfeld, the Broadway impresario, built his reputation on the same principle. He recruited ordinary-looking young women — not the most beautiful, not the most accomplished — and through the sheer force of making them feel exceptional, transformed them onstage into the glamorous stars his audiences came to see. The transformation was real because his appreciation was real. He raised chorus girls' salaries from $35 to $175 a week. On opening night, he sent a telegram to every star and roses to every girl in the chorus line.
Alice Foote MacDougall built a two-million-dollar restaurant business out of appreciation — she genuinely cared how her customers felt, wrote thank-you notes to every order, and when it rained and soaked commuters poured into Grand Central, she brought out a waffle iron and served free coffee and waffles because she understood exactly what they were feeling. Those free waffles created a line half a block long.
How to practice it
The obstacle is that most people spend 95 percent of their time thinking about themselves. The technique is to stop, notice the other person, and actually think about their good points. Then say what you found.
Carnegie's instruction is concrete: the next time you enjoy an exceptional meal, send word to the chef. When a tired salesperson shows you unusual courtesy, mention it. These small acts — genuine, specific, timely — leave trails of goodwill that compound.
The test for sincerity is simple: if you couldn't name what specifically you're appreciating, it's flattery. If you can name the thing, it's real.
Connection to the other principles
This principle is the positive counterpart to criticism-is-futile. Criticism withdraws from the account of a person's sense of importance; genuine appreciation deposits into it. The mechanism is desire-to-feel-important — understand that hunger and you understand why appreciation works and criticism doesn't.
It also enables arouse-an-eager-want: a person who feels genuinely appreciated by you is far more open to considering what you're about to ask of them.