If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I'll tell you what you are.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that a person's sense of self-worth and importance is intrinsically linked to their values and actions.
Dale Carnegie's quote reflects the idea that understanding how individuals derive their feelings of importance can reveal much about their character and priorities. It implies that everyone's self-esteem originates from different sources—some may find it through their achievements, relationships, or contributions to others. Therefore, by examining what elevates one’s sense of importance, we can gain insight into their true nature and motivations.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-esteem, you might say, 'If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I'll tell you what you are, which highlights the role of personal values in shaping our identity.'
When I asked him -Mr.Henry Ford- if he ever worried, he replied: "No. I believe God is managing affairs and that He doesn't need any advice from me. With God in charge, I believe that every-thing will work out for the best in the end. So what is there to worry about?
Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.
By talking to yourself about the things you have to be grateful for you can fill your mind with thoughts that soar and sing.
It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.
I can look back at my own life and see where a few words of praise have sharply changed my entire future. Can't you say the same thing about your life?
Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.
When it comes to religion, we're not two sides of the same coin, and you don't get to put your unreason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken, with the stuff that is not evidence-based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens.
Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
In war, while everything is simple, even the simplest thing is difficult. Difficulties accumulate and produce frictions which no one can comprehend who has not seen war.
I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.
When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.
The young man knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is another world, which has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to take him back to the world he came from.
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