All of us want two things out of life: Success and Happiness.

All of us are different. Your idea of success may be different from mine. But there is one Big Factor which all of us must learn to deal with if we are to be successful or happy. The Big Factor is the same whether you are a lawyer, doctor, businessman, salesman, parent, sales clerk, housewife, or what-not. The one common denominator to all success and happiness is other people.

Various scientific studies have proven that if you learn how to deal with other people, you will have gone about 85 percent of the way down the road to success in any business, occupation, or profession, and about 99 percent of the way down the road to personal happiness.

The reason 90 percent of people fail in life

The Carnegie Institute of Technology analyzed the records of 10,000 persons, and arrived at the conclusion that 15 percent of success is due to technical training, to brains and skill on the job, and 85 percent of success is due to personality factors, to the ability to deal with people successfully!

When the Bureau of Vocational Guidance at Harvard University made a study of thousands of men and women who had been fired, they found that for every one person who lost his job for failure to do the work, two persons lost their jobs for failure to deal successfully with people.

The percentage ran even higher in a study reported by Dr. Albert Edward Wiggam, in his syndicated column, "Let's Explore Your Mind." Out of 4,000 persons who lost their jobs in one year, only 10 percent or 400 lost out because they could not do the work. Ninety percent, or 3,600 of them, lost out because they had not developed the personality for successfully dealing with other people!

Your personality problems are your problems with other people

There are millions of people today who are self-conscious, shy, timid, ill-at-ease in social situations, who feel inferior and never realize that their real problem is a human relations problem. It never seems to get across to them that their failure as a personality is really a failure in learning to deal successfully with other people.

There are almost as many who, at least on the surface, seem to be the very opposite of the shy, retiring type. They appear to be self-assured. They are "bossy" and dominate any social group they are in, whether it is the home, the office, or the club. Yet they too realize that something is missing.

They cannot force other people to like them, and they never really get what they want because they have never mastered the art of dealing with other people.

Bonaro Overstreet, in her book Understanding Fear in Ourselves and Others, says that disruptive emotional problems always have their root in our relations with other people. "The human being experiences fear when his car skids on an icy highway; but such fear does not distort his personality. He experiences pain when he drops a hammer on his foot; but such pain does not foster a brooding hostility…. The one loss he cannot tolerate and remain in emotional health is loss of goodwill between himself and his fellow humans."

Horse-and-buggy methods won't work in an atomic age

There might have been a time in past history when a prominent industrialist could say... Read the rest of this chapter in the book!