80 Years Later: How to Make Friends and Influence People – a Bizarre Version of Self-Help
How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is one of the best-selling self-help books of all time. The book has influenced a wide range of people over the years, from Warren Buffett to Charles Manson . These two people, Buffett and Manson, truly express the weirdness that is inherent in Carnegie’s book in the modern era. Let’s delve into this.
This is part of the Lifehacker book review series . Not all life hacks can be described on a blog, so we decided to look at some of our favorite life changing books to dive deeper into the most important topics in life.
How to Win Friends and Influence People is a book that you can read in two different ways, and this little ampersand separates the book’s two intentions much more than was originally intended. While people like Buffett praise him for his management methods, it’s easy to see how the same methods can be used for evil. That is, depending on who you are, you can read Carnegie’s book in two different ways: to make friends or to influence people. Which path you take can change the way you feel about the book, yourself, and your relationships.
Who is this book for?
So, there is some rift between who exactly How to Win Friends & Influence People is for and the Pollyannaish philosophy, which is guided by many principles, clearly influences more recent self-help books like The Secret . Extreme optimism manifests itself in many of Carnegie’s tricks, including suggestions to smile more often and genuinely appreciate. “How to Win Friends” offers a lot of solid advice for people who deal with business relationships or make a lot of public appearances. It is also often cited as a great way to overcome social anxiety because it describes a few simple techniques that make it easier to meet new people.
On the other hand, ” How to Win Friends” also contains many subtle manipulation techniques, so if you like it more, you will find many tips here. The most obvious example of this is in Chapter 7, which focuses on ways to “make the other person feel like they own the idea.” This idea may sound familiar to anyone who has watched Inception .
What do you get
According to the book’s cover, Inside How to Win Friends and Influence People is a guide to creating a good first impression, good ways to criticize people, tricks to help you speak better, and a host of other things that essentially boil down to “doing business” with people. . “
Carnegie shares these tips in a format that has since become pretty standard in self-help books: start with how this tip will change your life, provide many examples of how it worked in the real world, and end with one sentence summation. Each chapter is based on a single principle, and then they are grouped into larger topics such as “Basic Techniques for Working with People” or “Leadership: How to Change People Without Resentment or Resentment.” The book is also a tool in Dale Carnegie’s training courses , but these courses are by no means required.
In short, you get tons of tips for small talk, business deals, and negotiation to get what you want.
One trick you won’t succeed
Since I’m not particularly interested in improving my sales methods, I found that the book’s theme really revolves around one piece of advice: Pay attention to people, because people like it when you pay attention to them. Wikipedia has a list of all the monosyllabic “tips” in the book if you don’t feel like reading them in full, and in fact, this is often a common sense tactic. For example, here are six ways to make people like you:
- Be really interested in other people.
- Smile.
- Remember that a person’s name is for him the most pleasant and most important sound in any language.
- Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
- Speak in terms of the other person’s interests.
- Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
It’s pretty simple. While it would be revolutionary in 1936 to hear that people tend to love you more when you listen to them, reading now is a little silly because it all seems obvious.
Our opinion
While Carnegie himself is likable enough throughout the book, his sentences are often either oversimplified or overwhelmed. For example, it is probably not shocking that one of the basic tips for winning friends is to smile more, but this advice goes too far in my opinion:
Don’t you feel like smiling? What then? Two things. First, force yourself to smile. If you’re alone, force yourself to whistle, hum or sing. Act as if you were already happy and it will make you happy.
If this advice sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the core advice in almost every self-help book on the planet. Of course, there is scientific merit to smiling more often , but overzealousness has the opposite effect . Nevertheless, it seems to me that all this relies too much on optimism .
However, that doesn’t mean that many of How to Win Friends are bad things. I certainly agree that the best way to please people is to show them genuine interest, listen to them, and ask the right questions. Likewise, a lot of Carnegie’s advice on getting people to your way of thinking boils down to just being nice and empathizing with other points of view. All of this is great, although I often find myself taking a bite when reading the many examples Carnegie uses to prove fairly simple ideas. While his basic proposals are still applicable, 80 years later the examples are dry and outdated. These include all sorts of things that are difficult to identify right now, such as recording birthdays, an extensive example of collecting stamps, and telling a polite disagreement with a police officer.
Despite the lack of sophistication in some of these proposals, it is all fairly harmless. The evil part tends to manifest itself when you completely miss the “seriousness” part of many of Carnegie’s proposals.
For example, when Carnegie suggests encouraging people to talk about themselves, it’s easy to see that if taken the wrong way, it looks fake to get what you want. Likewise, the idea of ”winning” friends turns meeting people into a game, which makes friendship seem trivial. Read this way, the advice in the book often sounds exploitative at best and manipulative at worst. The worst example of this is the seventh chapter that Charles Manson used the most . In fact, according to Manson biographer Jeff Guinn, Manson literally used many of the Carnegie tricks .
“Chapter Seven: How to Get Collaboration” sounds pretty harmless, but the key takeaway is the aforementioned “Make the other person feel like they own the idea.” Let’s take a look at the weirdest example in this chapter:
Letting the other person feel that the idea belongs to him works not only in business and politics, but also in family life. Paul M. Davis of Tulsa, Oklahoma, told his class how he applies this principle:
“My family and I enjoyed one of the most exciting sightseeing trips we’ve ever done. I have long dreamed of visiting historic sites such as the Gettysburg Civil War battlefield, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and our nation’s capital. Valley Forge, James Town, and the restored Colonial Village of Williamsburg were on the list of things I’d love to see.
“In March, my wife Nancy mentioned that she had ideas for our summer vacation, which includes a tour of the western states, sightseeing in New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada. She had wanted to make this journey for several years. But we obviously couldn’t make both trips.
“Our daughter Anne just finished her US history course in high school and is very interested in the events that have influenced the growth of our country. I asked her how she would like to visit the places that she has learned on the next vacation. She said she would love to. “Two nights later, as we sat at the dinner table, Nancy announced that if we all agree, summer vacation will be in the Eastern States, that it will be a great trip for Anna and exciting for all of us. We all agreed. “
As a reminder, this example describes how to trick a wife into taking the vacation a guy wants, using his child to get the idea into his wife’s head. I may be useful in this case, but this tactic seems manipulative to me. Read it wrong, this example, along with everything else in the “Twelve Ways to Get People to Think Way” section, has a rather evil tone. All of this is to say that when you read How to Win Friends and Influence The Manipulative People , this is a guide to getting what you want.
How you apply Carnegie’s lessons in your life is entirely up to you. When it comes to ” How to Win Friends and Influence People,” there are two very different readings that stem from why you are reading it. If you are in sales or dealing with people at the business level, many find this structure helpful, especially when they are learning the basics of working with people in a business environment. Likewise, if you are struggling with friendship because it is unclear how to respond in certain social situations, it provides guidance, albeit simplistic, for doing so. That said, on the other hand, if you’re looking for ways to get what you want by whatever means you need, it will definitely do it. There are manipulation tactics here to convince people to accept your way of thinking.
Personally, I find many of Carnegie’s proposals overly simplistic or insincere. I would say that insincerity is normal in many circumstances, but not in those in which I usually find myself. While I have certainly struggled a lot with “dealing with people” or social anxiety, I don’t really feel anyone better prepared to deal with this struggle after reading this.