How to Win Friends and Influence People: Dale Carnegie’s Timeless Rules for Getting Along
You can go after the job you want, and get it! You can take the job you have, and improve it! You can take any situation and make it work for you! That is the promise of How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie’s 1936 classic and one of the best-selling self-help books ever written.
Author: Dale Carnegie (1888–1955)
Title: How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
Format: English paperback (Vermilion), 304 pages
Scope: Practical guide to human relations, persuasion and leadership
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0091906814 (ASIN 0091906814)
Time-Tested Advice
Dale Carnegie’s rock-solid, time-tested advice has carried countless people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives. One of the most groundbreaking guidebooks of all time, it will teach you:
- The six ways to make people like you.
- The twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking.
- The nine ways to change people without arousing resentment.
Don’t Kick Over the Beehive
The book’s most famous piece of advice sums up its spirit: if you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive. In other words, criticism rarely changes anyone; appreciation, genuine interest in other people and letting them feel important work far better. Carnegie illustrates every principle with anecdotes about famous figures and ordinary people alike.
From a Missouri Farm to Public Speaking
Dale Carnegie grew up on a farm in Missouri and worked as a salesman and an aspiring actor before he began teaching public speaking to adults at a YMCA in New York in 1912. His courses, built on practical exercises and students’ own stories, became hugely popular. He changed the spelling of his surname from Carnagey, some said to echo the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. The book grew out of those courses after an editor at Simon & Schuster persuaded him to write it, and it was published in 1936.
Some of the Principles
Many of Carnegie’s rules have entered everyday speech: don’t criticise, condemn or complain; give honest and sincere appreciation; become genuinely interested in other people; smile; remember that a person’s name is, to them, the sweetest sound in any language; be a good listener; talk in terms of the other person’s interests. In disagreements he advises avoiding arguments altogether, showing respect for the other person’s opinions and admitting your own mistakes quickly. None of this is complicated, which is precisely the point: the difficulty lies in doing it consistently.
Manipulation or Kindness?
Critics have sometimes accused the book of teaching people to flatter and manipulate. Carnegie anticipated the charge: he insisted that appreciation must be sincere, and that techniques used without genuine interest in others will fail. Read in that spirit, the book is less about influence than about courtesy and empathy, which may explain its endurance. Warren Buffett, who took a Dale Carnegie course as a young man to overcome his fear of public speaking, has often credited it with changing his life.
Which Edition?
The current editions are based on a revision prepared in 1981 by Carnegie’s widow, Dorothy, which updated some examples while keeping the principles. Some anecdotes still feel old-fashioned, but the human situations they describe have not changed.
How to Use It
Carnegie himself suggested reading one chapter at a time and practising its principle for a week before moving on.
A Must-Read
Achieve your full potential with this book. Nearly ninety years after its publication it is still a must-read for the twenty-first century; its sales run into many millions of copies. If you read only one book on communication, make it this one, and then pick up its companion, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
As an Amazon Associate, this site earns from qualifying purchases.
Part of the reading recommendations featured on books.sapiensverbum.com.
