Our Changing World

Hello again. I'm going to ask you a very tricky question; however, it's important that you try to answer it the moment I ask it. I'm going to ask you a question that everyone should have given a lot of thought to and can answer immediately and in one sentence, but I might add that it's a question only a few people out of a thousand can answer. At any rate, get ready, and let's see how well you do....

Hello. Some time ago I read a story that had a very profound effect on me. With my customary brilliant memory, I can recall neither the name of the book nor the author. Maybe you'll recognize it. Anyway, it was about a young man who was to be hanged for committing some crime. This was way back, the early days. The young man didn't sleep at all during his last night on earth, and dawn found him sta...

Hello. Do you know what your most valuable tool is when it comes to getting along with other people and getting what you want from life? Well, it's the most obvious thing in the world, and I suppose one of the most overlooked. It's your ability to use your language. It's a strange and unfortunate thing, but the great majority of folks have just about the same vocabulary as adults as they had in th...

Have you ever thought you might like to become a writer? Here's something a lot of people could do and very successfully, but not very many will and you know why? It's because becoming successful as a writer is just about the hardest work in the world. Outside of writing my own radio programs, I've never done too much of it. I tried to hire writers for my radio programs one time, but it just never...

I suppose criminal psychology is one of the world's most interesting subjects and, at times, certainly the most terrifying. There's hardly a day goes by when the paper doesn't report some strange, senseless, twisted crime. But the most interesting of all, because of its sheer waste of talent and time, is the story of the Confidence Man. For example, there's a really interesting book published in 1...

Some years ago, a man came into my office whom I've never forgotten, and for whom I've never stopped being sorry. I've often thought that there must be thousands of people in the same boat. My secretary had given him an appointment, and he started right off on the wrong foot by arriving 15 minutes late. He then told me a long, sad story. As I remembered, it went something like this. Mr. Nightingal...

I received a telephone call the other day that really set me to thinking. I was working in my study, and as usual, the phone interrupted my work. I think I was reading the sports page at the time. And a charming female voice asked, Is this Mr. Nightingale? And I said, Yes. And then she said, Mr. Nightingale, Mr. Spelvin can speak to you now. I thought, Well, isn't that nice. This Mr. Spelvin must...

Hello again. To my mind, one of the most interesting Americans who lived around the turn of the century was a man by the name of Russell Herman Conwell. He was born in 1843 and lived until 1925. He was a lawyer for about 15 years, then became a clergyman. But one day a young man came to him at the church and told him he wanted to get a college education but was in such a fix financially that he ju...

Many years ago, when I was on the air in Chicago, I got a letter from a woman with a problem that must come to someone every day in a week in every town in the country. She wrote that she and her husband were thinking of going into the motel business in Florida, and she wanted my opinion on whether or not I thought the motel business was a good business to go into. She went on to say that her husb...

Well, how are you feeling today? Are you what they call a charming person? I used to wonder what they meant exactly when they referred to someone as being charming. And the other day I had a long talk with, and you can be sure of this, a very charming woman. Her name is Bess Rothman. She's an expert on this business of charm. She's taught it at colleges and traveled all over the country telling me...

Thank you and hello again. Here's an interesting question for you. Do you think you're just like 95 percent of the people? Well, you'll probably answer no. Maybe you're not. One of the strangest things about human nature is that every person likes to feel he's an individual, different from every other human being on earth, and it's true. There are literally no two human beings who are exactly alik...

I close my last show by saying our rewards in life will always be in direct proportion to our contribution. This is the law that stands as the supporting structure of all economics and our personal well-being as well. The paradox is that most people either don't know about this wonderful rule or think that somehow it's for the other guy. Most people believe we ought to have speed limit signs too,...

I was reading the other day about our universe and what we know and don't know about it, about the billions and billions of stars and planets and of the millions of galaxies like our Milky Way, separated by distances so vast it takes light, which travels 186,000 miles per second, about two million years to cross these almost incomprehensible distances. We've got astronomers sitting in front of tel...

From time to time you hear somebody say, you know, those people who got in on the ground floor of the opening of the West with its gold and silver really were fortunate. All that gold laying around waiting to be bailed and carried to market. Or you'll hear them say, and what about the early discoverers of our vast oil fields? All those derricks pumping millions of dollars worth of black gold and t...

You know, the experts are forever coming up with long words meant to describe the problems that we humans are complex enough to develop. And not too long ago they came up with a dandy. They use it to describe the feeling us poor men get, particularly the man who finds a lump like a watermelon with thorns right in the pit of his stomach. The word is panophobia, and it means fear. This is the word t...

In March of 1956, an amazing thing happened to me. I was retiring from a very busy schedule and had decided to take it easy for a while, and I decided to spend some time in Arizona. Since I'd be away, the manager of one of my little businesses asked me if I would record on tape a message he could play at the next sales meeting. Well, this made sense to me, so I decided to put into a 30-minute talk...