It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

We searched Nelson Mandela's major writings, including *Long Walk to Freedom*, his collected speeches from 1962 to 2013, and the archival records of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and found no instance of this line in any book chapter, speech transcript, letter, or authenticated interview attributed to him. The phrase does surface in several published books — including *Leadership Lessons: Nelson Mandela* (Will Peters, 2017), *Unequaled* (Runde, 2016), and *Win Every Argument* (Hasan, 2023) — but every one of these credits Mandela while offering no citation to a primary Mandela source, so they simply pass along the same uncited attribution rather than document it. We noted the thematic resemblance to Dale Carnegie's principle "Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers" (*How to Win Friends and Influence People*, 1936) and to the Tao Te Ching's ideal of the leader whose people say "we did it ourselves," but neither is a verbatim match, and our policy is explicit that a general sense of earlier parallels is not enough to name a competing origin. Because we cannot point to a specific stronger source or a documented earlier instance of this exact wording, the case for misattribution does not meet our bar. What remains is a line widely repeated under Mandela's name across popular leadership books and quote compilations but unsupported by any traceable primary source in his own record. We are marking this quotation as attributed.