Three questions, none about you

I spent more than ten years in restaurants, every station from the valet stand to the floor, and the whole business runs on one thing Dale Carnegie wrote down in 1936: people want to be listened to more than they want to be impressed.

Carnegie was a Missouri farm boy who had failed at selling and failed at acting. In 1912 he started teaching public speaking at a YMCA for a cut of the door, and the book he eventually wrote came from what his students told him worked. How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold tens of millions of copies. The title sounds like manipulation. The book is the opposite.

His rules fit on a napkin. Don't criticize, condemn or complain. Give honest appreciation, not flattery. Get interested in people instead of trying to get them interested in you. Remember a name. Let the other person talk. His favorite story is a dinner party where he said almost nothing, asked a botanist about his work for an hour, and was described afterward as a brilliant conversationalist.

Here is why it is in the first week, when the month is supposed to be about you. The way you listen is the fastest mirror you own. If you cannot go three questions without turning it back to yourself, that is information about you, not about them. You cannot know yourself without watching what you do when someone else is talking.

Most of us are waiting for our turn. This key asks you to give up your turn, once, on purpose, and see what it costs.